First of all big apologies for not posting lately. Now back to topic. My 3 weeks were really exciting but also very challenging and hard. My first week started out with a normal school week. It was mainly just focusing to follow along and sometimes a was messing with some people because the class itself was too boring. I had, throughout the 3 weeks, to mainly focus on my grades. I didn’t want to fall behind or dropp out of football just because some grades. I had ,after actually focusing on the stuff that we dealt with, no huge problems with understanding everything and my grades are pretty good now. The school weeks also consisted a few tests which was a little more work and also presentations. School was fun but especially weekends were nice. On every Thursday I had a football game and it was very much fun. I am very pleased being able to see my first debate meeting which also was extremely awesome. I plan on updating more fequent and in more detail. It is very hard for me right now though since I am sick in bed in therefore I do not have too much energy and also not much to report off. Thanks for all your patience and please don’t be hard on me for my last three weeks, had a lot to do.
First School week and Weekend(21-27.8)
I got my schedule a few days ago so I already knew which classes I’d have at which time and also where my classrooms were. Every day in school goes like that right now. I need to wake up at 6-6:30. I get my stuff for school and football ready. I shower, ger dressed, have a breakfast and leave at 7:30 at latest. My first period is football. I have to be there at 8 fully dressed. Obviously 7:55 Spartan time. When I get there at around 7:45, I get my stuff into the locker and get the things ready that I need for football. Cleats, shirt, pads and everything. We start out our meeting in the weightroom to sorta say good morning and check if everyones there because if you are a tardie or if you don’t show up, you get in serious trouble. If you are lucky you just get yelled at. Not so lucky get hit on the head a little and the coaches mess with you while practice. But if the coach slept bad you are about to run the hill up and down until he gets tired of watching you caugh and maybe you even throw up. Usually since everyone knows how hard the coaches are, everyone is on time. Depending on the purpose of the day we have to run or lift weights or work on specific drills in the morning. After first period I have my 2nd period which is debate. That one is extremely cool. The teacher is very smart and also gentle. And 12 of the 13 students are very open minded and kind but there is one guy who always walks into the room with a big smile a Trump T-Shirt and a Trump hat. I like how the teacher always makes fun of him in a good way. 3rd period is English. The people in that class are very nice but the teacher is quite annoying but that should be fine. My 4th period is finally one of my sience classes. Physics, it is very diffrent from German physics because they seriously sometimes use stuff like inches which doesn’t work with any formular and they even have diffrent signs as sort of abbreviations. It will take me quite a while to get used to that. The next class is chemestry. And as much as I love the subject and everyone is nice. It is not possilbe to focus on anything because I have 2 very distracting girls sitting at my table. They are talking all the time. On the one hand it is quite funny but also very annoying when I need to focus on the stuff that is taught. 6th is my lunch break. We are able to choose from quite a bit of things. On the first day I had Pizza and I once had chicken but now I decided to stick with a wrap and salad so I don’t get out of shape too much. After lunch I have my IT class. The teacher is the worst and already addmitted that she knows less about computers than I do. It is quite hard fot me to believe that I will stick with this class for this whole year since I am not going to learn anything. I am thinking about changing classes to something else that I might enjoy more and learn more from. My last class is a government. Eventhough the subject itself isn’t too interesting to me I love being around the people and the teacher is probably close to my elementry school teacher Herr Britz. She is such a cool person to hang around with and the guys in class are great. After school I have practice from 4:20 until 7:30ish and get home at around 8ish. Y’all can imagine that after that hunger is quite a big thing. I most of the times takes me up until 8:45-9 to be able to do stuff on my own. Start doing homework, maybe catch up with Game of Thrones or finally continue watch Hawaii-Five-0 (thx Klaus), but sometimes I am just not fit enough to do anything else. If I do have the energy tho I try to trrain swimming, football throwing or to maybe catch up on some soccer skills again. On Friday we had our first scrimmage and it was very fun. I even got to play eventhough I am just playing football for less than two weeks. Eventough I am definetly not usually into hurting people it is a great feeling to crash through the line and tackle some people. For everyone who knows anything about football, I am currently playing defensive end (Rover, Bandit) but they also want me to play O-right-tackle. I am having a great time here and yeah btw, Mayweather all the way. Eventough the fight was way too overhyped it turned out to be worth my time. Maybe I will have the time to anwser mails during the week but most likely blog entries will come up on the weekends.
