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!