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Sunday, January 31, 2010

Köln!



I’ve been writing letters to the Bundestag (German parliament), and I’ve had my host mom look over them... I realized I make fewer mistakes when I write in German than I do when I write in English. Whenever I make a blog post, I always have a bunch of mistakes that Microsoft Word finds, but only two or so when I write to the German Parliament... yay!

21.01.10

No school today. The only thing I really have to do is get on a train to Cologne. I met up with Tara, a friend who has the same scholarship as I do, and we got on the train together. The best part of this train ride, is that we bought reservations for some seats (since in Germany, having a train ticket doesn’t mean you have a seat, you need to pay extra if you want to be 100% sure you don’t have to stand the whole time), and then someone was sitting in them! To make it even better, the guy had the exact same reservations that we did, so we couldn’t make him leave, and had to go look for seats somewhere else... but at least we met up with some other CBYX kids on the way. We also met this really interesting man who had lived in East Germany. He writes philosophical books, but according to him, he writes what his heart says.

When we finally got to Cologne, we got to choose our rooms. After we got our stuff into our rooms, we had dinner, then a seminar, and it was basically just us all saying hi to each other again, and sharing funny experiences from Germany. After that, the other kids all decided to walk to the Cologne Cathedral. We totally didn’t make it all the way, because we needed to be back at the youth hostel by 10:30 pm. But at least we made it to the Rhein. We could see the cathedral from there.



I was really tired when we finally got back and went to bed... but my roommates weren’t. They talked until midnight.

22.01.10



Three alarms went off this morning. One was mine. One was from the person sleeping above me. The other one was a watch.

We went to Bonn today, but to get there we needed to catch a train at the Cologne Central Station, and I saw something in a window that I just had never really seen in a window before...



After we got to Bonn we had three hours of free time. I went with Nida, Garrett, and Tara to the Beethoven-Haus, where the composer Beethoven was born, but I didn’t actually go into the part that people had to pay for. Instead I went to this little Chinese shop right around the corner. It was really nice in there, and everything was cheap, and I think it was all really from China... it had a really nice air to it, because it was just a little family business. When the shopkeeper needed change for the money I gave him, he took it out of his own wallet. I also found a book in there in Chinese, and the people were speaking to each other in Chinese... the lady shopkeeper overheard my group and I talking to each other in English, and she told us we spoke English very well xD (she spoke in German).

Then we did some shopping. I believe this is when I bought this amazing jacket that I now have. It was on sale for €7,95 (in Germany, a comma is used instead of a period as a decimal place), and it’s amazing, and beautiful. After that we went to this Döner shop to get food. We were arguing the whole time though abut which one to go into, because there were two right next to each other... then I got ditched right in the middle of ordering, because my friends realized there were flies before I did. That döner was the worst tasting döner I’ve ever eaten. It didn’t taste bad, it just tasted disappointing.

I just realized something... during my time in Cologne I had been taking notes to remind myself of what I did, and I wrote „really nice dress“. I have no idea what I was talking about, but when I got home from Cologne I had asked me host brother if he liked my new dress, so I think I had forgotten for three days that a jacket is not a dress...

Anyways! Afterwards we all met up again, and went to the Haus der Geschichte, the house of history. It was a museum about the history of West Germany during the Cold War, and it was extremely fascinating. The Germans really had NOTHING back then... there was a collection of things people had made right after the war out of the strangest things, just because they really had NOTHING. One of the objects was a dress made out of a parachute. In another area there was also a car where its door was the window shield... the window shield popped up and people got in and out through that. I also bought a book about the DDR (it’s really cute and is a collection of facts and such), and then we found ICE CREAM!

Here's a random picture of a pretty building.



At dinner, Nida wasn’t paying attention. Garrett put all of his fish onto her plate. She didn’t notice we told her.

The seminar we had after dinner was spent by us dividing into the groups we had been in at language class (class wise), and talking about the good and bad experiences we had. It was interesting... I was able to see both similarities and contrasts between my experience in Germany and the experience of the others.

