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!