More Pine Scented Fun!

So I've got some stuff to tell yall about.

First thing that I have is the Rotary Christmas Get-Together that was held in Heidelburg. It was just a nice little overnight at a youth hostel that was meant pretty much as a check up for all the current exchange students. The other function(s) that it served was to say farewell to the old exchangers (the ones from last January) and to welcome in the new Six-Weekers from the Southern Hemisphere. It was a bit sad knowing that we would probably never see these people again but I think we made the best of it. The new kids from the Southern Hemisphere were pretty cool as well. They were from Argentina, South Africa, and Australia. Really nice people.

Rotary brought us to the Christmas Market in Heidelburg and took us around the city, checking out the sights. We spent the night in the hostel and the next day, about half the kids went on the Ski Tour to South Tirol in Italy. (From what I hear it was really fun, but snow was close to non-existent). Sad goodbyes and new hello's from that weekend.

The very next day, my new host family and I went to France! The city that we arrived at is called Strasbourg, and it is really quite large. There, I took many pictures and saw what there was to see. We walked through the huge flea markets and the Christmas markets, went to a French McDonald's (it was weird), and climbed the Notre Dame (after going inside of course). Strasbourg is a very beautiful city.

(BTW that was the quite condensed version, I'm preparing to go to a concert as I type)
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Christmas Eve is when about 99% of German Christians celebrate Christmas. It is the big day, not to be confused with Christmas day. Haha. Ok, so on Cmas Eve I cooked a fabulous meal of Chicken Curry over some nice basmati. Everybody loved it. Including Elke's mother, who decided to join in the festivities. It was a really laid back day after that until the sun went down. Tobias and I then played a ton of Cmas songs on the piano and my sax, busting them out without practicing for one second. Norbert literally handed us the music and we set to it. It was very very sweet. We lit the CANDLES on the tree (no electric lights for this household) and then opened our gifts. It was really low key and laid back. A very different feeling than the American day of opening ceremony. Their gifts to me were really sweet, some german books, cooking books, and some french comics. There was some other stuff as well. It was nice having this extremely sweet and welcoming family for this event, but at the same time I really missed everybody.

On Christmas day we went to the completely empty movie theater and saw "Love Doesn't Need a Vacation" which was ok, but it was all in German. It was exciting because I could understand what was going on!

The next day we went to this really really cool Jazz concert in a church in the next town over, Mussbach I think. They played a bunch of jazzified christmas songs which were very cool and felt quite good. For their second encore, the band started up a song which sounded really familliar. The director immediately whips around and starts singing "What a Wonderful World" in English and in a total scratchy voice, hitting the Louis Armstrong feel dead on. It was great.

In about five minutes I'm leaving to go out to the only Indian restaurant in about 500 miles then afterwards to a Orchestral Concert.

Hope you liked reading!

I'll update before Paris again.