Webmaster note: I emailed Christina the following: Tell me about your new home. Big, small? What do your host parents do? What's your room like? What treats did you get in your shoe on Mikulas? How is school going? How are you doing with the language? What's a typical day like for you now? Any adventures recently? How is Christmas different there?

December 23, 2003

Our house is a typical old style Slovak house actually. My host parents bought it from their grandparents and remodeled a lot of the inside. It is a good size for their family. It is rectangular with one room leading into the next all the way to the back of the house and the upstairs only has my room (the sisters room) and the boys’ room done. But I think they could fit more rooms if they wanted to behind the boys’ room. There has just never been the need, so they haven’t. They painted their living room walls and fixed up the kitchen this fall. It looks really pretty. Their daughter is in warren so she hasn’t seen it yet!

My mom works as a manager at a bread company in Kosice. And my host dad has his own business constructing and reconstructing stuff.

Mikulas was kind of like Easter here with out the egg hunt. We got chocolate mikulases and devils in our shoes that were like the chocolate Easter bunnies at home and an advent calendar to count down the days till Christmas.

School is going good. Nothing really exciting there. My classmates study a lot because the school I go to is one of the hardest in Slovakia. Some teachers give me supplemental work in English, but it is not as hard as what they are doing in Slovak. I think most of them assume I'm behind academically because I came from the United States (I got a lot of comments at the beginning about how they didn’t think I would understand what they were doing because American schools are weak.) They just put things in a different order and are required to know them till they graduate which means they remember more when they get to college. But some of the math they are doing is a year behind what I did in the US and some stuff is a year ahead. They have biology, chemistry and physics all 4 years, but they only have it twice a week.

The language is going ok. I guess its one of the hardest for English speakers to learn because it is so different. I can understand just about everything but I’m not as good as using it to say what I want to say. They have different verbs for everything, like for saying have or have been, so it takes a long time to learn. My typical day kind of differs since I just moved houses. Sometimes I wake up at 5:30 and sometimes I don’t have to wake up till 8:30. I travel 20 minutes or go by bus to get to school each day. After school I eat lunch at the school cafeteria and then go home by bus. Twice a week I go to folk dancing class. I have never really been into dance but I thought folk dancing would be interesting. It is lots of fun, good exercise and I got to meet a lot of cool people my age. It is from 6:30 till 9:30 but I have to leave at 9 to catch my bus home. On those days I go visit my first host family and their neighbors who happen to be Americans here with US steel. My first host sister really looks forward to my visits and she helps me a lot with Slovak (she likes playing teacher)

Hopefully over break we are going to go skiing in the Tatras. I am looking forward to it a lot because I have not snow skied a lot but I have water-skied. Ski lifts kind of scare me so I’m a little nervous but I can't wait.

The some of the biggest differences here is that they say that on Christmas you get your presents from Jesus and that they keep live carp in their bathtub till Christmas and then cook it. So right now there are 3 carp in the tub!!

Christina