Introduction of 20-year old Lotte Marijnissen :)

Hello everybody!

I wanted to introduce myself to all of you ☺

I’m a 20-year old dutch girl, who experienced a pretty normal life the first 18 years.

I was born as Lotte Marijnissen in a city in the South of Holland - Breda. With loving parents and a 3,5 year older brother.

From the age of 12 to 18 I was in high school. I never failed any class and got okay grades (sometimes really high, other times average). Of course in the last years of high school, you have to prepare yourself for what you want to do after. Almost everybody in Holland when they finish the degree VWO (pre-university degree), they immediately go to university. I had no idea what I wanted to study and it’s a lot of pressure I think for an 18 year old to choose already the direction with what you probably going to work with the rest of your life. In my blog posts I will talk more about this issue, because I have stumbled upon a lot more people who had the same ‘problem’ as me.

Well after a hard 2/3 weeks of exams, I graduaded! I was the happiest girl in the world in that moment.

But what after?

My mother always told me stories about when she went to Australia to travel and work when she was 18. And I always loved travelling, so I thought that is the best thing to do for me. My father then told me about Kibbutz. So my plan was that I would go first 2 months to a kibbutz in Israel and then 5 months to Australia. Well this is not how my travel went. I will of course also go more in details about this in another blog post, but I went in the end 5 months to Israel in 2 Kibbutzim and after that I traveled 3 months to Cyprus, Greece, Italy and Denmark.

In my second kibbutz I met a really nice guy who was half Danish and half Isreali and we fell in love immediately.

(this is the first ever picture I took of him)

We were 2 months together in Kibbutz Bar’am, but he left to go back to Denmark where he lives and I went to travel more with my good friend from Mexico.

This is me and Mariana in Skiathos, Greece.

So the long-distance relationship started… I don’t know if any of you ever had a long-distance relationship, but for me it was the worst time. The long distance lasted for 10 months, after I made the decision to move to Aarhus, Denmark to be with him. I was 19 at that moment and of course I still wanted to study, but I didn’t mind taking another gap year. I thought I would work, learn the languages, make friends and be with my boyfriend and the next year start a study there. In the end was it so much harder than I thought it would be…
Also another problem was that after a few months we found out that there was not a study in English that I wanted to do. I knew okay I can choose a study in economics and business what is not something I want to do, but I can stay with the guy I love so much. There was one study I liked ‘’Cognitive Siences’’ but the average was so high, that I should have known that I couldn’t get in. I also applied to 4 studies in Holland. I still had (have) the problem that I didn’t know what to study.

In the end I didn’t get accepted to the study in Denmark, so I had to say ‘see you later’ to my boyfriend. Haha now I read it, it doesn’t sound like how I meant it. I mean it was not a ‘good bye’, because we love eachother so much, that we are going to try it! It’s going to be hard, because we will have now for a minimum of 2 years a long-distance relationship. But I know we can do it. I sound now very positive, but I was more the negative one, who was getting angry a lot and my boyfriend was the positive one. But I know it’s the right choice.

Monday the 4th of September I will start my study ‘Psychology’ at the Erasmus University in Rotterdam, Holland. I will live with 3 of my friends from my old city in a house. So that is going to be my new adventure, which I’m very excited for!

I hope you liked reading my introduction and that you guys are excited to hear more from me! Thank you so much for taking your time and reading this.