Of course, afterwards I did the only logical thing possible. I went running through the streets of Cologne at night with Hannah and some other people looking for ice cream. We didn’t find any.

To end the night, I played Egyptian Rat Slap/Screw. AND OMG! I was watching Pan’s Labyrinth and writing this, and the first creepy thing started to appear, the one with the hooves. Anyways, the people I was playing Egyptian Rat Slap/Screw with either called it Egyptian Rat Slap or Egyptian Rat Screw, so I guess that last part is optional? Personally, I like the slappy option more. Because that’s what you do. You basically look for combinations in the cards that are being put into a pile in the center, and slap the pile, but then everyone is trying to slap it, so you end up slapping/being slapped.

23.01.10

I woke up to someone saying „oh my gosh, there’s only 15 minutes left“. So, we ended up being technically five minutes late to breakfast. After which, we all walked to the Cologne Cathedral as a group, and had half a day of free time. The first thing my group did was climb to the top of the Cologne Cathedral. I started to feel EXTREMELY sick... I’m deathly afraid of heights. I was about to give up when a really nice German lady stuck me between her daughter and I, and made me go to the top xD. She told me to just ignore my fears and keep walking. And I made it to the top. It was amazingly beautiful. I have a bunch of picture of the cathedral, but that thing was just so big it was impossible to get it all into one picture...





I decided to be a tourist after this, and got the coolest scarf in the world. A scarf with the German colors and the national emblem on it :D. We spent the last of our free time going to the El-De Haus... it was an Gestapo jail. It was under an apartment complex so that no one on the street could hear the people’s screams, but the people in the apartment could... the jail’s water sources and such were also cut off from the city’s, so that no one knew that it existed. The main things being shown there were carvings the prisoners had made into the walls. It was very touching. Most of the writings had to do with love and loved ones, in a variety of languages... many people wrote about missing what it was like to kiss their boyfriend or girlfriend. It was very touching, and so meaningful. But all of these people knew they were going to die. The worst part was the torture room. It was hard to even go there because of the feeling of foreboding...

After lunch we had a seminar about what we had expected from Germany, and tips we could give to the exchange students who would be coming next year. Then we took a language test. I didn’t do completely wonderful on it, I got a 50%, which by German standards isn’t really bad (they have a funky grading system).

At the second seminar of the day, someone asked to be treated older, because he felt like the rules were too little-kid-designed. Then we learned a lot about the program. Because there’s so little interest in the program from the American side, they had to make age exceptions. Originally, only 15-16 year olds could get the scholarship, but now 15-18 year olds are allowed, but only on the American side. The Germans also send 300 kids to America every year, but only 250 Americans go to Germany every year. Six million euros are paid out every year for the 550 students that get to take part in this program, and Germany pays 65% of that. And they wont be any change to our rules.

I ended up talking a LOT to someone else in my program that I never really talked to that much before... I found out she’s rather interesting and really nice ^^.

24.01.10



In case you're wondering, yes, it is perfectly normal to have a car with wings on top of buildings.

The last full day we had in Cologne. I met up with David, the German kid who was at my school in America last year and had introduced me to the CBYX program. We sat around for a while at the youth hostel, and then his parents drove us into the city and we walked around a bit... he showed me some old buildings in Cologne, some market places, and clubs. Just about every other building was a bar. But there were also a lot of Carnival related things... including a shop with a bunch of costumes. He also bought me a piece of cake, a cookie, and he gave me a book, a Kinder (brand of candy) egg, and a box of chocolates :D.

Then we had more seminars and stuff, but we really didn’t do anything... a group of kids decided to go to the movies, because we had some extra free time that night, but I just stayed at the youth hostel with a friend and watched movies on her laptop... I was feeling kind of sick too. I didn’t get to bed until 4 am. But, Micky gave Ann a HUGE thing of Doctor Pepper. He brought a case of it all the way from Potsdam to Cologne for her. I got two cans. And I got to sleep in my friend’s room. Yay.

