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"Come on Eileen"

So there are some things that I can't remember when they happened exactly so I thought I would just write those in here.

I made my second host family pumpkin pie one day because they actually had a whole pumpkin in their basement. They really liked it which I was surprised about. I don't know why, but I thought they would be making that face Gru made in Despicable Me 3 when the girls made him and his wife soup with gummi bears in it:


They thought it was great. My host sister Jael helped me with it and we had a lot of fun together making it. I ended up making a second one because my host dad Andre, my host mom Lilianne and my host cousin Shianne really liked it and we still had a lot of pumpkin puree left. I think I made that around end of January or beginning of February.

My second host family went to church every Sunday, but it wasn't like regular church. The group is called Pfimi and it's a Christian church,but it's modern. So they have people in the congregation (is that the right word?) that would play songs and then they would have someone talk and speak about a passage from the bible and then the band would play some more songs. So the church feels more like a small theater because you don't sit in pews, you sit in chairs but they are leveled. The band was usually two guitar players, a drummer, and a piano player. One time they also had a violinist there. One of my host brothers, the younger one, would play the drums sometimes. They would play four or five songs that were most of the time in Swiss German and they would have the lyrics beamed onto the wall behind them and I thought that was great because written Swiss German is very weird. So I could recognize some of the words. For example they say in High German "Konig" is King. But in Swiss German (Bern) it is pronounced practically the same but written like "Chonig." Okay I actually have a High German to Swiss German dictionary and here are some example of how weird Swiss German can be:

                     High German                         Swiss German                        English
                          ach was                                    a ba                                 certainly not!
                         anschreien                              aabrüälä                             to shout at
                          jenseits                                    ennet                                   beyond
                        gehst du?                                 gaasch?                         are you going?

As of today (April 30) I can actually understand Swiss German pretty good. I can get the general theme but sometimes they say three words together and I don't get those.

Before the Coronavirus happened I went swimming practically every Wednesday with a group here in Burgdorf and since I lived in a different town I would have to take the train into Burgdorf but swimming was at 8:30 PM and I would get there at the pool at 7:45 PM. I would leave the house at around 7:10 PM I think. So, I had a lot of down time waiting to go Swimming.

A few days before I left for my third host family I was in my host sister's room while she was doing her online English class and I was gonna help her. I failed a lot. But her teacher had... a bit of an accent and she didn't always say a sentence right. Normally for students here you turn off your camera and microphone so the teacher can talk and if you make a noise then it doesn't interrupt the teacher. So the teacher said one time "I wish you good time!" and I, just talking to Jael, mockingly said "I wish you good time!" but it turns out that my host sister's microphone was on..... Yeah, I'm deeply embarrassed and ashamed about that. I don't mind when someone makes a mistake in speaking English because everyday I make mistakes in German and when my school friends speak to me in English in English class I never make fun of anyone. But this time it just came out and Jael just looked at me and started laughing as soon as she turned off her microphone. So, that happened. We later told my host family about that and everyone started laughing as well. So, yup.

Oh! In the church that my host family goes to, they have someone in a booth on the balcony doing translations. So every Sunday they do two services and on the first one, they sometimes had someone doing an English translation and my host family usually took me to these ones. One of the translators there was actually from Kitchener, Ontario! I saw him twice and the first time we talked about Canada and it was really cool to talk to him. He's been living in Switzerland for 17 years now and translates very well. There was also another guy there who actually went to Cornell for four years and that's where he learned his English.

Some cool stuff that happened with school friends... oh! So there are three groups in my class. Maybe four, but the boys are one big group and sometimes they divide into two groups. Then there are three girls that are a group and then the other group is 6 girls and one guy. I'm friends with both of the girl groups. So the second group (the one with the six girls and the guy) were having a dinner night. So the guy's name is Nick and he invited us to come over to his house to make Pizza after school. I said yes and I went with the other girls (I think there were five of us this time) after gym class to his house. He met us at the train station and then we walked to his house. One of my friends doesn't like gym class and Nick lives on top of a hill so we had to climb it and it was so funny cause the whole time she's like "Go on without me! I'm not gonna make it" and she thought it was unbelievable that he lived on a hill. So what we did is we had a Racellete mini-stove thing and we cut up some pizza dough and had some tomato sauce and toppings on the table and made Racellete Pizza. It was so much fun and we ate so  much! I think that was a great night! We talked and afterwards all hung out on the couch! One of our friends had to go home a bit earlier because she lived the farthest from us (I only lived 5 minutes away by train) and then the rest of us left maybe an hour later.

So those were some big things that happened while I was at my second host family.

Oh! I chose this song because the night before I came to my third host family I was packing up my room and I was just listening to this song on repeat for a good two hours.

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