Quick Update!

I'm really sorry I haven't been on this lately, really. But I've been veeery busy doing exchange-related things... and I still have soo much to do! I even wonder if these 17 days I've left in Mexico are enough.


First of all, we received our exchange student Aléxia about 10 days ago! She's from Brazil and she's really nice! It's really fun to host someone because that way you get to learn a lot from another culture (even if it's similar to your own!) and some words in another language! I don't know about other countries, but here in Mexico, if you want to go on exchange with Rotary you need to host an exchange student. Some of you may think that's wrong because we're not volunteering to host, but we're more obliged to do it. But we're not. Actually most of us -if not all of us- are really happy to do it. I mean, to be honest, I don't think if I wasn't going to Germany my family would've been hosting, but we don't regret it and I don't think we ever will! Anyway, if you're thinking of hosting for a year, semester, summer or whatever.. DO IT! It's a really amazing experience, in which you learn and teach at the same time! (And I've been hosting for a little more than a week! haha :P)


Moving on to another thing: I GOT MY VISA!! I'm still happy and excited about it, even if I got it 2 weeks ago, but it's awesome because I'm already legally allowed to live in Germany! And it looks great in my passport haha I still can't believe it!


I got my itinerary too! I leave on the 4th of September, which I already knew but now that I have reserved my tickets, I can make the countdown official: seventeen days! Or in another words SIEBENZEHN TAGE! :D I'll fly with Lufthansa from Mexico City to Frankfurt and there I take another flight to München. Wow I really can't believe that in a little more than 2 weeks I'll be taking those flights and saying Auf Wiedersehen to Mexico for a year.. it's still so surreal. I'll probably start to believe it when I say goodbye to my family in the airport (I would loove to skip that part because I really hate goodbyes). I hope that day comes quickly, though. I've been waiting for it for years and it's FINALLY coming true! :D I've been reading a lot of blogs and almost everyone is leaving on these days, if not they've been in their host countries for days (or weeks!) already. Even some exchangers going to the same district I am have already left!


And today all of my best friends gave me a surprise going away... lunch? Haha, it wasn't a party but we went to Xochimilco, which is a place, here in Mexico City where there are canals, that actually were a lake before, but the aztecs built chinampas (artificial floating land on which they used to grow crops) so they're now just canals, and there are the typical trajineras (boats) where there are tables, so we ate typical Mexican food -such as quesadillas and tlacoyos- for lunch while we enjoyed the trip through the canals :) It was really fun, and a very good way to say goodbye to my country.

Anyway, I hope I can keep you updated during the next days as the date of my departure gets closer, I'll try I promise!

Bis dann!

Deutsche Musik ♪

Okay. First of all, as I said on my last post, my German sucks so I don't even know if the title of the post is well written. :/

But anyways, I never said this but I love music. I mean, I'm not a musician or anything but I just love listening to it! I also love foreign languages. So what can be better than listening to music in other languages? :D

Here's my first look into German music:

The song's called 'Symphonie' by Silbermond, a German band. I've heard some other songs by them but this one's my favorite so I posted it. I wanted to post the official video of the song, but I couldn't find it. :/

So, as my poor German slowly improves, I start to understand some words, even some sentences! :D But here you can find the lyrics with transaltion.

It was a short post, but I hope you enjoyed the song. :)

Die - Das - Der ?

Deutsch. Alemán. Alemão. Allemand. Tyska. Whatever they call it in your language it means the same: German: a really beautiful language spoken in Germany, Austria, Switzerland, Italy, Liechtenstein, etc. And a really difficult language to learn! At least that's my opinion. I've been learning it for about 4 months by myself on Livemocha, and I feel like I've learned nothing! I'm not going to say it's one of the most difficult languages on Earth, because it's not. Not even close. And I can tell you that because I'm a big fan of languages. I've tried to learn Swedish (not easy) and Russian, which is a really complicated language. Not to mention Arabic with the whole different alphabet in which letters change depending on where they are located in a word. So yeah, I could say it's one of the easiest languages compared to others; it has the same alphabet as Spanish and English, it has the same roots as English, some words are almost identical in English! But it's not that easy; it has 3 different articles, because there are 3 different genders for the words: masculine (der), feminine (die), and neutral (das), which makes it even more complicated. I can speak fluently only 2 languages: Spanish and English. In English, it's really easy because there's only one article (the) that is applied for every word, no matter what the gender is (the girl, the boy). In Spanish it's not that complicated either; there are 2 articles for 2 genders: masculine (el) and feminine (la). And it's really easy to know what gender goes for each word since most of the words that end up on 'a' are feminine, and the rest are masculine (la niña, el niño). Of course there are some exceptions. But in German there's no way to know what the gender of a word is! (as far as I know) For example you can say der Junge (the boy). As he's a boy it's pretty obvious that you need to use 'der' since it's masculine. If you're talking about a woman then you say die Frau, so there you're using 'die' which is feminine. But when it comes to talking about a girl then you have to say das Mädchen in which 'das' is the neutral article, so after thinking about it for a loong time I decided to stop questioning why it was das Mädchen and not die Mädchen. And that's just an example! I'm really trying to learn each word with its gender, so I can use it in a sentence, but my memory it's not that powerful!

Then, when you use adjectives to describe a word, its ending changes depending on the gender of the word. i.e. Adjective: jung. Der junger Mann (the young man), die junge Frau (the young woman).