25.01.10



We went home. No one was sitting in our reserved seats this time. I visited the neighbor’s house with my host mom, because she was going to be gone this weekend to visit her mom in southern Germany, and she wanted me to know the neighbors in case I had a problem or something. They’re really nice. Looking back on my sentence, it looks like someone can interpret it as „my host mom took me door-to-door o get to know all of the neighbors“, but I just met one family. And then I went to sleep.

26.01.10

I turned 16. My host mom baked me a cake with apples in it, and put a big candle in the middle. She also gave me a sweater, a thing of chocolates, a postcard-calendar, and a bucket of flowers.



Instead of school, today my class had Wandertag, where we basically just go on a field trip. My class went to the Museum of Movies and Television. The guided tour was interesting, but we ended up getting to leave early. At first the teacher wanted to us all to meet up again an hour later, but within 10 minutes everyone from my class but one person was in the lobby and wanted to leave... so we got to go early ^^. Then I saw a movie with two other girls. We saw the Surrogates, and it was pretty good, but I didn’t understand these two important conversations, so I was sort of left clueless at one part, and my friends had to explain it to me a little... we also did a little shopping, and then I met up with Tara for ice cream. I also got rid of all of my pocket change by feeding all of my coins to the stamp machine. There’s a limit of how many coins you can put in the machine though, and so I had to try at least four times... and the maximum is 15. I guess I just had a lot of coins.

27.01.10

I only went to school two days this week. This was one of those two.

28.01.10

Gesundheitstag (health day)! I went to Potsdam (a city right outside of Berlin) today on a small school organized trip to a health and fitness center. With a sauna and a water gymnastics area. We were supposed to try out different things, like the sauna, a spinning bicycle, and aerobics. I only got to try the sauna a little and the group massage at the end. The massage part was really nice; we teamed up with a partner and took these spiky balls and rubbed them on our partner’s back. Then we relaxed. I almost fell asleep.

My host mom left for the south of Germany today to visit her mom for her mom’s birthday. I had dinner at the neighbor’s house, and they were really nice. They invited me over for lunch for the next day.

29.01.10

The last day of school before the week of winter break. I only had two periods of classes today, and in the third period my class teacher gave us all our grades. My exchange program asked my school to grade me with A’s, B’s, C’s, and D’s, and my teacher made me a special printout with my Americanized grades on it. I got 6 A’s, 3 B’s, 2 C’s, and 1 D. I was worried about the D at first, since my program wrote in the hand book that we’re not allowed to have D’s, but I talked to my host mom about it, and she had hosted CBYX kids before, and her other host daughter had gotten D’s too. So it wasn’t that bad. Then my class got to get out of school before the period was over.

I found out that the little library where I live now has Brokeback Mountain. And that you can check it out with a minimum age of 12. Yes, mom, I did watch it. It was actually really interesting. The settings involved a heavy suppression of gay people, and even though it is a gay love story, gay-ness was shown in a more negative light, mainly because of the background where the story took place, and through the characters’ own dislike of it.

I went over to the neighbor’s house for dinner, and stayed for a really long time.

30.01.10

I went over my boyfriend’s mother’s apartment and we went to Kentucky Fried Chicken together ^^. Then I talked to my family and my boyfriend through Skype back at the apartment. And she gave me candy, a t-shirt, and a little pillow for my birthday.

31.01.10

The neighbor’s daughter is leaving for her university studies, and I stopped by for a little to say bye. Then I wrote this blog.

Thursday, January 21, 2010

I've finally updated on time!



14.01.10

I went to see the movie called „Friendship“ with my host family, and it was really good. I don’t know if it was shown in America, but it’s basically set right after the fall of the Berlin Wall, and the main characters are two guys from East Germany visiting America for the first time... and they can’t really speak English either ^^. If it’s also playing in America, which I really doubt it is, I suggest that you watch it.

Friday, January 15th, 2010.

I switched host families. Some problems came up, and well... yeah. I’m going to be staying with my community representative now. Luckily I’m going to be going to the same school. Normally a family change takes three weeks, but I just had some luck.



