It probably doesn’t come as a surprise but there are A LOT of differences between a life in The Netherlands and A life in America. Not just our daily life, but also in everything that you do. These are the biggest differences that we have noticed since we have been here.

The first thing that we noticed by going to the grocery store or walking around town is the clothes that the people wear on the daily. Here, people don’t really try to look good, but they would just go everywhere in pajamas, hair in a messy bun, no make-up and crocs. This is also how some kids walk around at school. If we go to school in The Netherlands, we always dress up, put on make-up and wear our nicest shoes. If we think about it now, high school was more a fashion show back at home.

Another thing is the driving age. When we first went to school and saw all these kids who are younger than us drive in cars, even though we don’t even have our license we were really shocked. It looks so weird. They can get their permanent at 15! At 16 they need to take their final drivers test and then they get their official licence. We have to wait until we are 18 years old to drive and we need to take a lot of drivers lessons. We think waiting until 18 is better because there are a lot of car crashes over here with young drivers because most of them are definitely not mature enough to be driving on the roads.

Another thing that we really got to experience here is how proud Americans are of their country. You will find an American flag in every house or store. Every morning right after the bell rings, they play The pledge of allegiance during announcements; "I pledge allegiance to the Flag of the United States of America, and to the Republic for which it stands, one Nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all." Before every game, they sing the national anthem to the American flag. We have to stand in a half circle like in the picture. It is very extra. But we think this is just the way Americans are.

The differences in school (where we already did a story about if you want to read it again) is a big influence of the cultures too. We see this everywhere we go here. The education is definitely not as good as in The Netherlands. Things are organized way better.

They also take sports way more seriously. We’re both playing a spring sport. This means that we have practice for two hours after school, or an hour practice in the morning before school. Soccer also has weekend practices. This means that you have one or two days a week without practice or games. The fall and winter sports are over now so that means that our cheer career is over :( This is really sad because we loved it so much but we are also excited for our new spring sports!

There are also a lot of different people here. These are the standard stereotypes. For example ‘rednecks’. These people are country people.. They are really old school like cowboys kind of. They go hunting and talk with a southern accent. We have the high school kids that normally don’t care about what people think of them and do what they want. The teen moms is definitely something we did not expect. This is a small town and news goes around fast so you hear everybody's business and so you also hear who is all pregnant. It shocked us a lot that some girls already get pregnant in middle school which means they are around the age of 13/14! The information about preventing getting pregnant is really bad in school so a lot of girls don’t even realize how easy it is. This is also something we do have in The Netherlands and why we think Dutch schools are better.

We love the school here and we are still enjoying our last few months to the fullest but we also have to confront the fact that we are almost coming home a lot. This just makes us enjoy every minute even more because we know we don’t have a lot of minutes left here. We are truly living our best life and have so much fun stuff still on the calendar so we are very busy but we try our best to keep you guys updated!