Herbstfeiren and I finally know how bells are made

I just read through my last post, and it occurred to me that I should probably proofread these things before I post them on the internet. I'm just going to claim that my English is going because I only speak German here (haha jokes) and that is why I can't figure out how to use the correct "your".

Moving on, the last two weeks I haven't had school because it's Herbstferien (or fall break) for my area of Germany. The first week I went on a cruise with my host family, which was absolutely amazing. It was a cruise around the Mediterranean, and every day we got to see a different city. We saw six cities- Marseille, Barcelona, Palma De Majorca, Rome, Florence and Pisa. It was totally amazing, and I loved all of the cities. I think Rome was my favorite because I want to be an archaeologist when I grow up, and seeing all the ruins was one of the coolest things ever. Here are some pictures that I took. I took like 300 pictures in the whole week so it took forever to pick out which ones I wanted to post on here.

Day One: Marseille

A little market in Marseille

The view from the Notre Dame 

The Notre Dame Bascilica

Barcelona!

My first Gaudi building

And the Sagrada Familia

The Catedral in Majorca

More Catedral in Majorca

The Colosseum!

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St. Peters Basilica

The Panthenon

The Trevi Fountain

An archaeological dig site we stumbled upon 

Cathedral in Florence

Bridge in Florence

And I couldn't go to Pisa without taking one of these pictures. It was raining really hard, hence the poncho

After we got back I still had another week with no school so I had a lot of time to do stuff with my friends and just kind of chill. I went into Munster with my friend one day, and we found a knitting store, so now I'm learning to knit which I'm very excited about. I had to ask the woman at the knitting store many questions about what yarn and needles to buy, so I know more knitting vocabulary in German than I ever thought I would need to.

My German is ok, but it's not anywhere near perfect, and I have trouble understanding people when they talk really fast or use big words. I have found though that people are so nice and helpful when they find out I don't speak that much German, and especially when they see my trying to speak it instead of just using English. Some of the best moments are when I successfully do something in German, like buy knitting needles or mail a box or order something with no sauce, and people are always so ready to help me get there. It's been one of my favorite things about exchange so far.

Wednesday I spent the day with friends, and then Thursday my host mom had of off work so the two of us spent the day together. She randomly found the Bell Museum a few towns over from us, so the two of us decided to go there in between getting the winter tires put on all the cars (a German tradition). I love tiny museums like that, and this one was actually pretty cool. They had so many bells, even some really old ones, and I got to learn about how a bell was made, which was interesting and not at all what I thought it was, not that I had spent a lot of time thinking about how bells are made, but still.

Look at all those bells

This is how bells are actually made

Friday I went with my liaison to see Finding Dory (for the third time) in Dulmen. It was the first time I had used the train by myself. Mostly I bike or use the bus, so I was very excited about my first foray into solo train travel. That is until I got stranded for 45 minutes at a train station 30 minutes drive from my town because my train got canceled. It turned out fine, my host dad and some of his neighbors came and picked me up and we all went to McDonald's (it was a very weird outing), but the whole incident forced to face the cold hard reality- even German public transportation isn't reliable.

All in all I really enjoyed the whole concept of a two week break two months into school, and I 10/10 would recommend it to American school systems.

So next weekend is my first AFS sleep away camp. I'm going to take the train up to Paderborn (that is not how you spell it) and spend the weekend with all the other exchange students from my area. I'm pretty excited and I'll write more about it next week, but I have to go to sleep because I have a math exam tomorrow first thing. Yay!