That's a picture of my host mom and I on the lake. I have a host father who works t of the week in Bonn, so he's not home when it's not a weekend. I also have a host brother who goes to the same school as me, but one grade higher. My other two host brothers are studying at universities; one in Germany and one in New York.

16.01.10

My host mom and I went ice skating together at Glienicke See. It’s really just a frozen lake, but there was so much snow on it that you couldn’t really ice skate, but some people had already brought snow shovels and were shoveling away the snow in areas so that people could actually ice skate.

19.01.10

I have two periods every tuesday in which I don’t have any classes, so usually I would just sit around and do nothing... but this Tuesday, I decided to go to the center of Spandau instead. First I tried to feed the stamp machine all of my pennies and bipennies (the Euro is Germany’s form of currency, and the Euro has 1 cent pieces, 2 cent pieces (hence „bipennies“), 5 cent pieces, 10 cent pieces, 20 cent pieces, 50 cent pieces, 1 Euro pieces, and 2 Euro pieces... from then on everything is in bill form) so that A) I could get rid of my mountain of pocket change (I would feel bad giving a person a billion pennies, ya know?), and B) I sort of need stamps. My mommy always gave me something for Valentine’s Day, and I finally have a boyfriend (that sounds a bit desperate...), so I want to at least send them postcards... sending packages is kind of expensive, but I am very happy with a package I got recently. I very nice person sent me a lot of CANDY. That’s perfect, because I love CANDY. I’ve been eating a lot more CANDY in Germany, but I’ve actually lost weight... ok, I’ve been pathetically trying to fit CANDY into the last few sentences, because I really just wanted to write CANDY xD.

Anyways. I also bought a 4 Gigabyte memory card with a 5 year garuntee for my camera for only 11,99 Euros. That’s like 15 dollars. Beat that! Also, another wonderful amazing little thing about Germany, is that the sales tax is ALWAYS included in the price... and they seperate their trash into different bins to help the environment.

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Ok, so I am leaving on Thursday 21.01.10 to go to Cologne (for a seminar for my exchange program), meeting up with the German exchange student who was at my highschool last year (he also had the same scholarship I do, but just on the German end) on Sunday 24.01.10, coming back to Berlin on Monday 26.01.10, having a Wandertag (basically there’s no school and you go on a fieldtrip with your class) and my 16th Birthday on Tuesday 26.01.10, going to a school-organized spa day instead of school on Thursday 28.01.10, and then having Winter break the whole next week. It’s like everything amazing is happening around my birthday! I am SO happy ^^. Also, another weird thing is that the German school semester, at least in Berlin, ends next week, instead of how ours ends right before Christmas. So, I technically had a week for Christmas and New Year’s breaks, but not the break to split up the semesters yet. A bad thing though, is that the end of the school year is later than the American end... I’m going to end up leaving about a week or two before the school year has actually ended. Maybe then I’ll at least get to miss a test or two ^^.

Saturday, January 16, 2010

Weihnachtszeit



13.12.09
I went over my friend’s house. His mother made „Carne Salada“, or something with the word „Carne“ in it, and it had so much meat! I really liked it. I also played Wii with him, then „Singster“ with both him and his mom. I was terrible, and the game was giving the players feedback after they sang a little bit, and I swear it was making fun of me. I even lost to him in chess. I was SO close to winning too! All of his good pieces were gone, but then my brain decided to take a nap. But, it was a lot of fun, and now his mom wants to cook fish for me ^^.

14.12.09
I just had an almost regular, normal day today. After school I dropped a truckload of books off at the library, and bought my host mom something at the Christmas market. I got her a candle made out of folded sheets of beeswax. I think it’s really pretty, and it smells nice too.



16.12.09
I look forward to Wednesdays because that’s when I have my first English class of the week. So, I was waiting with my class in the classroom for the teacher to come. We waited... and waited... and waited... and left. The teacher just NEVER came, so we got to go home early.

