My Blog

Weekly Blog 24

Sun, 11 Apr 2010 19:39:21 +0200

Easter Break has come to an end and I’m going back to school. It was a lot of fun spending yet another holiday in Germany.
I spent most of my break at the Vacation Bible School that I helped out with. I was one of the 4 leaders for the 1st grade group. They were really fun and we didn’t have any problems with them for the entire week.

The theme was “Klein aber Wichtig” or Small but important. It was about Samuel’s mother and how David was crowned king. And to top it off, I finally know The Lord’s Prayer in German.

A couple of times during our break, some friends and I rode our bikes out of town to a little hut where we’d make a fire. I ended up finding some land snails. One of them is in the picture above. They are really big! Escargot!

Here’s a picture of the park we went to.

Nightview of Bietigheim-Bissingen.

Well, not a lot went on other than those two things. My exams are coming up and I can’t wait till they’re over. I have German next Wednesday, English next Friday and Math the following Tuesday. After my exams are over, I won’t have to go to school as often. I plan on visiting other places in Germany and Europe.
The first week of May, my class and I are taking a trip to Berlin. It should be sweet! The following week I’m riding my bike with my host-dad, host-sister, and a friend of mine, to Munich where we’ll attend a festival. That’s 4 hours away by car! After that I have a week of school and then vacation already! We get two weeks off for the “Pfingsten” or The Pentecost.
June is a pretty empty month. I have one final oral exam about the life in West Germany, and other than that, nothing else. I plan on visiting Italy, Vienna, Prague, and some other places, if that works out.
The second weekend in July my host-family and I are going to “Der König der Löwen” or The Lion King musical in Hamburg. We’ll be there the entire weekend and I can’t wait to see it! Shortly afterwards, my two older sisters from America are going to visit me for a couple of weeks. We are planning on visiting my cousin in Tübingen, seeing the most famous castle in Germany “Schloss Neuschwanstein”, visiting Munich, Stuttgart, and even Paris! Oui oui!
The first two weeks of August I’m going to Romania with my host-dad and host-brother. We’ll get back on the 12th and I fly out for America on the 20th of August!

Thanks for reading,
McKinly

Weekly Blog 23

Wed, 31 Mar 2010 14:07:57 +0200

Finally Easter break! I was supposed to write this on Sunday, but I had to study for the 3 tests that were coming up.
On Monday I had a test in German over a book called ‘Bronsteins Kinder’ or ‘Bronstein’s Children’. It was pretty difficult but I tried. The book is 302 pages long, and they say that for the exams, you should read the book 1 or 2 times. I’ve read it only once, but we don’t have exams until April 21st.
Tuesday was our test in Physics. The entire year in all of our science classes (Physics, Chemistry, Biology) we’ve just been working on projects about renewable energy and different theories such as the Theory of Evolution. It was quite easy. The questions were just about, ‘Where does coal come from?’ ‘What is a nuclear power plant and how does it operate?’ Simple things like that.
Wednesday I had a test in Math over everything that we’ve worked on this year. I think it went well! The good thing is that we are allowed to use our book with all the formulas in it because in a society with all of our technology, it’s unlikely that we’d ever be without a formula book in the internet or something. And the important thing is that you know where to put which numbers in a formula.
Tomorrow I have a meeting for the Vacation Bible School thing that I’ll be doing next week for Easter. We have Easter break for a week and a half.
Thanks for reading,
McKinly

Weekly Blog 22

Sun, 21 Mar 2010 17:30:23 +0100

The last two weeks have been quite fun. Last Monday I gave a presentation about solar energy in Technology class. It went very well and I ended up getting an A- on it! I spoke for 15 minutes and gave a PowerPoint all in German.
In the last blog I mentioned that Saskia, my host-sister, was in Spain on foreign exchange. Well this week her host-brother from Spain came here to Germany to foreign exchange too. He is very nice and my ‘Spanish skills’ that I learned in the States aren’t enough for me to understand much of what he says. Luckily he speaks mostly English.
The other weekend I went to a magic show with a friend of mine from school. It was really amazing what the magician could do. They even said he is one of the top ten magicians in the world! He ended up asking the audience who had the longest trip here. I raised my hand and said I was from the States and I won a free drink.
Not too much has been going on here. Well, I guess the weather is great now. It’s in the 60°s F!

