Day 152

Hello People of the World,

So I was sitting on my bed, so tired and then I realized. It's Monday. Y'know what that means? Happy May Monday! We are back in business so you know the deal. 

School:

So last week was my first week back at school. School is still hard, but it is getting a tiny bit easier. I'm starting to understand a lot more. I now understand questions the teacher asks, and I try to answer them. I may not always be right, but y'know I'm giving effort. Then there's some subjects like Chemistry or Physics where I don't even fully understand them in English. Just need to take it day by day. Now it's another week of school, and another week and another and another until Ferien in February.

Zürich:

So on Saturday I went to Zürich with my friend Stephanie. We went out there to go check out this store called Brandy Melville. I bought this really cute shirt there. Then we went walking around some more Zürich is such a pretty city. I was so proud because I bought a really cute leather jacket for 20 Francs. This is an absolute steal because all the leather jackets I've seen are usually like 60 francs or something outrageous like that. Then we went to get some coffee at Starbucks. Overall it was a very fun day.

Family Party:

Sunday I had a family party. It was pretty fun. It was my host cousin's 15th birthday party. We had good food. We played a game where we had to guess movie titles with emojis. Luckily with the help of my movie knowledge from Netflix I was fairly good at this game. Then we had a cake, and dark and white chocolate mousse. White Toblerone chocolate mousse is so good. I absolutely love it. If you ever get the chance to I advise you all to try it. It's just plain wonderful.

Fitness:

So as you all know it is January. Also the time known for Resolutions that get broken within the first week. I wanted to be good this year and be more active in the gym. Since at the beginning of the year I was still healing my broken foot, I couldn't really start a Resolution. But now I'm all healed and all cleared so the resolution is under way. Yay for resolutions! In reality it's pretty annoying, but y'know it keeps me busy and it makes me feel good so yay for self confidence! Maybe if I do it enough I'll start seeing results. Or I'lll just end up looking like this 

What's coming up next?

So I know this isn't the most thrilling post ever. I'm still getting into the hang of things. Plus my camera is acting up, so that explains the lack of pictures. Anyways let's talk about the up coming things.

Changing host families:

So at the end of January I shall be changing host families. No there were no problems whatsoever with my first host family. This was settled before they even chose to have me. I live with my first host family the first 5 months and then with my second host family has me the other 6 months. The only reason I'm telling you all this is because you may see a change of the people in my pictures, so I just wanted to explain beforehand. My first family were very good to me and I can't thank them enough for welcoming me into their family, and my second family seem like very nice people, and I'm excited to get to know them  

Ski trip:

So in February we have this two week break in February, so people can go skiing. I know awesome right? Anyways I shall be going skiing with my second host family in the Italian part of Switzerland. I'm really looking forward to it because I haven't gone skiing in such a long time, and to go skiing in Switzerland in all places is just unreal. I wanted to go skiing during Christmas break, but due to my broken foot and lack of snow, I didn't go. But now I'm all recovered, and  the snow should be here by February, so I'm ready!

There's a couple of other things lined up for the future, but I'd rather wait until they come up so I have something to write about in the future. I think I'm going to wrap things up here. So I hope you all have a wonderful week.

Until next time, 

Tschüss,

-May

Day 145

Hello People of the World,

 Happy May Monday! The first May Monday of 2016. Also the first Monday of 2016 so we aren't off to a bad start! I basically went ghost for a while. I know. I could come up with a million excuses as to why I haven't written. Those excuses don't really matter because either way it just resulted in me not writing for a while. But it's a new year, so my new year's resolution is to not let this blog die. Since so much time has passed, I think I'll just reflect on my time here rather than fill you in on what's happened since October. This is a more serious post, so don't expect gifs or pictures.

So we are almost to the halfway mark. It's crazy how fast time is going by. It seems like just yesterday I was in California talking to my host siblings through What's App. Now if I want to talk to them all I have to do is walk upstairs. Unless I'm tired then I'll still text them through What's App because I don't feel like going upstairs.

I've had many exchange friends leave because they were just semester students. More are leaving soon because they are what we call "oldies". They came here in February and stay until January. Most of these kids are from the Southern Hemisphere, and come here during their summer break which would be our winter break for those in the Northern Hemisphere. Those who come in August are called "Newbies". Then when February when new exchange students come in, the "Newbies" become the "Oldies". And the cycle continues.

So since everyone is leaving this is the usually the part of exchange where you start to miss the country you are in before you even leave. Going out to get some Kebap turns into a "I'm really going to miss this when I go back home". Eating a Swiss chocolate bar turns into "How am I going to live without this when I go back home". It's really easy to get into this mentality.

