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Saturday, May 16, 2009

My First Phone Orientation

My phone orientation on Friday outlined language camp in Germany (since they have to teach me German, of course :P) and the basics of the CBYX program.

My first month in Germany will be at language camp in Hedersleben. If you look this town up on google and wikipedia, you wont really find anything, and the coordinator said that it was a small town; therefore I imagine it to sort of be like Buckeye, but in Germany. One big difference is that Buckeye doesn't have a 13th century monastery like the one I will be staying in at Hedersleben :D. Its rooms are renovated and such to be like upperclass hotel rooms, but there's only 2 phones in the building. It's suggested to contact home no more than twice a month, but I should be able to use the Internet at least once a week, which I will do to update my beautiful wonderfull blog. My daily schedule will be really intense, though, with it being summed up as wake up, breakfast, German classes, lunch, core classes, Dinner, and then free time. During my free time, I would be expected to study for my classes, and I would have to watch the German news with all of the other kids. I'm really excited for this, because I LOVE to learn, and I have been curious as to wether or not I could spend too much time learning.

There are five points that the CBYX program is built around, family, friends, language, government, and school. I am required to make a life long relationship with my host family, and can even be put on probation if I don't. I'm also required to make friends, and can but put on probation there if I don't (I'm not worried though, I just thought that was cool). We're expected to speak as little English as possible to fully immerse ourselves in the language, and we're expected to be in contact with our local Bundestag (the German parliament) representative. As for school, we are expected to be a full time student and skipping classes is not allowed. I would be required to keep my grades above a 4 (the German version of a C with a 1 being an A+), but I might be able to keep up with learning French along with the core classes of history, English, German, math, science, and PE that I would be taking. I would be placed by age though, so that would be interesting since I have always been the youngest since I skipped a grade...

I should have a blog post soon about who my future host family will be. I am SO excited :D.

I will have to fly to Washington D.C. to meet up with the other CBYX kids at the Dorris International Airport, and then we will all fly together to Frankfurt, then to Hannover, and then we will go by bus to Hedersleben. I couldn't find much on Hedersleben, but here is a picture of a cute little church in it. It has living plants, not dead ones :D.



Hedersleben is in Eastern Germany, and I am excited to be there since Eastern Germany was a communist controlled area of Germany up until October 3, 1990. I doubt it will be too different from West Germany, but it would still be interesting to see any differences at all. Here's a small map of where Hedersleben is.

Thursday, May 7, 2009

I've been feeling rather melancholy now, thinking of the fact that when I go to Germany I will come back to see that all of my friends who are currently seniors will be gone, as well as my friends that're juniors... so, for any of my friends that actually LOOK at my blog, like I asked them to, they can find me on Facebook, MySpace, and e-mail me at caitlincerra@hotmail.com.

I should be leaving for Germany on August 16th, and coming back June 18th. I'll probably go to BUHS for the first few days of the school year before I leave.

Also, for any of you that want to learn another language online, a service is offered through the Buckeye Public Library. Go here; http://buckeye.mcldaz.org/ and click on the link to the left that says, "Tell Me More Online Language Learning". Then you just enter your library card number, and then create an account, and you will have free access to the software, with no download needed. German, French, Italian, Dutch, English, and Spanish (both Spain Spanish and Latin American Spanish) are offered.

I got beautiful wonderfull AIMs scores back.

I am happy with these scores, ansd congratulations to Antonio for his scores, as well as everyone else.