Until next time,
McKinly

Weekly Blog 21

Mon, 8 Mar 2010 17:41:09 +0100

This week started off pretty normal, but then it got quite interesting. From eating kangaroo, to our entire Ludwigsburg county shutting down and locking all of the schools with the students, including me, in one of them.
Monday ended up being quite normal. In technology class, I guess I’d call it shop now, we are fixing up an ’89 Hercules mofa. A mofa is faster than a moped, yet slower than a motorcycle. It looks really nice and it doesn’t seem like we’ll have to do a lot of work on it.
On Tuesday Saskia, my host-sister, got home from her class trip to Spain with her Spanish class. She had a lot of fun, but she was only there for a week and she said she wanted to go back. I also attended the Children Bible Week meeting once again since I’m a volunteer and we need a little training. I’m going to be in a child’s play playing as the father of Samuel from the Bible. It should be interesting.
Wednesday I spent most of my time after school calling British Airways to confirm my flight back to the States on August the 20th. Everything’s confirmed now after being on hold for about 30 minutes.
Thursday was a very exciting day here in the county of Ludwigsburg (Landeskreis Ludwigsburg). As was walking up to my school, I saw a police car parked in front. In Germany it isn’t normal to see a police car or policemen just driving around patrolling, but on Thursday it was different.
I walked into the school and then some teachers came up to me and told me to rush upstairs to my room. Once I got there, our English teacher arrived just like normal. We heard some over the intercom (which ended up being a certain coded message) and then our teacher walked to the door and locked us all in the room.
For 2 hours we were locked in there unable to go to the bathroom or eat, luckily I didn’t need to do either. We started getting texts and phone calls from parents saying this and that, you know how rumours spread, about a school shooting. Some people were crying and once we were finally let out of our rooms, we were able to eat and use the bathrooms. Some people’s parents were waiting at the entrance and they picked their kids up. At this time, we still didn’t know what happened.
After the food break, we went back in and continued school. Our math teacher explained to us that a drunk person with a pellet gun was walking around at a train station that happens to be near a school. He was having problems with his girlfriend and he was on his way to Ludwigsburg, our county seat, where the police ended up arresting him. Luckily no one was hurt.
It was a little over-exaggerated for our county to shut down all the schools, but it could’ve saved our lives. Last year around this time they had a school shooting in this state that ended up killing some people. So I guess they were prepared.
On Saturday I went to eat some Chinese. My friend and I had to wait an extra 30 minutes, even though we had already reserved a table. The Chinese food isn’t the same in Germany and the USA. It’s similar, but here you can eat kangaroo, which is a really red meat, and you don’t usually get fortune cookies. Everything tasted good though.
On Sunday, my host-parents got back from Austria, where they went skiing. They brought back some horse meat and some other sausage links. It was my first time eating horse too.
Well, the crazy week is over and now it’s time to start the new one. Who knows what it will bring?
Gruß,
McKinly

Weekly Blog 20

Sun, 28 Feb 2010 19:31:39 +0100

The entire week was in the 50s°F! All of our snow is melted and the streets are dry here in Baden-Württemberg, the state I’m living in. I’ve been wearing t-shirts in school, and putting away my winter clothes.
On Monday, my host-family and I made hamburgers to test for my birthday party that I celebrated on Saturday. Everything went well with cooking, but the taste isn’t like it is back home in Iowa.
I’m going to take part in a vacation Bible school during Easter break. It’s called Kinder Bibel Woche, or literally Children Bible Week. As you can tell by the name, it’s a week long. I’ll be helping out by teaching the kids about this year’s theme ‘Klein, aber wichtig’ ‘Small, but important’. It’s about Samuel from the Bible and about how children are sometimes picked on for being small.
I decided to celebrate my birthday with friends on Saturday. It was a lot of fun. I borrowed my host-brother Sven’s Iowa and USA flags and decorated the party room in the basement with an American theme. We had hamburgers, fries, cheese cake, muffins and donuts to eat.

These are some of the presents I got. The first picture is of me blowing out candles on a cheese cake, and the items in the second picture from left to right are; beer glass from Stuttgart, German cookbook with special recipes from the area I’m living in Swabia, a book of things made in Germany, a dictionary of teenager slang in Austria, Switzerland and Germany, a very small, yellow dictionary of Swabian word translations from Schwäbisch in German, (Schwäbisch is a dialect in Germany and the people who speak it are everywhere around me; teachers, friends, strangers...), the next gift is an Oktoberfest 1 Liter beer mug, a Stuttgart mousepad and finally a Germany scarf.
Today it was still in the 50s°F, but we had some high winds. A storm coming from France was passing by. I think it hit just south of where I live.
Well, on to another week. I’ll be coming home in mid-August.

Thanks for reading,
McKinly