Orlando days

Thursday May 5th
Today it was theme park time. We only had to drive 10 minutes since our AirBnb room was very close to all the attractions. We went to Universal Islands of Adventure, which had a lot of nice movie related rides like Harry Potter, Jurassic Park and Spiderman. We spent the whole day in the rides and ended with rides where you get soaked. Which wasn't a very smart idea since we had to drive back in the car. Luckily it was very nice weather and we dried up pretty fast. At 7 pm the park closed and we headed to the supermarket to get some dinner and breakfast for the next day.

Friday May 6th
Today we had a relaxing day at the waterpark Wet 'N Wild. There were many slides and pools and it was nice weather but it was windy so we took our towels everywhere to dry off and go to the next slide. It was a lot of fun but we didn't take our phones or anything important so we don't have any pictures. Around 5 pm we left the park and drove back to Jackie in Fort Lauderdale, this took us 3 hours. When we arrived we grabbed some dinner with Jackie and relaxed at her house.

Travel Time, First Stop: Florida

Tuesday May 3rd
After cleaning our apartment and packing our bags, it was time for us to leave the Seneca Residence. We checked out at 11 am and headed to the airport. Luckily we could store our huge suitcases and extra luggage with a classmate who also lives in the residence so we didn't have to take everything to Florida.

We arrived at the airport at 12.30 and checked in immediately so we'd have enough time to relax after we got through all the security checks. The flight only took 3 hours and when we arrived we headed over to the car rental places to rent a car. When we drove away from the airport the navigation that we got with the car did not want to work with us. It did not recognize Jackie's (my cousin) address so we drove around a while until we finally got the navigation to work. It's search function is horrible.
When we finally arrived at Jackie's place we took our stuff inside and grabbed some dinner with her at a very good burger place named BurgerFri. We had some drinks when we got back and headed to bed at 11.

Wednesday May 4th
When we woke up we got ready to leave again because we were headed to Orlando. We grabbed some breakfast at a bakery and drove 3 hours to get to Kennedy Space Center. It was a very rainy and stormy day but most of the things were inside so we did stay dry most of the time. We saw the retired spaceshuttle Atlantis and went into a spaceshuttle launching simulator which was pretty cool to experience. When the Space Center closed we drove to our AirBnb place and relaxed in our room. The room is very close to the Universal Studios and is in a very nice place.
We also found a little friend when I opened the window of our room. There was a little lizard stuck between the window and the screens keeping out bugs. It jumped into our room and hopped around until Berwout caught him and set him free outside.

Atlantis Spaceshuttle

Little Lizard Friend

Medieval Times & Toronto Island

Saturday April 23rd
Today we went to a Medieval Times event. It's a dinner show that's entirely about Medieval Times. It's in downtown Toronto and we went with about 20 international students. The show started at 4:30 and we got an awesome green crown which meant we had to cheer for the green knight in the show. The main part of the show was about six knights compete to see who is the strongest between the realms. The audience was divided into colors as well and we all needed to cheer on our colored knight. Our green knight did awesome and won the entire battle so we were very proud! The food that got served was very good as well and we had to eat everything with our hands because in the Medieval Times, you did not have any cutlery. Overall it was a fun show and I even won a little souvenir at the end!

Sunday April 24th
Another international students activity! Today it was time to see the Toronto Island! We took a school bus with about 26 students and went to the harbor where the ferry leaves for Toronto Island. The ferry trip only took about 10-15 minutes. It was a pretty sunny day but still quite cold.
The students in charge of the activity brought a lot of fun stuff along like footballs, frisbees, and badminton equipment so we could have fun on the island together. Once we walked to a nice place where we would have our gather spot, we separated from the group to walk around the island. The island was very pretty and had many parks and beaches. Berwout and I decided to lay down in the grass, where we both fell asleep in the sun and got a sunburn as a result... When we woke up we walked to the petting zoo to pet all the animals! The petting zoo had a HUGE pig called Charlotte, and weighed about 700 pounds(350kg)! It was a very nice and relaxing day.

Sick days and Final Exams

Friday April 8th and on
Berwout got sick on Friday and stayed in bed all day. I took care of him until he passed it on to me on Sunday. From here on we were both sick in bed and couldn't go to school. Luckily the classes we missed were not as important anymore because we mostly had projects to hand in at the end of the week. But because we were sick we couldn't work on these projects... After explaining the situation to our teachers we got an extension and could work on it when we felt better.

