First off, I cannot believe that 3 weeks have already gone by! My trip so far has been such an incredible experience, and I cannot wait to see what the rest of my weeks here have in store. This past week was pretty busy as we have been getting a good amount of participant sign-ups. We ran a total of 5 participants last week, and all went smoothly! There were some days, though, that we had no participants, but on those days we instead went to the cafeteria and handed out flyers. I think our campaigning helped because we currently have 6 participants signed up for this week and two for next. Hopefully as the week goes on more people will sign up, or we will keep giving out flyers to encourage people to join. Today and tomorrow my partner is in Belgium for a conference, so I have had to run my experiment by myself; luckily, my previous experience running in-person sessions for my other lab prepared me for this, and so far there has been no issues! Overall, its been super exciting to meet new people in our lab and actually start gathering data for this project we have worked so long and hard for.

As for the rest of the week, we mainly stayed in Nijmegen for the week days, but on Saturday we traveled to Rotterdam (another city in the Netherlands). Rotterdam was super cool because it was more city-like, which reminded me of the cities I go to back at home. We went to a biergarten with a live band, which was super cool because we could sit outside in the nice weather and enjoy the music. Then, on Sunday we went to Antwerpen (in Belgium) and stayed over night. I think Antwerpen may have been my favorite city so far because there were so many cute markets and pretty much all the streets were filled with terraces. The weather was also super nice on Sunday, so we spent most of our day going from terrace to terrace and enjoying the views. Finally, because Monday was a holiday, we woke up in Antwerpen and took the train to Gent. Gent was also incredible as there were also many terraces but also restaurants along the canal. In Gent I had the best meal of my trip so far, which was some pasta scampi that was so good I could have eaten about three of them. After the long adventurous weekend, I was exhausted, so we came home early last night, so I could sleep well before my 9:30 session this morning. Attached is our view of the canal in Gent from my weekend extravaganza!