It’s cold this morning, but when I walk to the living room one of the surfer guys already lid up the fireplace. I have breakfast and sit down at one of the couches to read a book. It’s a relaxed morning. Everyone here is telling me that I should try surfing, so I sign up to join them later in the morning. There is also a class in the afternoon, but it’s much more expensive and the people here say you can better just try it out. I decide I’ll give it a try. Around ten o’clock we come together at the reception and get a short introduction of about five minutes. We get our wetsuits and surfboards and I’m thinking by myself what I got myself into. To be honest, I’m a bit nervous about surfing, because I’ve never done it before. We get into a car and drive to the beach. I’m together with three people from Germany and Austria, also beginners.

When we get into the sea, I’m surprised by how warm a wetsuit keeps you. It’s not cold at all. It helps of course that it’s a bright sunshiny day. The first hour I don’t like surfing at all. People around me keep saying “this is so much fun!”, but I can’t see the fun at all yet. Getting the seawater smashed in your face over and over gets quite annoying. You really need some patience and determination for learning to surf and I wonder if I have it. After an hour I go back to the beach, ready to give up. When I’ve been sitting on the sand for five minutes I decide to give it another try. I go far in the water and after a couple more tries I manage to catch a wave with my knees on the board. That already feels great and is motivating enough to keep trying. I actually find it becoming more fun as well and don’t mind the seawater smashing in my face all the time anymore. I’m enjoying it more and more and after a while I finally manage to get on the board standing. Even though it’s only for a few seconds, it feels as a big victory. From that moment on I really enjoy surfing and I feel like I could do this all day. I have a great time in the water and only when the wind gets stronger and the waves are not so good anymore I finally go back to the beach. I’m glad I kept going when I thought about giving up, surfing is indeed a lot of fun!

When we’re back at the hostel and have the boards and wetsuits cleaned I can’t wait to get back in the hot tub. It’s even better after a couple of hours of surfing. I stay in the hot tub for about an hour and then one of my new German friends asks me if I want to join her for a burger at a burger place across the bridge. Of course I’m in for that and we enjoy a great burger and fries together. After dinner we do some groceries at the small local supermarket and I get some more beers, I think we’ve earned it after today. It feels good to have been so active. I’m not sure yet if I’ll do it again tomorrow. I heard the weather is gonna get worse, so as usual I’ll see in the morning what I’ll do. While surfing I met some cool people who stay in another hostel not to far from here, so I think I’ll move to there tomorrow. This hostel was nice, but somehow I didn’t like the vibe so much. The guests were nice, but the people that work here seem a bit unfriendly. Some of them are Dutch, but refuse to speak Dutch at all, even in one-on-one conversations. They act like they are from here, while they’re clearly not of course. For me that’s strange, because all Dutch people I’ve met before were very kind and eager to speak some Dutch as well. I speak a bit of German with the German people here, but they’re actually quite good in English, so we mainly speak English here.

I’m glad that I went surfing, something that had been on my bucket-list for quite some time. I still need to learn a lot, but we had a lot of fun today and I really enjoyed it. I think I’ll do it again some time.