And now the hardest part! :P The article might change depending on where it's located in a sentence, like for example: Sie gibt dem Mann einen Brief. (She gives the man a letter.) The noun article der changes into dativ (dem) and ein into akkusativ (einen). Don't ask why because I still don't understand. :/

Good news is that I was talking with Victor (a friend who's also going to D1840) and he told me that we'll have a German course when we're in Germany.. so I think it won't be that bad.

On another matter..

MY PAPERS WERE ACCEPTED IN THE EMBASSY! :D So that means I got my Visa.. or I'll get it. They told me to pick it up on the 2nd week of August! That's one step closer to Germany! I need now to buy the plane tickets, but I'm going to wait until the last week of July, because it'll be cheaper then (according to the travel agents).

Until then..

Bis dann! :)

"Getting there means leaving things behind"

I just wanted to share this with all of you. Right after I wrote my last post this morning, I was listening to music and a song came on my iPod. It's called "Starts With Goodbye" by Carrie Underwood. I love that song, and I know the lyrics by heart, but to be honest I had never payed much attention to them.. until today. It was really weird, because as I said, I heard it like 5 minutes after I published the post, and what I had wrote was still on my mind, and well for all of those who haven't heard the song, it described pretty much how I felt when I wrote my post! Of course it was in a more poetic way, but it was still what I was thinking! (except for the beginning of the song.)

So I invite you to listen to the song and read the lyrics:

"WHAT the hell am I doing!?" D:

Those words have been floating in my head for the past few days. I've heard it's common in almost every exchange student to feel this way just a few weeks before leaving, and I knew this would happen, but it's just starting to sink in that I'm actually leaving. It's not a dream anymore, it's not a fantasy, it's not just something I would love to do: it's something I'm about to do. It's called pre-homesickness. I haven't even left and I'm already thinking about how much I'm going to miss: my family, my friends, even this big, crowded, polluted and beautiful city I live in. I'll miss the weather, the language, the FOOD! Well, if I continue on how many things I'm going to miss, then this post would be neverending.

So the real question would be: Is it really worth it? I mean leaving EVERYTHING I know and care about to set off on an adventure that I don't really know how's it going to turn out, and that probably's going to change my person, character etc.? 90% of the times I've asked myself this question my answer had been YES. Yes, it's worth it because I'll learn a new language, get to know another culture, meet new people, and it'll help me mature and grow as a person.

Sometimes my answer's NO. And along with that answer comes a loooong list of fears. I fear my host-families not liking me. I fear not being able to adapt to my life in Germany. I fear being homesick and missing my family too much, since the longest I've ever been apart from them was only 1 week! I fear not learning the language quickly and failing at school. Which takes me to my biggest fear: SCHOOL. I've always been in the same school, since kindergarden! My classmates have been the same in the last 13 years. The same goes for my friends. I've been living in this little bubble for my whole life, and to be honest I couldn't wait to get out of it. But, at the same time I'm scared! I'm scared that I won't have any friends in Germany, at least in the first few months, because I SUCK at starting conversations. First day of school scares the hell out of me! D: I don't know what I'm going to do, who am I going to talk to, etc. I'm scared of leaving my comfort zone and going somewhere where nobody knows anything about me. But that's one of the reasons I decided to go on exchange, to actually open myself to people, become more social, etc.

So to everyone who's reading this and planning to go on exchange in future years: get ready to feel this way. It's common, but it's not pleasant.

Getting a German Visa is not easy..

UGH. I hate all of those looong legal processes. They're just a nightmare!

It all started 3 weeks ago when I went to the German Embassy to apply for my visa. Well, first of all, I had to fill in 2 applications IN German, but my knowledge of German is, literally, nothing! So after trying with about a dozen of applications, I completed them. I handed in my guarantee forms with the applications, my birth certificate and my passport, but they told me that I had to translate my birth certificate to German and also that I was missing a letter from my Rotary Club in Germany, so I had to go back home and e-mail my host club asking them for the letter. They replied really quickly and, about 10 days later, I received an e-mail from them with a copy of the letter attached. And last week a woman who speaks German translated my birth certificate, so I had everything I was missing and was ready to apply for my Visa.. or so I thought.

Finally, today I went once again to the German Embassy but, unlike the last time I'd gone, there was a lot of people who were also applying for a Visa, so it took us about half an hour to get in, and an hour or so to get attended. So I handed in all my papers, confident that everything was complete, but the woman that was attending me told me that my letter was missing a text that said it was based on the 84th and 86th articles or something like that, so basically I had to go back to my house (after wasting almost 2 hours waiting) and e-mail once again my host club.

Now I'm scared that I won't get my Visa on time! :/

Second host-family!

So today, after I woke up, I checked and I had a new e-mail, and it was from my second host-father! He told me that his family lives in Vierkirchen, a small village that's only 15km away from Dachau, and there are buses that leave every 20 minutes or so, so it won't be a problem going from one town to the other. I looked for it in Wikipedia, and it has a population of about 4000 people, which is a big change for me, since I live in a city with a population of about 24 million people. He also told me about the family: I will have 3 host-brothers: a 12-year-old, a 14-year-old, and a 16-year-old who will be on exchange in India, and a 3-year-old host-sister! It's going to be great to have younger siblings, since I only have an older sister, so I don't know what it's like to have a brother, and much less a younger one!

Church in Vierkirchen

So I think I'll only have 2 host-families, which is great, because that way I get to have more time with each family (about 5/6 months) and get to know them better.

Ahh, this is one of those moments when I just CAN'T wait to get there, but I still have so many things to do: get my Visa, buy the plane tickets, etc. I'll update probably next week when I go to get my Visa!