Merry Christmas to everyone!
This time I won’t wait two months after everything is over :D I'll tell y'all right now: I had a great Christmas!!!
To be totally honest I wasn't so sure how my first christmas without my family is going to be, but all worries I ever had were completely without reason. I spent a wonderful Christmas Eve and Day with my second family and I enjoyed it so much.
On Christmas Eve we went to a German Christmas Service of a Lutheran Church in Houston. That was great for me. It especially made me very happy to know all the traditional Christmas carols. Later our family friends came over for dinner, and we had lot of fun together playing games and eating lots of food. I made German pancakes and I think the Americans liked them.
Later that night we got our first christmas presents, matching, red pyjamas for everybody with our first initial on it. We slept in them, and also wore them during half of the next day.
Most of you probably know already that Americans get their gifts in the morning of Christmas Day, so that's what we did then. I got so many things that I absolutely love! Thank you again to everyone who thought of me in these days!
After that I got to skype with my german family/ies. I realized that I now have three wonderful families that I love so so so much, and I couldn't live without a single one of them!
Tonight we had another dinner with friends, which was a lot of fun too. Now we are all going to bed, very tired and very happy (at least for my part)!
So Merry Christmas again, for the Germans it isn't over yet, enjoy your Second Weihnachtsfeiertag!
Love, Johanna
Auf geht's!
Livin' a dream!
Freitag, 25. Dezember 2015
Mittwoch, 23. Dezember 2015
Christmas is coming!
Hey!!!
Sorry, I didn't write anything for an even longer time this time and people keep on asking me for a new post, so finally: Here you go! And thank you for still reading this and being interested!
I'll try to start at the beginning and I hope I won't forget anything but so many things happened in the last (almost) two month...
The homecoming dance was great! I went together with three girls and our dates (I was so happy that I acutally had a date :D). We girls got ready together, then we met the boys at a Japanese Restaurant where we had dinner and then we finally went to a Country Club where the dance was and stayed there until midnight.
I am playing the trombone here more than I've ever played before I think. Basically just because I have Band in my regular schedule every day. I'm defenitely very happy about that because it's a lot of fun, I'm doing it with friends and I'm pretty sure that I'm improving. Especially because all the band students had to go to the All-city auditions, which is a solo-contest for brass and woodwind players in Houston. For that contest we had to learn pretty hard (high and fast!) music. I practiced a lot and I think it was worth it. Three of the four Bellaire-trombones, including me, made it. That means that we are getting new music soon that we have to practice and I think we will have a concert with all the people who made All-city together.
As you can see I'm spending a lot of time in band and with band friends - and I love it! Our band director is so nice: one night, during the halftime show of a football game, all the seniors who have been in band during their high school time were recognized with their parents on the field and they got little medals from Bellaire High School. And because this is my only year here they treated me as a senior and I got one of those medals too. That is soooo sweet and nice! It really made me happy.
Sadly the football season is over now. But at least we got to play one playoff game, which was very surprising since our football team didn't play that good during the rest of this season.
I watched two movies with my friends: Specter and Krampus. Both of them had at least a little part in German in it, Krampus even more. That was so funny! By the way, the story of Krampus, a bad Santa Claus, is apparently German. I had never heard about it before, and all the other German exchange students that I asked didn't know what I was talking about either. So if you are German and you know Krampus, tell me!! I really want to know if anybody has heard about it before.
Tanksgiving! - November 26th. I finally met my second host sister. She lives and works in North Carolina and came home for thanksgiving (and now again for christmas). I like her a lot (just as I like everyone else in my family so much!)! She invited me to do Hot Yoga together (something I have never done before). I'm glad I tried it and I acutally really liked it and would definitely do it again. Thanksgiving itself was great too. We cooked all day long and then had dinner, with traditional turkey and Tofurkey for the Vegetarians (not the best idea to be honest :D). But everything else was delicious! The day after, we had a second brasilian thanksgiving dinner together with family friends (they are hosting a german student too), that was a lot of fun too.
The Wednesday after thanksgiving until Sunday, I went to New York with my host family. I love that city now, it's huge and it was soo crowded everywhere but it's just so cool and interesting! I could probably talk about that forever because we did so many things in only 5 days, but this post already is pretty long. So just a little overview about what we did: Empire State Building, Central Park, Shopping, Broadway (An American In Paris and Wicket), Museum of Modern Arts, Little Italy, Chinatown, Chocolat-making Class... It was amazing and I'm so glad that I had the opportunity to see New York, something many "real" Americans in my age have never done.