After school I went with my friend and his mom to an Italian restaurant to celebrate her birthday, and I ordered Schweinschnitzel mit Fleischsoße, and it was SO GOOD! It was basically a piece of fried swine meat with a cheese and tomato (I think?) sauce. And French fries. I could hardly finish it. Afterwards, we went back to my friend’s apartment, and hung out... and well, now I have a boyfriend. And he’s a lifeguard. And he speaks French.



(Normally he’s not wearing a pink cowboy hat. He just tried this one on at the Christmas market in Spandau.)

17.12.09
„Today, I was assaulted by white balls. They were very small things on the ground, and in the air... I figured they were dew balls or something falling from the plants... but then I realized they were falling in places far away from the trees too...“ behold, my first experience with snow actually falling on me o.O

18.12.09
This was my last day of school. I couldn’t find my teacher for the last lesson of the day, and then I realized there was a huge concert thing going on in the entrance hall. Some of the younger kids were playing instruments and singing, and when they were done, we were released to go home almost two hours early ^^. Then I talked to the Columbian exchange student on the bus. It’s really interesting to talk to him, because I got used to how the Germans are, and now I think he’s kind of different, but in reality he acts sort of like an American ^^. Basically, my own culture is starting to see different to me... ^^.

19.12.09
It was really cold, snowy, and really pretty, and we (I and my host family) cut our own Christmas treeeeee! :D We just sort of drove for a while to I have no idea where, and went to a Christmas tree lot, and cut one down. The biggest question was ‚how are we going to get it back home?’, but eventually, it all worked ^^. At the lot there was a canal, and I REALLY liked it, because... it reminded me of jumping over the canals back in Arizona.

20.12.09



My host parents took me to the Christmas market at Schloß Charlottenburg, and IT WAS SO PRETTY!!!! Despite the cold, I really had a nice time there. The cold itself was pretty cool, because I had just never been THAT cold. I had like five jackets on and three pairs of socks, but I was still freezing. There were also a few dogs that were there, but their owners had put them in little bags and carried them around and it was soooooo cute! There was also these really cool birdhouses, but picture taking was forbidden, so... ya. There was also this really pretty Christmas tree set up, and just as we were leaving, some musicians were getting ready to play. Here’s another picture of the Schloß after it’s gotten a little bit darker.



Afterwards, we were walking back home when we found these street artists who were giving a display with fire. It was actually really cool.

21.12.09
I went with my boyfriend to Kudamm, which is THE shopping street of Berlin. If a business is successful, they have a shop there. It also is home of one of the most expensive malls in all of Germany, the KaDeWe. The whole mall looked pristine, and sooooooooo expensive. You actually aren’t allowed to take pictures in it, so... ya, no pictures for my blog ^^. But believe me, the whole thing looked like it was out of one of those really nice magazines. They also had a very nice Christmas thing going on in this amazingly huge entrance room, and I thought the decorations were really nice... until I realized they weren’t really decorations because they all had price tags on them. Basically, you could buy like everything there. Anyways, then we went to the Europa Center (it had a really cool water display by this little café), and to the Kaiser-Wilhelm-Gedächtnis-Kirche. The Germans have a nickname for it, which in English is „hollow fang“. Here’s why.



It was destroyed in WWII, and then rebuilt as a memorial to the Catholics who died in the war. It’s really a beautiful church though, and there are even some wall paintings left over from the original.

One last thing, we went to a Döner Shop (a Döner is a Turkish... thing) and I was speaking to Georg, my boyfriend, in English... so the Turkish cashier started to talk to Georg in English, and Georg told him „I’m the German, she’s the American“. Then the guy said „and I’m Turkish“. It was really cute!

23.12.09
Today it was just a lot of getting ready for Christmas... It’s actually tradition in Germany to decorate the tree just a few days before Christmas. So, now our pretty tree is sitting in the living room.

