Ich finde dich!

Today, we did some community service in the town of Hedersleben. First I helped paint a fence, then I painted a wall in a playground. Our orders for the wall was to pick one of the pictures already painted there, then to build on it. I picked a picture that was a red hexagon inside of a rectangular yellow background. First I tried to add orange streaks, then that got boring, so I decided to flick red paint at it and to add handprints everywhere. Now it looks like someone was murdered there, and their blood got all over the wall xD. The guy who was working at the playground looked at me, told me to look for the nearest shower, and to stop painting. He also kept cursing and saying ‘shit’ in German. I personally happened to find my picture pretty :’(... but then again, I had two streaks of red and orange paint on the bottom of one pant leg, droplets of red paint on my shoes, two hands covered in red paint, and red paint all over the area under my elbow. My mom is about to freak out from hearing this, so I am going to mention that the paint was like little kid paint, and it was coming out of my clothes just from rubbing them xD.

I got 18 or so bug bites all over my body. The language teachers made me stay in bed this one evening with a wet bandage wrapped around my foot because there were two swollen bug bites on the heel of my foot. The night I got them, I woke up at midnight itching myself, and would find more and more bites after each day. They’re almost healed now with almost no irritation and reddening. I keep getting self conscious about my comma use, since that was my biggest problem with writing in English class... I keep imagining Ms. Balicki reading my blog and shaking her head at all of my mistakes. I puked two mornings ago, and have had a killer stomachache since then... but I am resting a lot and starting to feel better.

I called my host family twice now, and they’ve sent me two packages. Both packages had chocolate :D. But, they seem really nice, and as language camp is getting closer to ending, I’m looking forward more and more to meeting them. The only qualm I have is the fact that I wouldn’t want to speak English to them, and it’s kind of hard to learn another language in a month... but, if babies can learn a language without even being able to ask questions, or to translate things, then I should be able to learn a language too. At least I can understand most of what my teacher is saying to me... the only thing is that I don’t really understand the idioms they’re using, or what they’re referring to. For example, I understood exactly what my teacher said this one time, I just didn’t know what she was referring to, so I was like ‘what?’.

I’m having a great time here, and I feel like I know what a boarding school is like now. Some people are annoying, but then again, I can’t expect to be perfectly compatible with every single person here, since there’s 45. McKenna, Tara, and Nida are all really cool people, and I go to town and hang out with them just about every day. There’s some other friends I have here too, but I don’t spend as much time with them as I do with those three.

Have I mentioned there’s practically no rules here, other than to not do things detrimental to yourself? I’m going to go to this town, I think it’s called Halberstadt, tomorrow; a few days ago I went to Quedlinburg, and it was sooooo pretty. There were anarchy signs all over, which was kind of weird, but some vandal made up for it when they drew a picture of a man throwing the Nazi emblem into the trash with a note saying “Nazis are on the out!”. The town had been a shrine to the Nazi regime during the Nazi regime, so that could explain the vandalism... the group I was in was comprised of all beginners (the name of our German class level), and I was speaking for them to German citizens a little bit, and the people understood me, and I understood them, so I was really happy and confident ^^. I just realized that I feel more confident about my German abilities when I’m in a city. An interesting thing about the teachers here, is that so far whenever they ask someone a question, they don’t ask someone else if the person doesn’t respond.

I really really like it here, but I feel like I complained more than I complimented in this blog, so I would like to mention that my stomach is killlliiinnnng me, so I’m not in the greatest of moods, but I really do love it here. I already don’t want to go back.

I want to meet my host familllyyyyyy. My host sister is 12, so I keep having this picture in my head of an adorable little kid, even though I have a picture of her and she’s really tall. She doesn’t look like a little kid either. I think my lack of siblings has screwed up what I expect people to look like at certain ages... I just realized I don’t know how to pronounce either of my host parent’s names :D. My host mother called me by the German pronunciation of my name on the phone, so that sort of reminded me I didn’t know how to pronounce their names in German.