Together with my host mom, a friend that I met in school and her family (They lived in Hannover for 3 years) I went to a German Christmas Market. It was a lot of fun, we had Flammkuchen, Bratwurst and Bretzeln and saw traditional german clothes and an "Alphornbläser"!
The last week of school here was Final-week, what means that we had to take an two-hour test in every class we have. The good thing about that is, that all the questions are multiple choice so it actually wasn't too hard.
Now it's finally Winter break, although it doesn't feel like winter at all (today it's 28 degrees celsius outside). I like this warm weather a lot better than freezing without snow! It felt a little weird that I went ice skating with some other AFS students yesterday since some people were acutally wearing shorts or skirts but it was a lot of fun!!
Ooookay that's it for now, the only thing I want to say is:
Merry Christmas, Frohe Weihnachten, Joyeux Noel - you know what I mean :D
Sorry, I didn't write anything for an even longer time this time and people keep on asking me for a new post, so finally: Here you go! And thank you for still reading this and being interested!
I'll try to start at the beginning and I hope I won't forget anything but so many things happened in the last (almost) two month...
The homecoming dance was great! I went together with three girls and our dates (I was so happy that I acutally had a date :D). We girls got ready together, then we met the boys at a Japanese Restaurant where we had dinner and then we finally went to a Country Club where the dance was and stayed there until midnight.
I am playing the trombone here more than I've ever played before I think. Basically just because I have Band in my regular schedule every day. I'm defenitely very happy about that because it's a lot of fun, I'm doing it with friends and I'm pretty sure that I'm improving. Especially because all the band students had to go to the All-city auditions, which is a solo-contest for brass and woodwind players in Houston. For that contest we had to learn pretty hard (high and fast!) music. I practiced a lot and I think it was worth it. Three of the four Bellaire-trombones, including me, made it. That means that we are getting new music soon that we have to practice and I think we will have a concert with all the people who made All-city together.
As you can see I'm spending a lot of time in band and with band friends - and I love it! Our band director is so nice: one night, during the halftime show of a football game, all the seniors who have been in band during their high school time were recognized with their parents on the field and they got little medals from Bellaire High School. And because this is my only year here they treated me as a senior and I got one of those medals too. That is soooo sweet and nice! It really made me happy.
Sadly the football season is over now. But at least we got to play one playoff game, which was very surprising since our football team didn't play that good during the rest of this season.
I watched two movies with my friends: Specter and Krampus. Both of them had at least a little part in German in it, Krampus even more. That was so funny! By the way, the story of Krampus, a bad Santa Claus, is apparently German. I had never heard about it before, and all the other German exchange students that I asked didn't know what I was talking about either. So if you are German and you know Krampus, tell me!! I really want to know if anybody has heard about it before.
Tanksgiving! - November 26th. I finally met my second host sister. She lives and works in North Carolina and came home for thanksgiving (and now again for christmas). I like her a lot (just as I like everyone else in my family so much!)! She invited me to do Hot Yoga together (something I have never done before). I'm glad I tried it and I acutally really liked it and would definitely do it again. Thanksgiving itself was great too. We cooked all day long and then had dinner, with traditional turkey and Tofurkey for the Vegetarians (not the best idea to be honest :D). But everything else was delicious! The day after, we had a second brasilian thanksgiving dinner together with family friends (they are hosting a german student too), that was a lot of fun too.
The Wednesday after thanksgiving until Sunday, I went to New York with my host family. I love that city now, it's huge and it was soo crowded everywhere but it's just so cool and interesting! I could probably talk about that forever because we did so many things in only 5 days, but this post already is pretty long. So just a little overview about what we did: Empire State Building, Central Park, Shopping, Broadway (An American In Paris and Wicket), Museum of Modern Arts, Little Italy, Chinatown, Chocolat-making Class... It was amazing and I'm so glad that I had the opportunity to see New York, something many "real" Americans in my age have never done.
Together with my host mom, a friend that I met in school and her family (They lived in Hannover for 3 years) I went to a German Christmas Market. It was a lot of fun, we had Flammkuchen, Bratwurst and Bretzeln and saw traditional german clothes and an "Alphornbläser"!
The last week of school here was Final-week, what means that we had to take an two-hour test in every class we have. The good thing about that is, that all the questions are multiple choice so it actually wasn't too hard.
Now it's finally Winter break, although it doesn't feel like winter at all (today it's 28 degrees celsius outside). I like this warm weather a lot better than freezing without snow! It felt a little weird that I went ice skating with some other AFS students yesterday since some people were acutally wearing shorts or skirts but it was a lot of fun!!
Ooookay that's it for now, the only thing I want to say is:
Merry Christmas, Frohe Weihnachten, Joyeux Noel - you know what I mean :D
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