Happy Halloween!

Today was moving day today, and Halloween! My old host mom drove me to new new host family, who literally live two blocks from my old house. Today went really well, I got to unpack, and for dinner we made pumpkin soup - it was delish! Surprisingly I fit all my stuff into the bags I originally brought to Germany! I'm pretty proud :)

 Here's my stuff.

And my new room!

Until today I didn't fully realize that it was Halloween. Tonight is the first night that I have seen jack-ö-lanterns. Unlike back in the states there were no decorations on the houses, no lights or zombies or fake cobwebs. Of course it is celebrated, but just not as much as it is back home. I think we have had two trick-or-treaters come to the door tonight, thats weird for me!

Paris in three days <3

Food

It is finally fall!

I was talking to a really close friend the other night and in the middle of describing some story I stopped and I realized that it didn't feel right. I didn't really feel like me. I panicked a little bit, my voice didn't sound right, and what was coming out of it wasn't what old Rose would be talking about. I could have used every word in the English dictionary and my friend still wouldn't have really completely understood.

The Spree

Before I left for this exchange I knew what rebounds had said, how it was hard to go back home because no one would understand what an entirely different person they are. I understand that now. For the first two months I think I felt like the same person just living some four thousand miles east of where she used to live. Now it's still me but.. different.

I had Quark (pronounced: ka-vaack) on Friday. To me it tasted like a sweeter jogurt with raspberries (or some red berry), and every time I would say that they were like "no, its different" but couldn't actually tell me specifics on how. Maybe it's a secret recipe...

This is Quark with some red fruit.. mmmyummy

On Tuesday Paola, Andrea, rebekah, and I came to my house after school and made käse kuchen - cheese cake. It was Andrea's recipe and it was amaaaazing! I brought it to school for the next few days for us to munch on. Although there was Quark in it so I'm not sure if it's a German recipe or not.

The Käse Kuchen

Andrea & I eating it (:

This coming Thursday my distrikt leaves for Paris! We will drive there in two buses. My distrikt and a few people from other districts are going as well, over 90 people total! We will have to sleep on the bus because we will arrive in Paris at 8am or so an have a full day ahead of us! I looked at our itinerary and it sounds like we are going to the Louvre, Eifel Tower, Montmarte, Moulon Rouge (?), and Versailles. I went to Paris four years ago and I am interested to see if I remember everything we will be seeing! I hope it won't feel like a been there - done that situation.. Well, I do know for sure that it will be a completely different experience than last time!

This is one of the two instant coffee machines in the school.

We have no snack vending machines :(

But we do have a cafeteria that has forks and knives and real plates!

Serving fries and currywurst, as well as sandwhiches and donuts

and a ton of other stuff but its pommes all the way for me! 

A Little of This, A Little of That.

Today is Saturday and I am very tired. Last night I went to a birthday party of another exchanger. I didn't really know what to expect and I don't think that the birthday girl did either. Turns out her mom took it more seriously than we thought and when we got there she had the table all made up with fancy plates and napkins. The that food we had was similar those Pudgy Pies we would cook over fires back home except these were the fancy version sans meat and inside.

On the way home I noticed that magically overnight the trees had shed another layer of leaves onto the ground. Autumn seems to be taking forever. I feel like in Grand Marais fall went a lot quicker than this. Back home it's like one minute the leaves are green, then a startling array of reds and yellows and oranges and then just like that they're all on the ground. Yet here, to me it still looks like summer outside. The leaves on the trees are still a deep green, the sun is shining. Only difference is that it's now getting chillier.

I realize that I haven't been extremely diligent about posting in a while. Oops! Well to begin, my school and the rest of the state of Brandenburg had their two-week fall holiday during the first two weeks of Oktober. For the first week of break my host mom, dad, and I drove 6 hours to an island in Denmark called Römö to visit my host mom's sister and brother-in-law. Römö is populated somewhere close to 95% with Germans so you could pay with Euros and speak German and still be understood everywhere.  The beach on the island Römö was really something else. It went so far out into the ocean it was incredible. You could drive your car way out there. The shells were present in the hundreds, thousands, etc. There were also dead clear jellyfish that washed up on shore the siye of dinner plates. For being called jelly fish they were still pretty firm.

On the second or third day there we went inland to a town that I do not remember the name of. There was a market going on that day (so it must have been Sunday I guess) and there were heaps of straw all over the cobblestone roads from what I assumed was a festival the night before.It was very cool but every time that I heard Danish my brain would try and interpret German and Danish just sounded like crazy.

The next week I was able to go to Berlin a few times before school started again. Berlin really is such an amazing place full of incredible new things, history, opportunities, a vast variety of cultures and languages. Back home in Grand Marais we don't have homeless people and when I first came to Germany I wasn't used to seeing.. Im not quite sure how to phrase it... I'm not used to seeing that level of poverty that is present. I think that in the 80 days I've been here I have already just started to blur it from my vision, ignore it. If I could give an euro to every homeless person I see begging for money, or to every s-bahn musician, or to every young child or pregnant woman that asked me if I speak English, I would be very broke right now. It makes me so sad. I wonder "how did you get here?", "where are your parents?". What is their story? What are their lives like? What is so terrible in this world that they would have to resort to doing this? It makes me feel so selfish for having food in my stomach and wasting my money on stupid stuff like postcards and eis when they sleep in the corners of train stations at night.

On a happier note, I'm an Aunt again! My sister had a baby girl two days ago. Her name is Autumn Brule and I am so excited to see her beautiful face in 9 months (:  I thought that it felt weird when my school had homecoming last weekend. I had that weird feeling like it wasn't actually happening for real because I wasn't like, there. It just felt so weird, like I should be there with my friends with our dresses and stressing over homecoming dates and eyeshadow colors and deciding where to eat dinner. But hearing about my new niece was definately way weirder by a longshot.

In two weeks from now I will be in Paris! I am so excited because Paris will be incredible and I love my other exchangers to death and so it will all-in-all be amazing! I think that this last week I had a little “click” with the German Language. I couldn't tell you exactly how I am better or specifically which words I now know, but it's all of a sudden easier to understand and it just seems more natural to speak. I have also been trying to perfect my German accent when I speak Englisch. I am told that it sounds like a Russian/French/German mix but I think it sounds super cool. I was at a friends house this morning and she was talking to a friend on skype and I pretended to be her German friend and he totally fell for it and it was hilarious(:

That's all!