We handed everything in successfully at the end of the week and now had time to study for our upcoming final exams. I officially have three final exams but for one course the exam is optional if your grade is a B or higher. My grade is apparently an A+, so I decided to to take that exam. Now I only have two exams to do, but they're both on Monday.

Monday April 18th
Final exam day and it's even 18C!
My first exam is Mobile App Development, which was an interesting course to follow but the exam is given on paper... I am totally not used to doing programming tests on paper. It requires you to remember every little syntax of code while normally you get to google these things. Even our teacher would not be able to write so much code from his head, because in class he would always have to google the answers to his examples... Besides that, I think I did alright on the exam.

The next exam I had was Hardware, which required me to know a lot about routers, switches and ip addresses. This course itself was a fun course to follow and had very nice teachers, but the final exam was pretty hard in comparison to the in class exercises. Overall I do think I did well on it.

The only thing left that I need to do for school is hand in a project and the end of this week. After that I'm all done! Then I get to relax and do some more sightseeing before we go traveling!

The Niagara Falls

Sunday April 27th
Anneke en Johan arrived on the 26th of April and together we went to The Niagara Falls! It took about an hour and a half by car to get to the falls. Apparently the falls are located in a pretty large city, which I did not expect. In all the pictures online it looks like it would be more out in the nature, but it's pretty central in a city. We parked the car pretty close and walked along the Niagara river. It was pretty big and there are two waterfalls.

The Horseshoe waterfall

City next to Niagara Falls

We also decided to buy tickets to the attraction "Journey behind the falls". With this ticket we were able to go down into the mountain and go into underground tunnels behind the biggest waterfall.

Behind the falls

Behind the falls

Original Tunnel Structure

Underneath the falls

After looking at the falls from the Canadian side, we also wanted to walk to the U.S.A. side and see if they have a pretty view as well. There is a bridge that crosses to the U.S.A. and we walked to the border. When we made it to the border we saw there was a lot of border control and we didn't feel like filling out many forms for just a half an hour on the other side, so we walked back on the bridge.

American border control

Border between U.S.A. and Canada

Around 6 pm we drove back to Toronto and had a nice all you can eat dinner near our place. Once we were back home, I went straight to bed because I had to get up at 6 am to go to school!

Monday April 28th
I had classes until 1:30 pm today, and after that Johan en Anneke picked us up from school and we went downtown together to go to Ripley's Aquarium. They had many beautiful fish and some really weird looking ones, which made it very entertaining. They also had a long tunnel where the fish tank is all around you while you walk through. In this tank there were many sharks and awesome fish.
I'm not sure what else to say about an aquarium, so I'll just leave some pictures here.
For more pictures, see facebook!

Seadragon

Casa Loma

March 18th 2016

I bought a new camera! I've been researching what the best camera would be for my needs. I wanted it to be compact enough to travel with but still with a good quality in pictures and movies which wouldn't be too expensive. Another thing is that I wanted one with a screen that can be flipped so you could see yourself if you're taking a picture of filming yourself. So after some research and advice from people at Best Buy I bought the following camera: Sony A5000

March 19th 2016

We signed up for another international student activity, and this time we'd go visit a castle here in Toronto. The castle is called Casa Loma and was built in the early 1900's. It was a 30-45 minute drive and we walked around the castle for about 3,5 hours. It has 98 rooms and some secret passageways. Of course I brought my new camera to take nice pictures!

Midterms and Studyweek

8th school week, February 22th to 26th
Since we're already half way our semester, it's time for our midterms. For every course we have a test this week or upcoming weeks. Since we always had to do our homework because our homework gets graded as well, I didn't have problems studying for the midterms. Actually, for most of them I didn't really have to study because doing the homework was enough information for me.  

Studyweek, February 27th to March 6th
The studyweek is basically just a vacation week, but they expect you do still do homework. Besides the necessary homework, our plan for this week off was to go sightseeing in downtown Toronto and see all the tourist attractions. In the end the only thing we did was see the one of the largest underground malls. It was three stories down into the ground and had over 230 stores and many food corners. We were able to find two new pairs of jeans for Berwout, which is very special because his size is very hard to find. Other than that we strolled around the mall and had some food at the food corner. After a day of walking there we decided to to home. Below you'll find some pictures of the mall and outside.
For the other sightseeing trips we wanted to wait till it was better weather outside, since we'd be walking outside the whole day we didn't want to walk in rain or snow and freeze. So, more trips upcoming!