The way I see it is you can look at it from an optimistic perspective. The whole "glass half full" view. "Yeah I still have 7 months". Or you can be a pessimistic "half glass empty" perspective and just sulk about how you only have 7 months left. Or you can stop sulking, down whatever's in the cup and just make the most of it and appreciate what you just drank.

(I'm not sure if this metaphor makes sense. I'm sorry if it doesn't. This was my attempt to be philosophical)

There are still days I can't believe that I'm living this life. There's days where I'll sit at the table and listen to my host family speak in German, and realize that I can understand everything they're saying, and actually follow the conversation. Sometimes it just hits me like "Wow they're speaking in a totally different language than I was raised on, but I actually understand it." Some days I'lll walk into Englsih class and be so confused as to why my teacher is speaking English. Or in Spanish class I'll be thinking in German trying to gather all the words I need in Spanish. Or other days where I'll call my Brasilien friend and we'll just go out for coffee. It all just feels so unreal honestly.

2015 went by so quickly. I had so many good memories that I will never forget. It was probably the best year of my life. Wait no, it was the best year of my life. It's going to be hard for 2016 to follow it up, but 2016 is a brand new year and has lots of potential.

I'd like to take this moment to thank everyone that has made this year possible. I'd like to thank my wonderful family back in the U.S. My supportive friends in the U.S. My two amazing host families. My lovely Swiss friends. My awesome Exchange friends. The Elita Hawley Scholarship Fund and the Global Leaders Needs-Based Scholarship for making this possible for me. Also just anyone who's stood by me and supported me on this journey. Thank you.

I know this post wasn't all that extravagant, but it works. I just wanted to update you all, and confirm that I'm still alive and healthy. In the upcoming blogs, I will have more pictures and gifs and updates on daily life and all those fun things. I hope you all had a wonderful holidays. It's a new beginning, and I'll try to keep my resolution of keeping this blog up. See you all next Monday.


Until next time,
Tschüss,
-May

Day 77

Hello People of the World,

Guess who's back? Back again. May is back. Tell a friend. Okay, seriously though, I'm back! It feels like forever since I've written a blog post. I know I've been horrible keeping up with this, and my last post was in September. I've just been so busy in the past weeks. So much to write about.I just decided to write today because the longer I wait the more things happen which means I would have to write a longer post. I won't go too into depth about everything because there's so much that's happened. Anyway let's get started.

Fachewoche

The week before last week I had my Fachewoche. A Fachwoche is like a study week where you go out with your class somewhere for week and study. In my case, my class and I stayed in a "Schloss"(castle) in the canton of Thurgau.  Our theme of the week was Legends. I had to do a presentation on the Arthurian Legend. The two languages focused during the camp were  German and English. For this reason, my presentation had to be in English. You could only imagine how much of a difficult time I had with that. Jokes aside it was really fun. I got to get closer to my classmates, and overall it was just a great time.

The Schloss we stayed in looked like it belonged in Candy Land

View from the back of the Schloss

Ferien:

Ferien is the German word for vacation! When I returned from Fachewoche, two weeks of vacation officially started. The first few days I was a bit sick so I just stayed home and watched movies in German on Netflix. So the first few days I was like..

When I started feeling better, I went out to a couple different places

Basel

I went to Basel with my host mom and my host brother, Phillip.  We went to go visit my host grandparents. My host mom had to go to work, so I toured the city of Basel with my host granparents and Phillip. It was raining, but still nice. I took lots of pictures, and I wish I could share them but once again when I tried to upload them to my computer they all deleted.

Interlacken

I went to Interlacken with a friend I believe the day after I went to Basel. The weather was a bit foggy and rainy, so that was sort of a downer. We decided to have lunch and the weather started to clear up a bit, and it stopped raining. We wandered around for a while looking at a bunch of different things. It was so pretty. There was a river and a lake, and the water is SO BLUE. I couldn't believe it. I took a lot of photos here as well but lost them when trying to upload them. I only have a picture of cows eating grass that I took on my phone while we were walking along the river.

Look how furry Swiss cows are

Luzern

I went to Luzern the day after Interlacken. This time I went with a couple of friends. We actually planned out places to go for this trip rather than wandering around. This time I became frustrated from my camera, so I just to my handy dandy Iphone. Fun Fact: Here a cellphone is called a Handy. We went to the famous bridge. We went to a very nice art museum. We saw a couple churches. Can I just say I love the churches here? They are all just so pretty and I love how each one has like it's own design. We also walked along the river, where we saw a lot of swans and ducks. Swans look really pretty from a distance but up close they are so scary. I tried taking a picture by the lake and I was pretty close to the edge, and this swan swims up to us, and started to hiss at us. I was so startled I almost fell into the lake. There was also a carnival in town. This carnival happened to include a drop tower that stood at 80 meters tall.For my readers from the U.S. this is about 262 feet. The minute I saw it I knew I had to go on it. I went on with a friend, while my other friend watched our stuff because she had a fear of heights. The ride was so fun. It took you up in the air above the Luzern skyline and you stayed up there for about 5 minutes. It was really pretty to look at especially because we went on at the end of the day, so there was all the city lights. You hear a countdown: Feuf, Vier, Drüü, Zwei, Eis and then you drop.

