Wonderful Wizard of Deutschland: Onions and Minions

Hallo
It's been a little over a week and I've been through a lot.
Emotionally, it's been a roller coaster. Sometimes I feel, "Wow, this is so epic!" and then sometimes I feel like shit, to put it bluntly. But I can't blame my host family because they are the best. I still feel a little awkward around my host sister but everyone else is swell. My host mom is super and my host dad helps me with homework and my host brother and I play chess, computer games, and watch videos. But then my host sister, I only see her when she comes down to eat dinner. The rest of the time she's in her room or working. At the dinner table she speaks only German and then when the whole table gets going I'm just kinda on the side not really understanding what they say and it makes me feel like I use up space.

I can't participate in the conversation because I only understand phrases (which, by the way, is a huge improvement from when I got here) but still can't exactly say anything coherent. Due to my frustration sometimes I feel like I hear way too much German and read a book in English to keep myself slightly sane.

But I try insanely hard to work my way to the surface again. For example yesterday I did not seclude myself no matter how bad I really wanted to go to my room and sleep to forget my troubles. Rather I stayed with my host mom and made a new plan to get to school and she made me laugh incredibly hard when she called my friend Ploi, Plo.

Another thing I did was hang out with friends. If you ever go on an exchange program ask for permission to go out. The first few days I'd be the last to leave and the first to get here, so it was very lonely sometimes. But my host mom told me, "Go out with you're friends. Don't come home right away, you'll be by yourself for too long." So I did just that. When my friends and I get out from Sprachkurs we walk to the Marktplatz, which is this shopping center and we just loiter and talk and laugh and eat. Friends include: Ploi, Ana Maria, Laura, Tom(ohiro), John, Kevin, and Javier. There's also David but he goes home.

Today Tom offered me a drink of his beer and so I decided to try it. Tastes like scheisse. But I suppose I'll get used to it, since drinking is a social activity. I ordered a sandwich in German at Subway... but I did use some pointing.

But as for how I'm getting along, for the most part well except for those random spurts of "I feel lost," moments. Also I met my liaison Lea, and she's super cool. Since my German is crap and her English isn't so good we speak in Spanish. Haha, she went with AFS to Costa Rica and got back this summer. She offered for me to go to her house to ride horses and she goes to the same school I'll be going to!

And now, enough blabber and some pictures!