I will start with introducing myself to you. I'm Anouk, I live in a little village in the Netherlands called Donderen, and I'm 16 years old. My big passion is music, I sing a lot, played the violin for some years, and thought myself some guitar and piano. My favorite bands are Sonata Arctica, Nightwish, Stratovarius, Children of Bodom, Bullet for my Valentine, stuff like that, metal, like you might have noticed already.
And then, because of all the music I listen to, comes one thing that became such a big interest to me, Scandinavia, Finland. And that's what this blog wil mainly be about. I'm going to Finland for about 10 months, living there with a host family, going to school, learning about the language and the culture. I can't wait!
The idea came because I know a girl, she's from Argentina, and she's been here in the Netherlands for one year. I had a lot of contact with her, over the Nightwish forum, and later over MSN, when she told me she was coming here we started making the craziest plans and stuff, and it was great. We ended up meeting each other at the Sonata Arctica gig, december 10th 2009, at Paradiso, Amsterdam.
It was so nice to meet her, and my parents were like "Well, you're always talking about Finland, and your teacher said that this would be the ideal moment to do something like that because you're not bound to one place yet, so, why don't do a year like that as well?"
And, yeh, that was how it all started I guess, we started looking up information, and we ended up with AFS, an international organisation that does these High School programmes, and also volunteer work in other countries, for adults.
When I get back from Finland, maybe we will be a host family ourselves, I think that would be great, but first in row is now my own year. It's already confirmed that I'm going, AFS Finland accepted me, and now it's just waiting for the place I will be.
Welcome to my blog, and enjoy =)
'Anouk
