Yesterday the first matches in the European Championship Waterpolo have been played. This tournament is extra interesting for me, because I have three good friends playing for the Dutch national team. They have been training full time for years now. One of them actually plays for a Croatian team.
So yesterday they played Greece. Overall a pretty good game for the young Dutch team. The game resulted in a 12 -14 win for Greece, which actually is not too bad. This does mean that they will have to win again Turkey and their fourth game to be able to play in the Olympics this summer. It would be amazing to see my friends play during the biggest tournament in the world!
To watch the games live visit: http://nos.nl/dossier/327686-waterpolo-ek-2012/tab/341/live/
Games will always be played around 7pm.
Tonight at 7, Holland - Hungary (Olympic Champion)
The most important fact that a new student has to take in account is that this course is about academic English, using the business world as subject of interest. So the English learned during your secondary school forms the basic knowledge that you need to have to successfully pass the course. So my advice would be: don't think this course is unnecessary just because you can find your way in English abroad or being able to watch movies without subtitles. This is not enough. This course will take steps towards academic English, which is a whole new level. So again, my advice would be to take the course seriously and don't be a slacker, because this course can really help you with other courses and the level of conversation.
On wednesday the 11th of January, I had to give my graded presentation for English 1. Together with Thijs Benedek, we presented a new web design and a new marketing strategy for a fictional company named Audio Wire. The audio wire case was not new to us. It had occurred earlier during class, so it was not a big challenge. We basically used the earlier knowledge, created a powerpoint of this knowledge and presented this. We added a couple of things, for instance the website design itself. Thijs and I both never created lines to say to prepare a presentation. We just say what comes out naturally. There was an obstacle to use this tactic, because we had to use specific words from the academic word list. I believe I got sort of stuck during the presentation, because I knew I needed to say a couple of words but I could not find the right timing to actually use them. It all worked out well eventually, but better preparation could have prevented this problem. Besides this little problem, I think we did fine. It could have been better, but for that we should have put more time in the project. There were not questions coming from the class, the fictional board of audio wire, so I think everything we explained was clear. So to wrap this feedback up; The presentation could have been way better, but looking at the effort we put in I believe we did fine.
It might come as a surprise to some that instead of water polo, american football is my favorite sport. My trip to California changed my view on the sport. At first, I saw the sport as a rugby rip-off for sissies, because of all the gear the players wear. Only after I started to understand the sport and started watching games more often( not that I had a choice, I was forced to watch) I started to really like the sport. I even joined one practice, which completely changed my view on the gear. A ball was rocketed at me and hit me in the face. If I wasn't wearing that helmet, I would have been knocked out for sure.
I lived close to San Francisco, which automatically made me a SF 49'ers fan. This season they have been playing amazing and became the champions of the NFC WEST, which gained them access to the playoff's. This means that they will get a shot to play in the Superbowl if they keep winning. Who's got it better than us?
The Superbowl will be played on February third. I know I will be staying up all night to watch!