24.12.09 Heiligabend
Germans open their presents today. One day before the Americans. Ha ha, Americans!

But anyways, I had a really nice time with my host family (and my host grandparents that live in Berlin came to visit) during Christmas. And in Germany, Christmas is three days long. The first day is Heiligabend (holy evening), and the next two are basically called „Party Day One“ and „Party Day Two“. What do Germans do to celebrate? EAT!!!!! I felt like I was going to explode the first day, but the food was just sooooooo good. We also set up a little train that went through the living room and under the tree. Afterwards we went to church, then went home to unwrap the presents. My host sister and I divided up the stack of presents between whom they all were sent to, and it was all just really nice. I really had a nice day, maybe I like Christmas in Germany more than Christmas in America. I got some nice presents too; a t-shirt with all of the sectors of Berlin, a pen set (with a real leather carrying case), a calendar with tips in it on German from Duden (this company produces a lot of books on school subjects, including a list of German words (no, not a dictionary, just a list of words with extremely brief notes on each one)), a Donald Duck comic book (in German), CANDY, a cutting block with the Tischregeln on it (table rules for the sloppy American), and lots of other stuff. Including paper (two notebooks, and one set of five really nice pieces of paper with matching envelopes and stamps from my community representative). I know it’s weird, but I was REALLY happy to get paper. I have a thing for writing, apparently ^^. After we unwrapped the presents, my host sister and I started putting together a puzzle she got for Christmas. It was a map of the world, and it had 1,000 pieces.

25.12.09 Erster Feiertag
My host grandparents left today, but not after my host uncle came over and we played games together. I swear I ALMOST won a game of cards. It’s a really weird and sort of complicated game that I totally didn’t understand at first, but it’s SO MUCH FUN! I just realized, I really like playing card and board games. My host family has some really interesting ones. But anyways, the puzzle of the Earth was a pain in the neck, because there were about 50 pieces that were all the same color of gray (a map of Earth is elliptical-ish and the puzzle was rectangular, but the designer decided to make the part outside of the Earth all gray, except for a part that was the flag of every country in the world), and then the ocean is all pretty much the same type of blue, so it was a lot of fumbling around in the dark, but we were able to finish before we went to bed! Well, I was in bed when they finished it, but I could hear my host sister screaming, and figured she had finished it ^^.

26.12.09
There wasn’t as much eating and having fun today, only because my host grandparents, host uncle, and host sister were all away, but I still had a nice day. My host parents went with me to the Neue Museum on Museum Island in Berlin. It had a special exhibit of Egyptian artifacts, and it was really interesting. I saw sarcophagi, a Book of the Dead, and it was overall just really interesting...

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Ok, I took forever to write this, so I sort of forget what happened on what day, and so... To sum it up, I celebrated New Year’s Eve with my host family, and we set off fireworks in the snow. We had a friend of my host mom and her family over, and it was a really nice time. I also went to go see Avatar with my boyfriend, and it was really an amazing film... I liked it so much because most films these days don’t have a real background idea like some books do, such as „Animal Farm“ and such... but Avatar does. To me, it raises the question of what people are willing to give up, or even destroy, to get something material. Then, on January 2nd, I went to the airport with my boyfriend and his parents, and her flew to America for a semester long exchange year.

The school is going really well for me now. I feel like I belong there somehow; like everything’s not so foreign anymore. I’m also hanging out with people more, I went to the Deutsche Geschichte Museum (German History Museum) and the Berliner Bär (Berlin Bear) exhibit with another exchange student from Switzerland. I also hung out with another kid from the CBYX program in Spandau. My host family and I also went to an ice hockey game together, the Berliner Eisbäre against the Hannover Scorpions... the Berlin team lost 3-4.



Anyways, the Berlin Bears are huge bear statues from I believe 144 different countries. I’m not sure how many there are, but the bear is the „mascot“ of Berlin, and artists from all of these different countries were asked to make a bear that best represented their country... then all of the bears are supposed to be holding hands to show global acceptance and cooperation.

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Ok, so I wrote the rest of that a while ago, and didn’t get around to actually posting it until the date stamp on this blog post... but a lot has happened since then. I’ll write about it in my next post.