This morning I had forgotten that one of my classes had been canceled so I woke up at 6:45 only to realise that I now had narly two and a half hourse before school started. Therefore, I hvaea bit of extra tie to do some writing. on Saturday I went to a christmas party for the Karneval people with my host family. It was in a bakery and ended up being super fun. The teenagers all sat at a table towards teh back and played poker. One of the male karneval members dressed up as St. Nikolous during one point in the evening. He read outnames of all the families there and we all had to go up to the front of the room to hear what he had to say about us. The costume he ... read more

The Christmas market is finally open! Although I suppose I shouldn't really say finally because it is only about two hours until thanksgiving day is completely over and actually the christmas Market has already been open nearly a week. Regardless though I find it to be an absolutely marvelous tradition and I love the atmostphere. this is the first year ina long time that I have hactually felt like using the phrase 'Christmas Spirit'. I'm totally stoked for Christmas this year, no joke. It gets dark very early so going for a walk at five in the aternoon is usually done under an entirely black sky. However, the Christmas lights draped across every street are spektacular. A lot of money and effort was pur into dolling Aachen up for the Christmas season. It has to be ... read more

I got to bake cookies for my Germany Course yesterday evening. Our teacher told us to translate a traditional recipe out of each of our own countries into Germany and then bring it to class for the others to try. This excercise seems fairly dull until you consider thatour class consisted of natural born cities from Brazil, France, Spain, Greece, Italy, Thailand, China, and Korea. That truly was a prominant culture lesson. The Italian guy in our class discovered Nusspli (similar to Nutella, but made directly in Aachen) The French guy had brought it along to spread on the crepes that he had made. However, Paulo, the Italian, felt the need to put it on everything. Including the quark filled omlet things that one of the Spanish ladies brought and the chocolate chip cookies that I ... read more

Let me just quickly tell you about my day. This week is Praktikum. Last week was Praktikum as well. This is a two week time period were allt he eligable students in the eleventh grade go to work in place of school. I, being an exchange student, stayed behind with a few other kids who had either already done Praktikum at a different school or couldn't find any place open for them to work. So for this period of time the remaining 17 or so 11th graders have a different class plan that allows them to do some catching up. In English especialls. This first week we had 6 English classes planned. Normally there are only two. Thankfully though Kyle and I were excused from english classes for these two weeks because there were so many ... read more

The past two weeks have been very uneventful. Apart from my trip to the North Sea I have not left Aachen. Most of the free days were spent doing nothing more than sitting around in my room and reading books that I shouldn't have bought when I already had too many to begin with. Partick came over a few times just to sit around and visit or play cards with us. Today, though, we went to a waterpark in Würselen called Aquana. It was totally freezing in there. And one funny thing about hot tubs in Europe: they are not even remotely close to being hot. We stayed there for six hours. There were two slides, one was for inner tubes and the other...was dull to an extend one never before thought possible. There were lights ... read more