This week was slow with participants because students are starting their final exams 🙁 But we have used this week to recharge energies since homesickness is getting to us. On Thursday we did not have any participants so we decided to take the day for ourselves. As some of you may know Mavel is from Honduras and I am from Puerto Rico, so coming to the Netherlands from Penn State and not having stopped at our homes for a long while we reached the point where we started to miss Latin American Cuisine that is not Mexican. To be honest, Mexican food is great and one of my favorites, but Latin American food has so much more to offer than Mexican plates. We were craving plantains, arepas, churrasco, frijoles etc. So we found this small restaurant called a Taste from Home and it LITERALLY was what we needed to kick start our energy and take us out of our homesickness funk. We got to eat tostones, arepas, chorizo, chicharron, churrasco, empanadas etc, it was Exactly What We Needed. We also walked around the town and visited two beautiful parks, the Goffertpark and the Kronenburger park. Also, my parents got here on Friday for a visit and I went to Amsterdam to spend the weekend with them. They will be visiting Utrecht next week and Nijmegen so I am excited to show them around the campus and this beautiful city. Also, I believe Janet is coming this week so I am excited for them to meet and for my parents to meet the people I have been working with these past 6 weeks.
Also, crazy coincidence, Madison and Perry’s families are coming this following week and we all found out they were coming the same week when they already made their travel arrangements. It was completely coincidental as well as Janet coming the same week, but it all turned out amazing!
So this week and the next in dutch would be described as “gezellig”.
As for our study, everything is running smoothly even though we have had a slow week due to final exams. But we are still getting a good flow of participants, and the professors from last week’s meeting helped us recruit their students and the people in our lab are helping us recruit more participants.