First week of German School!

Sorry about not updating in a while, but I just started school here in Germany, and it’s a lot more work than I previously anticipated (so I haven’t had time to sit down and write a blog post). But, today I have one of my short days, so I have a couple hours of to do what I want instead of homework. First of all, I want to say that even though school has been a lot of work (translating mainly, since my German vocab is pretty limited), my class mates had been super welcoming and helpful, and I really love school. It’s really one of the things I enjoy the most out of my day (which sounds a little weird… but it is what it is). I have been placed in the 10^th grade so all my class mates are younger than me (but that really doesn’t bother me at all) and the good thing about that is that I’ve taken most of the classes before in English, so it’s not like I’m trying to learn new material in another language (except in politics, but more on that later).

My weekly schedule (just in case you were wondering)

	M	Tu	W	Th	F
1	Chem	Bio	Spanish	Physics	French
2	Politics	French	Spanish	English	Math
3	English	Art	Math	German	Spanish
4	German	Art	History	German	Spanish
5	Math	Geography	German	Sport	Religion
6	Religion	Music	English	Sport	Music
7	Choir	Lunch break		Lunch break
8		Math		Politics
9		Physics		Bio
10		Chem		French
11				History

I have school till 4:20 on Tuesdays and 5:10 on Thursdays so I have to eat lunch at school, and this has led me into trying some new yummy food! A couple of my classmates would always take me to the bakery or the cafeteria (where the food is actually pretty good and they sell bread and donuts and crepes) or the Dönner shop. Oh, I forgot to say that I don’t have to take French, because all my classmates had 6 years of French already, and there’s no way I could learn 6 years of materials in 1 year, so instead I have extra German lessons, which is really helpful because I really need to learn German grammar.

I have to take Chemistry, Physics and Biology at the same time though, and I have to be honest and say that I’ve forgotten a lot, so I’m glad I got to do some review. Math is really easy (we were talking about functions… so it’s like what I did in 8^th grade), English and Geography are both not very challenging (both I have in English, Geography is only once a week though, which is kinda sad) but really helps my German because I have vocab in German and English. 

Politics is really challenging because the teacher decided to do an experiment. The politics teacher is also our German teacher, so he decided to do politics instead of German for 2 weeks, then all German and no politics for 4 weeks. This had made the class move super fast, and since my German vocab knowledge does not extend to politics, I have to literally translate every word. So it’s hard to keep up. History is by far the most challenging for me because it’s boring… (the teacher is very old, and the textbook hard to read (my classmates told me that they have a hard time reading the textbook too)) I might switch out of that class to an English history class, but I’m not sure if I want to do that yet (since I’ll be with 9^th graders, I think it wouldn’t be a bad idea because then I would have English and German history vocab lists instead of having to translate everything myself)

But aside from school- I also hanged out with some friends last Friday in Mannheim, which was super fun and I had some really good curry! Forgot to take pictures though… will have to do that later. Then on Saturday I went on a biking trip with my host family and their friends, 11 people in total, and I expected it to be an hour of biking and then food. But I was wrong, it was so hard to get to the place we wanted because we literally had to climb a mountain (it was easy going down, but def wasn’t going up) on a bike. It was fun overall though, got to watch my host sisters play mini golf on stone (I didn’t know that was a thing) and then we went to a little carnival on Sunday and I finally had some waffles (I missed them).

All in all, life is pretty good here in Germany, and I’m learning a lot, having lots of fun, and sleeping a lot. Until next time!   

German Wedding!

     So last Saturday (September 6^th) I got to attend a German Wedding! It was the wedding of my host mom’s cousin (I feel like a lot of German families are much closer (relationship) because they all live pretty close to each other). First, the couple had a pretty traditional German Catholic Wedding at a church. (I had to stand several times and kneel too… may I say that the benches were super uncomfortable. I made the joke that the benches are the reason why Germans don’t go to church often (and I think my host parents agreed, lol) then it was the reception! The food was awesome, lots of traditional German food :)

     Oh, I forgot to add that I didn’t sit with my host family during the meal because the seating arrangements were done pretty early on and I think the people planning the wedding didn’t know that I was going to be there, so I ended up sitting with people I didn’t know. But, all is ok because the couple I ended up siting with actual knew really good English and we had a very good conversation during the meal, I even talked a little bit in German! The reception started at 5:30 p.m. and lasted throughout the night, my host parents and I went home at about 2:30 a.m., and there were still people there when we left.   

     The Party was very fun, they had a band there that played music that I didn’t really know but they did sing “Country Roads” and Atemlos, which made up a little bit for the other songs. For the rest of the time I mainly played with the kids (soccer in a dress and dress shoes) since there really weren’t people there my age (I did have a conversation with a guy about environmental science and renewable energy (in English) that was very interesting). All in all the wedding was very fun and educational and I am really glad to be able to attend. (there are no pictures because it’s not my wedding and I didn’t ask for permission to post the pictures)

France!Holiday Park!

France!

          Before you ask, no, I didn’t go to Paris (my brother’s first reaction when I told him), I went to Strasbourg. Strasbourg is one of the biggest French cities near where I live in Germany and my family had told me before that we were going to visit France, but I never caught the name of the place they said. So I was really surprised when I walked down the stairs one morning and my host mom told me that we were going to Strasbourg. (In my head I was thinking, Strasbourg, what Strasbourg?) Then she spared me asking and said it’s in France. The drive was about an hour to an hour and a half, it wasn’t bad at all. The thing that really surprised me was how much the border between France and Germany resembles the border between two states in the U.S. There was no border patrol, and you didn’t have to stop, it was just a “Welcome to France” sign, sort of like a “Welcome to Indiana” sign that I see pretty often at home…

         There were a ton of tourists in Strasbourg (and according to my host parents they were mostly Germans) so we didn’t do a boat tour (it was also pretty hot, which was really unusual) but we did visit the cathedral and palace (now two museums) and walked along the river. And we got Icecream! It was good :)

The Cathedral

The River

The Palace

River

Opera

Holiday Park!

            Basically it’s really similar to Holiday World except there are no Holiday themed rides… I think it literally means a park you go on when it’s holiday, and not that the park has holiday themed areas like Holiday World back in the U.S. It was a lot of fun (and my host dad got me an unlimited pass for the year). I went on two adult rides, then since I have a 3 year-old host sister, we went to the kid section of the park, and it was surprisingly fun! I mean I never really enjoy rollercoasters and scary rides all that much, so the kid park was sort of perfect. You get to have a pretty view and have a little bit of thrill. 

The shops inside

The Entrance