College Apps sint sooo (mit drei o) viel spaß im Deutschland.

I know that I haven't updated in more than a week! Sorry. But I have been busy, working on my college apps and exploring a new part of Germany!

I have been to Magdeburg three times this week, its only about 25 minutes away and is a pretty big city, about a half million people. All of the Architecture is extremely old, and inherently very interesting for me. When we went to the Dome, the city monument and largest building in Magdeburg, my host father and I explored for almost two hours. There are some very cool pictures up on Facebook, go look!

Also, I went to visit my host mom's old school yesterday and that was cool. Her old school happens to be the oldest and largest castle in the area. It was a castle for 850 years and was only a school during the time of the DDR for the last 60 years. That was also very cool because half of the Castle was updated and the other half was left in its original form. I saw the pros and cons of both. I prefer the older parts because of the history, but I can see why people needed to make it new. I took pictures there too!

As for the bads parts of this week, College Apps. I am more worried about them because of the impact that they have on my life, not so much with how difficult they are to fill out. I have completed the American App, and it didn't take very long except for my essay. Writing was not easy because I keep forgetting specific words in English. Without speaking good English in over a month my vocabulary is shot. However, I did buy and english book this week for vocab inspiration. Ken Follett's new one, Fall Of Giants.

This week was vacation from school, but I think that it came at a good time so that I could focus on writing my essay and it gave my German time to REALLY improve. I am happy to say that I only asked what four words from english to german were today, and ended up looking up 3 of them anyways. I think that it has helped that my family speaks almost no english except when singing along to the radio. Also, most of the adults don't speak english (maybe because im in former east germany? I dont know why?) but I always am forced to speak german. That is a huge difference from in Celle, where I could frequently speak english because everyone else could and did. It's helped me in the end!

My New Family and School!

The past week has been so crazy! I am so tired, I haven't had any time to rest. It has finally just started to settle down. So I will write about what I have done.

Last Friday I went left my old guest house with the Göhrings. It was sad, but I was very happy to finally be with my permanent family. It was a good month and a good start to my year. And now I can finally settle in and make friends! I am very excited.

I then went to the late orientation camp run by AFS. It was very cool. I expected it to be like DC, mostly rules and regulations. It wasn't. It was more about what you should be careful doing, and how it was best to spend your time in Germany. More importantly, I met people from all around the world. From Shanghai to Italy to columbia. Everyone was very cool, and everyone had to speak either german because we all had different native languages. Although, many of them could speak english, especially the ones from Europe or China.

On Sunday, I officially moved in with my new family, the Klitches. They are a very nice, very crazy, and very loud family. It's a lot of fun but was very tiring at first. I have my own room which is good, but the internet is not wireless, which is not good.

Yesterday was my first day of school, and it might have been the most exhausting day of my life. I was already overtired from my weekend, and spent the entire day speaking with german teachers who had better things to do than listen to an austauschüler speak bad german. But they all turned out to be nice, or at least understanding.

My favorite class is Math, and my second favorite is Englisch. Both make perfekt sense to me! English is funny. Picture a frenchman sitting in on a french class at GHS. Sehr lustig!

Here's to hoping that everything continues to go smoothly!

Autostadt!

So! The past few days have been very eventful. On Saturday I went to the AFS farewell party, as I will be leaving Celle on Friday morning. Das ist sehr schlimm, Ich weiß. I have had a great time here, my family has been great, and I have done so many interesting things! From the first day, I have always had something to do after school, and that made a huge impact on the way that I am viewing my the rest of my year. I know that some other exchange students have not gotten the bright start that I have.

Yesterday I visited the city of Wolfsburg. If you didn't know, Wolfsburg is the car capitol of Europe, where Volkswagons Headquarters are. There is a really cool auto museum, and a pavillion for each of the companies that volkswagon owns. My favorites were Audi and Ferrari. In the Audi Pavilion I was able to go inside of all of their current cars, including a 2011 r8 Spyder. The car starts at around 200,000 euros. I was amazed.

In other news, I am very excited to go to my next host family because I will be starting at School there! Monday is my first day. Wish me luck!