Metal map of Luzern

I love the organs in churches they are so pretty

Carnival

Trippy Mirror Selfie

Zermatt

I went to Zermatt the first weekend of my break. Zermatt is home of the Matterhorn. And yes, I'm talking about the Matterhorn in Switzerland, not the one at Disneyland. Anyways, we stayed there for three days. We did a lot of hiking. There's no better way to exercise than hiking in the Swiss mountains. I took so many pictures of the Matterhorn at every single angle I possibly could. It was just so beautiful I couldn't help it. We stopped by the museum where I got to learn a lot of background on the Matterhorn. I also went zip lining one day when I was down there. That was really fun. 

Switzerland in autumn is so pretty

Bridge we went on during our hike

Snow in October? What is this madness?

This chocolate Matterhorn was so cute that I didn't to eat it. Eventually I did and it was delicious

Zip Lining was really cool

Rheinfall

I went to Rheinfall I believe the second week of my holidays. Rheinfall is in Schaffhausen. It is home to the famous waterfall in Switzerland. I went with my hosts sister and her friend. It was a bit cold, but really pretty. I enjoyed it. We also came across and popcorn vending machine. That was very interesting. Afterwards, we went to my host sister's friend's house and watched some movies. It was a good day.

Genf

Two days later, I went to Genf with my my friend Catherine. Genf also known as Geneve is about a four hour train ride from where I live. I had to wake up super early, so that way i could spend the day there. I got up, bought some coffee and that pretty much helped me stay awake the whole four hour train ride. We finally got there but it was raining. We decided to make most of the day. We went to see the famous Jet d'Eau. While walking through the city, we found an market that sold American snacks so I picked some up some things for my host family to try. Then we tried to visit the U.N. building. However, we couldn't figure out where the entrance was, but we eventually stumbled across the Red Cross Museum. That was really cool.

Me feauturing the Jet d'Eud

Me featuring murals

This clock actually worked

It may look like I took this from inside the UN property, but in reality I took it through a fence

Add caption

Again, I really like church organs

Jura

This was the last trip I took before returning to school. This one was a great way to end the holidays. I went with my host family to Jura. Jura is a canton(a canton is basically like a state) in the French part of Switzerland. First, we took a train ride to Jura. Once, we got there we walked to a farm where we picked up the horse and stage coach that we rented. The plan was that we would explore Jura by stage coach and we would sleep in a farmer's barn for the night. Since Jura is in the French part of Switzerland, the farmers's houses we stayed at spoke only French. My host family all speak fluent french so they had no problem. Me on the other hand didn't understand too much of the dinner conversations. Those two years of French I took really didn't help me. Believe it or not I think this 

really helped me improve my German because most of my time I spoke German or at least attempted. Breakfast and dinners were funny because my family would translate what they were talking about from French to German, then if I still didn't understand they'd translate it from German to English.  The first farm we stayed at served us fondue for dinner. The second farm we stayed at had Emus, and they served us emu meat for dinner. At night, we slept in the farmers's barns in sleeping bags on straw. My host family wanted to ensure that I was warm so they gave me the warmest sleeping bag, plenty of blankets and I wore many layers.

On the Road Again

Fun fact: I kept warm by wearing two t shirts, a pullover, a jacket, leggings under my jeans, two pairs of socks, so I may have looked like a marshmallow but I was warm 

First time sleeping in straw

What's happening now?

So now I'm back in school. I have been for like the past two weeks I think. However, I do have big news. I'm going to France this Saturday! I'm going with my exchange program for a week. While I am there, I shall be learning about how my program started, I will be visiting the European Parliment, and I'll even get to go to Germany for a bit. Added bonus: I get to go to Europa Park.EuropaPark is an the biggest amusement park in Europe. Since I shall not be returning until the 7th of November I shall write a brand new May Monday on November 9th telling about my time away. I'm going to try to keep on track by being consistent in blogging again.  

Anyways I've got some homework to do so I have to go off now. Hope you all enjoy your week!

Until next time,

Tschüss,

-May

Day 39

Hello People of the World,

Happy May Monday! Today I was sitting during my free period thinking what I needed to put in my blog.  Then I started to think of the title of this site. I don't really know why I called it "A Day with May" if I usually talk about my whole week rather than just one day. If it was just one day, it's probably be really boring and short. I think when I started this I was more focused on sharing my story, and could really care less about the title. I just liked it because it rhymed. Anyway I just wanted to address that; I'm going to stop worrying about the name of the site now. Let's talk about what I've been up to.

