First Day of School

So, as the title of this post suggests, today was my first day of school! Yesterday, my host family ad I went in to the school to talk to my teachers, and I got my schedule and books and so I was all set for school the next day. At 6;15 I woke up and showered, and then I ate breakfast with my host family. During breakfast, my host parents gave me a giant Schultute. For those of you who don't know, a schuletute is a German tradition for the first day of school. Each kid gets a cone that they bring to school, and they are supposed to share it with other kids to help them make friends. It's super cute to see the little kids with their cones, but thankfully my host family didn't make me bring mine to school because I think that would have been embarrassing.

Once I got to school, I found my art class pretty successfully  (I'm pretty proud of myself) and I sat down. I met a really nice girl in my art class who pretty much hooked me up for the rest of the day with someone to walk me from class to class. She even added me to the gorup message for our grade, which was super awesome. I added a picture of the icon our our group message, to try and show you how much dabbing has infiltrated Europe.
                                                                
After my art class, I had gym (Sport in German). It was just as mediocre as in America, and I even got hit in the face with a ball, which is typical of my performance in American gym class as well. After gym, I actually met this girl who had gone on exchange to America last year, and the two of us have a bunch of classes together, so I stuck with her for the rest of my day. We went to the Backerei for lunch after English class and I got a sandwich and an Italian ice type thing for only 1,20 euro, which was very exciting for me. We got of early today because of the heat, so I didn't have physics (it's about 90 degrees here) and we don't have afternoon classes tomorrow or Thursday. So my host Dad just picked me up after I ate lunch. It was a pretty good day!

There are some major differences between American and German schools that I noticed my first day, most of which I actually really like. The first one is that you can leave school whenever you don't have class. There is a Backerei and a Pizza/Doner place right across the street, so most kids go there, but we could potentially go home for lunch and come back, if we wanted too. That's the other big difference. My lunch is now almost an hour, which is awesome compared to my 22 minute lunch at home. In addition to that, I have at least a 10 minute break in between each class, and we can go get food then too, if we want. German schools also work on block scheduling, so I have 10 classes, but I only take 3 or 4 a day, which I'm not sure how much I like yet.

Today was also my first German class at the Volkshule. This is sort of like a community center, and anyone can take classes there. They offer a ton of classes and they are really cheap, and I think it's a really awesome idea. The class is pretty cool because it's a bunch of people who recently immigrated to Germany. Most of them are from Poland, but there is also a couple from Afghanistan, a woman from Bangladesh, and A woman from Mexico. It's kind of cool to meet a whole new set of people that I wouldn't have met otherwise.

That's it for now. I'll try and start updating more on Sunday night from now on. This week I have my AFS "Survival Camp" on Sunday, and so my next post will probably be something about that.