No one in my host family speaks very much English so communication is limited to broken German and hand gestures but I get by because I am in German 4 so I can communicate on a pretty decent level but they talk really fast. They live in a small village of 240 and the village itself is 750 years old. The father's name is Franz, the mother's name is Kathy, and the daughter's name is Lilna and they own a farm with cows and horses. My german was surprisingly good when I talk to them but it is still not the best. I can't understand what Franz says most of the time because he has a fast, old, gritty, deep, smoker's voice, so when he talks it just sound likes one deep long slur to me. Communication between me and Franz is limited to grunts and hand gestures with a little bit of german mixed in. I've helped Franz out by driving his tractor around the farm and making hay. Over here the farms are much smaller and it is more of a hobby or second job. The region we are staying in is basically a forest. My family has showed me around the forest and it was really cool and we saw a bunch of the wildlife like deers, rabbits, and hawks. The people in the area really take pride in living in such a beautiful and natural land. Kathy is a really good cook and on the first day she cooked some bratwurst and some other delicious meat with potato salad for dinner. I think tomorrow they are going to have a friend who is a hunter show me around the area and look at the wildlife. Or I was going to go on a horseback ride tomorrow I don't remember. Overall I am starting to really enjoy my host stay even though there is a language barrier. Today the whole group went to an immigration/emigration museum in Bremerhaven. It was pretty cool because you were assigned a person who was immigrating to the America or "the new world". You learned about their reasons for leaving and how they did once they made it to their destination. There was also a section were you could trace your family's history back though census and immigration papers. I traced my family back 400 years to Whales, so that was cool I guess. The last thing we did in Bremerhaven was visit a WWII U - Boat that was built during the war but was never put in action. So we climbed through the boat and saw basically what it was like in a U - Boat which was also pretty awesome. Oh yeah I almost forgot about the school part. So my first class of the day was Musik Klasse, the lesson that day was dancing and the dance was the Disco Fox. I am talking about straight up saturday night fever disco. So I could't stop laughing in that class but little did I know I would laugh even more. The next class was English and the lesson for that day was black music. They were talking about hip hop and R & B and they called black music so once again I was laughing at the germans. Overall Germany is pretty cool and stuff.
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