The Search for Guitar Strings:

So recently my family lent me a classic guitar of a friend since I was sad that I had to leave my guitar back in California in order to give me more space for luggage. The guitar is in good shape, but it just needed some new strings. I remembered about a guitar shop I saw during my first days here. So one day after school I went with a friend to go find the store. We looked around for almost two hours, but never found it. It's okay though because we weren't really looking that hard. We would get distracted by all the cute little shops that we saw.

I really liked this weird looking foutain

Pretty houses with the church in the background

LOOK AT HOW BEAUTIFUL THIS CHURCH WAS

Last Day of Language School:

So last Wednesday was the last day of Language School.*tear tear* It was a really great day though. First in the morning session, we had to take a test in the morning which was sort of a drag. Then we still had like two hours to kill before the morning session was over. So we played games like: Pictionary, Concentration, and Charades. The teacher made us play the games in German since we were technically still in language school. At the beginning of the year our teacher promised us a "party" on the last day of school. His definition of party was to make Swiss cuisine together. Our language school happened to be taught at the same place they teach people how to cook, so we had access to a kitchen. We made a dish that is very popular here called Birchermüesli. It is like a yogurt mixed with milk and oatmeal and a variety of fruit. We also attempted to make Raclette which is a Swiss dish where you melt cheese and pour it over cooked potatoes. The only thing was I think our teacher forgot the thing that would melt the cheese, so instead we just ate potatoes with slices of cheese. After our meal, we took group photos, and we received our "diplomas". Basically they just said that we passed the class along with the result of our final test score. 

Swiss Cheese(left) and Birchermüesli(right)

It's a struggle to get everyone to look at the camera 

My class and I with our diplomas

Yay everyone is looking at the camera

So during dinner, a friend of mine suggested we go to Zürich when the class ended. I didn't really have any plans for the day, so I agreed. Zürich is such a beautiful city. I absolutely love it. We only stayed for a short time because the class ended later than it usually did because of all the goodbyes that needed to be said. I also had to be home by seven for dinner so we stayed in Zürich for about two hours. We almost missed our train that would get us home in time since we got so distracted by the beauty of Zürich, but after running in the train station we made it. Honestly making a train or bus you thought you were going to miss is the best feeling of accomplishment.

A statue in a park in Zürich

The Zürich train station

The Eschenberg Tower:

On Saturday I went out with my family to go see the Eschenberg tower that was in the woods of Winterthur. The German word for woods is Wald which sounds a lot like the German word for whale which is Wal. So when my family suggested we go to the woods, I thought they were suggesting to go to the whale. I was very confused since we were in Switzerland and there's no ocean, so no whales I didn't really mention this was why I was confused. They just saw by the look on my face I was confused.They then explained that were were going to the woods to go see the watch tower and have a little bonfire. The walk into the woods was hard because it was all uphill. Coming from the valley of California, I'm really not used to walking up and down hills all the time. Eventually we made it to the watch tower. It was really tall. I believe it was 30 meters which would be about 98 feet. In order to reach the top you would have to walk up 162 stairs(I counted). The view was amazing as you could imagine. It gave an overview of the city of Winterthur.

THE AMAZING VIEW TOTALLY WORTH THOSE 162 STAIRS

bad panorama of the view ft. my sister

The view down (honestly was so scared of dropping my phone)

The view from the bottom

Metal Swiss Flag

'Look, Simba. Everything the light touches is our kingdom. 

My sister and I at the top of the tower

The bonfire was really fun. I learned how to make an actual fire like how you would learn in like Boy Scouts. We roasted a type of Swiss sausage known as "Cervelat". It's honestly like the best thing ever. It was also my first time roasting sausages over a fire. We also roasted bread over fire which I didn;t really think was a thing until I saw it with my own eyes.

The Fire 

Cervelat

Me being very confused after being told you can roast bread

Roasting bread on the fire

 Upcoming Events:

This week is my first full week at the "Kantonsschule" which is basically normal school. Everything is taught in German besides English and Spanish. If you're wondering what classes I'm taking, I'm taking  are:German, English, Spanish, Biology, Chemistry, Physics,  Geography, History,Math P.E., and Art. My favourite subject right now is math because no matter where you go in the world, numbers never change. Of course, English is a close second.

I don't think I have big plans for the weekend, yet. I believe on Sunday I will be going with my brother to a horse jumping competition which should be fun. Next week I will be going with my class for a study week where we will be studying German and English literature, so that should be fun as well. Then after that is a two week vacation. The first week I will probably hang out with some friends. The second week I know that I will be joining my family on a trip by buggy through some parts of Switzerland which I'm looking forward too.

Well I better get going to bed now. Hope you all have a great Monday and enjoy the rest of your week.

Until next time,

Tschüss

-May