On a sidenote...

Das ist Christoph und Helena.

So recently, my host family from Germany started emailing me. They finally got their internet working and the mother has been keeping in touch with me within the past couple of weeks. The funny thing is that I really have to concentrate on the messages now and read them several times before I can truly understand what is going on. I haven't spoken much German in about a year now or so and it's kind of difficult. I still can kind of read for context if I don't know exactly what is going on in her emails. And of course, I must respond but now that is taking me a little longer than it used to in order to come up with appropriate responses. I'm starting to forget some of the simpler phrasiology and idioms and whatnot. Guess it's time for another trip to Deutschland! Pictured above are the two children of Marianne von Auer. The girl really got a kick out of having an American living with her. I overheard her one day when the doorbell rang when she said to her friend, "Do you want to play together or do you want to play with the American?" hahahaha.....too funny. She and I really ended up getting along quite well. It was hard at first because I wasn't used to hearing children speak German--they speak a lot faster and there's a lot more slang used when they speak. But eventually, she and I were able to work together and we started making up games together to play outside and stuff.

The boy was a bit shy though. He and I didn't interact as much. I offered him help in his English homework but he always said that he could do it. There's a man, for ya. ;) I think I did help him on some geography and other important landmarks dealing with the USA though. He would help me sometimes with my German grammar homework just to make sure my verbs and prepositions worked out correctly. The mother is originally from Belgium and so her first language was French but she's been in Germany for so long that she's starting to forget her French but at the same time, she's still not so sure in the German language either. It's kind of funny and so her son corrects her a lot of times, I guess. Anyway, just thought I'd share something totally different. I think it's cool that I'm still keeping in touch with the von Auers--I think I might be the only one who still talks to their host family 3 years down the road.