Happy November!

Yippee! Only 10 days until my birthday :)

Today I slept in a bit, did laundry, finished an English presentation, organized over 1,000 pictures from my phone to my laptop, and did a little bit of history homework. Then I went and hung out with Lara and took pictures at sunset, which turned out really cool. 

Before dinner Lara and I "carved" Rüben (turnips!). Apparently it is a tradition here to carve not pumpkins, but turnips. (Also, it's not to celebrate Halloween, but all saints day, I think. Don't quote me on that. I'm tired, ok?) However, they're not carved like we carve pumpkins. You hollow out the turnip, then carefully peel off the skin in the places where you want the light to shine through a bit more. It's really neat.

Happy Fall!

Today I went to school and got two tests back, a Physics and a History test. History I only passed:/, but Physics I got a better grade!:) yay for knowing stuff!

Then I bought an iTunes card so I could buy the new Taylor Swift album, not realizing that to use Swiss francs in the iTunes Store I have to change the country so I can't pay with dollars. So that was annoying. Oh well...

Then I did homework and played piano. So exciting. I'm so happy fall is finally here though! Happy fall!:)

Friday! Week 8!

Today I went exploring in the "Alt Stadt", the old part of Zurich with aunt Claudia. It was pretty fun. Did you know the first mention of the city of Zurich is on the gravestone of a one year, 5 month and 5 day old boy in the year 200 A.D.? I didn't.

Lara and I just watched movies until 3 am again. Yay!

Long day:)

Today I had school until 5:15. It was super fun because our history teacher is doing a big project week with another class, so we had two hours to eat lunch, which was cool. I also did my English presentation, and it went awesome! I talked for the whole period, and everyone wanted more details about what I think are the weirdest things. A big deal was the fact that I put a picture of me in a tree stand at age 12 with a gun, although I said I never shot anything. The whole class thought that was the bomb diggity. 

An interesting question someone asked me was if it was weird to listen to music and understand the words. Here everyone listens to exactly the same stuff as we do in the U.S. (with a few Swiss or German artists mixed in) and they usually don't understand the words in English songs, so to them it's strange you actually comprehend what the artists are saying. 

Tomorrow after school Lara and I are going to the west part of Switzerland for the weekend! (Lara's godmother lives there and invited us!) I'm really excited! :) 

Woo for almost another week of school being over! Time flies when you're having fun... 

Grades

Today we got our test results back for English and math. Our class average for math was 3.4 (on a scale of 1-6, which is how grading is done here), which is pretty bad. No one understood what the math teacher was even talking about during most of the lessons. I had a "bad" grade, but if the grades were based off of class ranking, I would have definitely gotten a way better grade. Basically, 3/4 of the people failed miserably and 1/4 got lucky and passed.

My English test was much better. I got a 5.5. :)

Tomorrow I get to sleep in because our history teacher is doing a "Projekts Woche" (project week) with another grade. And after school Lara and Aunt Claudia and I are going shopping for winter boots. Yippee!

Monday.

Today I got up early and went to school, the usual. Here, have a random picture I tried to take of Lara on the tram:)

I discovered during history that in German saltwater is called salt water (Salzwasser), but freshwater is called Süßwasser, which means sweet water. My friend looked at me all weird when I started randomly laughing. She didn't think it was all that funny, but to me it was. 

Yay for sleeping in tomorrow!!

First day of school!

Well I survived my first day! (Yay!) 

I had to get up at 6:15 am to catch the train at 7:15 with my cousin and her friends. We got to the school around 7:30, when I promptly got completely confused and had to go to the office to ask where my first class was... So that was fun. 

Something that I noticed right away was that not a single soul talked or whispered or giggled when the teacher was talking (at least at the beginning of the day), and that the teacher was strict. Well, not exactly "strict", but he meant business. 

I technically had German first, but we introduced ourselves and figured out who say where and what was expected of us and so on. Then we went to Geography, which sounds super interesting. It's not really just naming countries from what I can tell, it's more learning about different countries and things like that but we'll see. Then we went to French. That was a wild ride. I understood about two words because I have 1 year of French whereas the rest of my classmates have 4 and the teacher talked a million miles per hour (or at least seemed to). After class I talked to her and she said she'd give me a different book so I can still learn stuff this year-yay! Then we had Physics. I feel like Physics is going to be one of my favorite classes, just because already on the first day we watched a really fascinating short video on comets. Plus the teacher seemed really easygoing. Then we had a lunch break-an entire hour. It was so nice to be able to walk down to the supermarket, buy food, and sit and eat and talk instead of just eating and running to the next class. After lunch, we had Spanish, which I think will also be awesome, because everyone is starting with zero Spanish experience, so I fit right in.  The teacher was very humorous. Lastly, we had "Geschichte" (which literally translated means "stories", so I was confused what it even was) which is History. It was ok. 

After school I had voice lessons. Of course I forgot the name of the teacher once I walked into the music building so I couldn't find her room for a while. Then I finally figured out where I was supposed to be. She said hello to me and then had me sing bent over, with my mouth nearly closed, and not breathing in before singing for the entire half hour.

After that, I wandered down to the tram station and hopped on a tram going back home. Or so I thought. See, to get back home the quickest and most logical way, I would take a tram and then a train. However, I took the tram on the other side of the street, meaning it went in the opposite direction. I was blissfully unaware until about 3 stops later when my stop wasn't showing up on the board. Thankfully, all roads/trams/buses lead to the Hauptbahnhof (main train station in Zurich), so I just took a slightly more roundabout way home. 

Altogether, I think it was a pretty fantastic first day, and I'm super excited for the rest of the year!

Language class day 3

Today I got up early again and went to Zurich for my language class. We sat in class for 4 long hours, then we were freed.

One of my friends wanted Mcdonalds, but we couldn't figure out how on earth to get there. We tried for about 10 minutes to plan out a route using the trams, then we gave up and just decided to hop on a tram and go wherever it would take us. We ended up passing a Mcdonalds anyways, so that worked out perfectly. We also stopped at Starbucks because why not.

Then we were bored, so we wandered over to what is called the "Landesmuseum", which is a museum about Swiss history. 

There was a bobsled that you were allowed to climb into, so my friend and I decided to...

There was some pretty cool stuff there:

So that was my day! :)