German Exchange 2016

Hi everyone, hope you're all well back in Australia. I am having an amazing time in Germany. I’m sorry we haven’t written a blog in a while but Teagan and I haven’t been very well and then we had our holidays so we had limited internet. But I will tell you everything that I have been up to over the past few weeks.

Language Experience:

After the short-termers left it was a bit weird to be honest, I got to school the next day and it felt very empty because we were used to seeing our Australian school friends in the morning and it was different not seeing them and speaking English. As a consequence, my German has gotten so much better! I’m able to understand some conversations now and I am sometimes even able to talk back. It’s amazing how you can be in a country for so long and just adjust to the different language. I think we have been here now for about one and a half months and it's incredible how much my German has improved as well as Teagan’s. It was very difficult at the beginning and it was hard to understand what they were saying because sometimes they speak High German and sometimes they speak Bavarian which is different to what we learn at school. I didn’t really know how to join into conversations and it was challenging and to have a conversation with somebody I didn't know very well. However, I would really encourage anyone that wants to study German to come over to Germany and immerse themselves in the language for three months. It has been the best experience of my life and I still have about 5 or 6 weeks to go.

School Holidays:

We have also just recently had a one week school holiday and my amazing host family took me to ... Italy! We travelled with the caravan down to Rome, we stopped in Venice to stay two nights and it was the most amazing weather, it’s such a beautiful city or town I don’t really know. We travelled on a ferry that took us from the caravan park that we were staying at to where the main part of Venice is on the water. I saw gondolas and the little tiny water canals that have tiny bridges over them. We then headed down to stay a night in Siena and we looked around the town. It just also happened to be Halloween, so we saw lots of little kids all dressed up in their pirate and fairy costumes. It was very cute. They were trick or treating around Siena and there were lots of people in the town as well. Soon we arrived in Rome. Andrea and I were a little bit tired so we didn’t do much on our first night. The next day we met with some of Martina and Robert's (my host parents) friends who flew down from Munich to show us around Rome. The first place we visited was the Colosseum. It was amazing. We also visited the Vatican and went to the top of the dome where I could see all of Rome. It was so beautiful, we were lucky to have such good weather. There are lots of amazing churches in Italy and we went to four in one day because of the Holy Doors legend. They say that if you go to these four doors in these four churches including the Vatican, then God would forgive you for everything bad that you have done.

On our last day before we travelled back to Rosenheim we stayed the night in a place that is the sister city of Rosenheim. While my host family and I were having dinner at this restaurant a lady comes up behind Andrea and asks her if she is from Bad Aibling and is this your exchange student and that family turned out to be Clyde English’s host family from last year - Alina and her family!! We sat and we talked for about another hour and a half. It was very exciting (Clyde if you’re reading this Alina says “Hi".) Hope everyone is all well back at home and see everyone soon.

- Venice