Day 1

Today was my first day of school. Go figure it would be the day I had to get up late. The alarm clock I use (one of those old-fashioned, wind-up ones with the bells on the top like mickey mouse ears) didn't go off, which is my fault. Apparently you have to move the metal switch to the left, so it doesn't hinder the ringer. You learn something new every day here.

So I had about 15 minutes before I left for school. I was too nervous to eat anyway, so that saved time, too. Amelie from across the street came over to wait for me, so we could ride to school together.

I have never seen so many bikes being ridden in one place. The streets close to the school are packed with children on bicycle, so it's amazing no one hits each other. You don't have to wear a helmet here, either. I thought we'd take our bikes to the bike racks we saw when we visited the school, but we didn't. There's actually are garage underneath the school for bicycles, which is really cool. It gets really full, too, so it's hard sometimes to find a spot.

Classes were...interesting. Most of the time I just sat there and tried to understand some of the words people were saying. In religion, they were doing read-arounds. They skipped me. In French, I did nothing. English was far more interesting. Herr Schoch drilled me with questions in German, translated into English if I didn't understand, and made me answer in German. Then he'd correct all my German phrases. That class is writing newspaper articles on hurricane Katrina. Now I'm extremely glad we did newspapers in Mrs. Ross's class last year. The other classes were physics (that teacher is...strange. Most of them seem very strange to me) and music, where we watched a video on different singers and their strategies. Billy Idol is quite, um, disturbed.

We got out of school at 12:30 or so, because math class got canceled. Usually school will run until 1:15.

Tonight we went to a restaurant to meet our AFS liasons, returnees from AFS. Mine wasn't there, but we're supposed to get together for a chat on Thursday.