My Host Family

Ok, finally time to tell you about my host family and some of the good things that have been going on!

My family is great. They consist of my actual host counselor Rotarian, Clemens, his wife Monika, and their three kids – Carin (20), Mark (19), and Chris (15). Carin is a student at another university about an hour away, but she was in town this weekend so I got to meet her. She majors in German and English and lived in New Zealand for 6 months in high school. Mark just graduated high school but has to do one year of mandatory army service before going to college (it’s a German law), and he also lived in Canada for one year in high school. He’s your typical pretty boy jock, but he’s cool. Chris is still in high school and just doing his thing.

Clemens and Monika both work in the financial world, doing something or other with all that. Clemens works at the savings bank, and I’m actually not quite sure about Monika. Their house is absolutely gorgeous, and quite enormous, and – they have riverfront property. The Elbe River runs through Dresden, and it’s breathtakingly gorgeous, and this family lives on the river. They also have the property bordering a ferry that goes 2 minutes across the river to a castle and a vineyard, so it takes approximately 5 minutes to get to this castle. It’s pretty much amazing.

This weekend Clemens and Monika took me around and showed me all the nature stuff around the outskirts of the city, including the aforementioned castle and vineyard. We climbed a couple mountains and saw some beautiful and tiny little villages. We shared American and German music, and showed each other pictures of home, vacations, and family. I was totally fine with the language and we laughed a lot as I figured out how to say things better or not as awkwardly, or how to correctly respond to things.

Tuesday night Clemens took me along to a meeting at the Savings Bank, where they had a guest speaker who is a tv news reporter who spent a long time in China. When he found out I had been there too he got excited and said “of course you have to come with me to this meeting!” It was interesting, and I understood about 75% of it, except I was sick with a cold and awfully drowsy through it all. There was a huge buffet afterward, so I got to brush shoulders with all the big wigs of the company and attempt to keep up with conversation. It went pretty well, and the men were nice and understanding. I met another Rotarian who is also a professor at the university (but I couldn’t figure out what he was doing at this meeting), and he invited Miname (the other Rotary student here) and me to some sightseeing and stuff the next day. I broke it up into two posts for easier reading, so keep going! ---->