HELLO!

Hello! I have so much to talk about! I know I haven't written in months sorry about that! I am officially in my third host family and things are going great! I'm back in Burgdorf and I'm loving it here. I finally got internet on my laptop so I can now fill you in on what is new. So, we are still under quarantine here and have been for 6 weeks now. We have online school but we have more work to do here than my friends do in Canada. I hear they only have to do around four hours a week while here we have a normal day. 8-4 everyday for all our subjects. 

I got here in my third host family on April 4 and things are going so great! I have a host sister who is one year younger than me and a host brother who is the same age. Every night we try and play a game so sometimes we play UNO and then these last few days we have played a game called Tutto. It's very similar to Yatzee but it's with cards and dice. You try and get three of a kind and to get a Tutto you have to have three other ones and/or fives. You always have to roll a five or a 1 to keep playing and if you don't get one you lose all the points you could have gotten for that round and then your turn it over. It's rather fun. My first week at my host family I did a Harry Potter movie marathon with my host sister. They have all the Harry Potter movies including the two Fantastic Beast movies. Every night we watched a movie starting with the Fantastic Beasts and it was so much fun! We were questioning everything and we were laughing and talking through all the movies. 

One day my host sister said she's never seen Star Wars, so my host brother and I said we need to watch them with her and that's what we're doing now. He said we should start with Star Wars 1 because it's the first one and then she will understand the history and everything will be easier to follow, and I said that we should start with Star Wars 4 because it was the first ever Star Wars movie and if we watch 1,2, 3 first then she won't be surprised when Darth Vader says "I am your father." We did start with four but it was actually boring (I rather like four, but it was quiet and if you're trying to get someone hooked on it from our generation, maybe not the best one to start with). So this past weekend we watched 1 and it was a lot better. I haven't actually seen this movie since, probably kindergarten so I remembered scenes of things and I thought that was cool that I still remembered some of it. We had a lot of fun and our plan is to watch one or two movies every weekend till we get to 9. Our host sister is rather confused with the order of Star Wars because it goes 4,5,6 for the original Star Wars movies, and then it's 1,2,3 and then now you have the newest movies 7,8,9. Of course you have all the side movies and TV shows but we're just gonna do the main ones. So this is how it's gonna go: 4, 1, 2, 3, 5, 6, 7, 8,  and 9 when it's on Disney+. Wow, I've just written a whole paragraph about Star Wars. Anyways, it's going good here with the family. 

There are two main hills in Burgdorf and on one there is a church and the other one there is the castle. My host family lives right next to the church on the hill so they are right down town (the old town which is my favourite part) and from my room you can see all of Burgdorf and the Alps.

In quarantine here, I hear it's about the same as it is there. We can't have groups more than 5... I can't remember if it was 3 or 5. We have to hand sanitize our hands before going into the store and then if there are to many people we have to wait outside. We have to put on plastic gloves if we want to get some fresh produce. We don't have lines in the grocery stores saying what sides we have to stay on. The government is trying to open up stores again on May 11 so... I'm hoping to go to Bern if that is okay with my host family. Rotary for a while was giving us stuff to do like, Kahoots, and games we could play. All our weekend trips with Rotary have been cancelled. We were supposed to go to the Italian part of Switzerland (there it is completely different. You actually think that you are in Italy. They have Palm trees there!) but that got cancelled. We are still waiting to see if our Europe Trip is cancelled though. They said they're going to talk about that soon. I'm thinking that they're going to wait as long as possible before they make that decision. I'm hoping that it will still go but that they'll just be making some changes to it, but I understand if they do cancel it. I think we'll all be disappointed but there is nothing we can do and we all understand why. As of right now, we can't travel to other countries, even if you are a resident in the EU.

Oh! I was supposed to be going to the IIHF (international Ice Hockey F.... can't remember the F) but it was a big international hockey game happening in Switzerland. I was going to go with three other Canadian friends to the game in Lausanne (french part. South-West Switzerland) on May 13 I think  to watch Canada vs. Denmark but that got cancelled. They said they're going to try and reschedule it but I'm not sure if I'll still be here for the date. It's okay though.

I've been working on my German a bit, I took quite a long break and actually was focusing on English because I have an English presentation in school next week and I'm reading the 1800s English so my brain is a bit confused at times. I'm finding out that I can understand German very well, I'm having trouble speaking so I'm trying to work on more grammar and writing.

Since we live by the church, you can hear the bell ring every time. So, every fifteen minutes it rings and then it goes four times on the hour then the bigger bell rings with the hour number. Sometimes the bels just start ringing for about 10 minutes long and for a while I thought they were doing it like Monday at 12, Tuesday  at 2, Wednesday at 4, Thursday at 6, and Friday at 8, but one day Thursday went at 4. But usually that's how it goes... I think. It's rather handy knowing what time it is every 15 minutes. The cool thing about living here is that you are always 5 minutes away from everything. I'm five minutes away from the supermarkets, five minutes away from the train station, 3 minutes away from school, 10 minutes away from the trail where I took the photos below. 

Oh! The trail is actually great! i used to go to this one all the time when I was living at the Schonenbergers, and it's just past the smaller train station and you go up a hill and then you are in a forest and you walk along this path for a while then you can either go up or down and for the last month I've been going down and then it leads you onto this field where to your left is green hills and if you go far enough cows! Then to your right you have an awesome view of Burgdorf and the next town, Oberburg. 

I think for this moment that is everything that I have to say. I'll go see what my other posts were and update you on what I said I would. Hope everything's good with you!

Here are some photos and videos:

You may be able to see the alps a bit. They're in between the moutain. On my screen they look like patches of a weird orange colour.