Host Family Help

To help cut down on costs and to ensure that we get a genuine Belgian experience, we will being staying in the homes of faculty from the University of Ghent. We spoke with students who have done home stays before to get their advice on how to make it the most pleasant experience possible.

Hannah Baker, who stayed with a host family in Germany, was a great person to talk to! She gave us so much helpful advice!

Here are a few things I took away from our discussion:

• weird to share a bathroom, but learned rotations
• language barrier made it hard at first
• conserve water
• ask your family about rules
• Europeans are very liberal, they expect young people to go out
• food was the best part of staying with a family, get to experience authentic cuisine
• buy adapters, European power is not the same as in the US
• consider a GO phone, purchase minutes & international SIM card
• most wonderful experience, now has second family
• be sure to pack club clothes
• scarves are a big trend in Europe
• people dress up for school
• pack umbrella & raincoat, unexpected showers in Europe

I hope that my home stay experience goes as smoothly as Hannah's did! Our experiences will be a little different because she was in Germany. I do know that language barriers shouldn't be a problem for me because most Belgian people speak English. I have also taken one year of French, so I should be able to navigate my way around even if there aren't English-speaking folks around.

I'm trying to come up with some sort of gift that I can bring my host family that is representative of Arkansas culture. Maybe I can bring them some Razorback gear or paint them a canvas!

The only thing that really worries me about the trip is keeping in contact with my family and boyfriend in the states. I'm considering the GO phone, but I'm afraid it would end up being very expensive and difficult to work. There is always Skype, but I'm worried about how I would let my parents know that I am available to Skype. Maybe send a text from the computer? Who knows. But, I've got two months to get it all figured out so no worries!

I just bought a student travel guide for Europe, so I should be posting some things that I hope to do sometime soon! :)