First week of Football (14.8-19.8)
For me the 14th was the first day that I really went to the school, not just for visiting purposes. My football training started. We had to be there at 7, which for Spartans meant 6:55 dressed up in gear. Since the football training just started they just wanted to get us started into exercising again. For my teammates it was a 3 month summer break and for me it was the first time ever. I got there at about 6:40. I already knew where my locker was and soon one coach (Lowe) came in and gave me my stuff. The first day was just meeting, warming up and a little exercising of the things that we had talked about in the meeting. For me it was extremely hard to follow along, because not just football was new for me but also their specific words they used to express certain things. I pretty much just always went into the lines as 2nd or 3rd guy to see what the guy in front of me did and followed along. It was not even very exhausting and I swam after I got home. On the 2nd day I woke up with terrible sore hamstrings and glutes. The positions in which we were doing stuff were just completely new and my muscles were not used to it at all. The 2nd day was quite hard since I had sore legs and we didnt just play around like on the first day. The 3rd day was way better, my legs were starting to not just hurt anymore but I was actually able to follow along pretty good. The tactics and techniques were still very unusual for me. The 4th day was PADday. That means we got to put on pads. Pads to protect legs and knees and pads to protect the upper body and shoulders. From that day I realized how crazy some people were. Some people were going 50%, since it’s just a practice game, but some went 100% and were trying to hit people. The most craziest thing that day was that someone got a concussion and can’t play anymore for at least 3 weeks. The 4th day felt like it started to become a routine. Eventhough I was shocked that you wouldn’t get kicked out of the team if you were trying to box with other people. It turned out that 2 people got into a serious fight and people were trying to holding them back. For us in Germany you would have to immediately leave the team. They kept on practicing. The rest is pretty self explainetory. The following days were exhausting and many people quit already because it was too hard for them. We also had to practice on saturday and eventough I am not going into detail with sunday. It was churchday and therefore also quite exhausting and no oppertunity to sleep in.
9.8
Beautiful day in my life
I just got up very early in the morning to eat breakfast. Immediately after that I packed some sports wear and Linda brought me to Chris ( a friend of mine that I first met at chruch). When I arrived he was still pretty tired too. We played some WiiU since his brother bought one recently. We were pretty equal in terms of skill that made it a lot more interessting. Then after that we went outside into his garden. He instructed me a Little on throwing a football and it was pretty hard because it is very diffrent from usual throwing that I used to do. The way that you have to get the ball to spin is very weird and feels strange but once you get it down it is hell of a lot fun. After that we played some basketball because he plays it for his school. I didn’t have the chance to play soccer with him because he also plays that but only in a club and not for School. We didn’t have a field or enough space for soccer so we only did basketball and football. We went to Mc Donalds to eat for lunch and I had some fries, a few Big Macs and some Coke to drink along. We went to his house and he wanted to show me a series that he likes. Park and Recreation! It’s a funny series in which Chris Pratt is one of the main actors.
Then sth real bad happend. My crush who currently is also doing an exchange year got sick. She told me she was fine but needed medicine but nevertheless I was worried and couldn’t enjoy the series too much anymore. Linda got back home from her own trip and we went home. I helped John with some carrying of furniture from Kimberly because they got a Pick-Up from a friend and wanted to transport things like sofas and stuff after we were done with that I was chatting again and in the evening I had to get my things ready for the pool party over at Joshs’ place. We were about 30 to 40 people and had some pizza and played some volleyball in the pool. It was pretty fun and all the people that I haven’t met from church yet were nice and cool. Later I came home and chatted a little with my little chrush :D. I opened up on her about how I feel about her and could not have hoped for anything better than her reaction…
That made my day,
THANK YOU
4th Day (6.8)
Sunday
Since it was sunday it was church day for my Family. Kim took Nana to her church and joined us later. I went to the church group and was introduced to everyone from Chris who is the son of good friends from Linda and John. I didn’t know how chruch was going to be so I was quite nervous and excited. First it started with a youth group and we played games in there. After that we had a funny group of boys. After that everyone came together we sung Gospel together and finished off with a part from bible.
3rd Day (5.8)
Morning
I started off my day by writing my blog entries. I went downstairs and had breakfast together with them because they didn’t have to leave for work because it’s a saturday. I had serial and melon and some sort of eggburger which tasted great.
Afternoon
John took me to Wallmart and we bought some stuff to eat and also stuff for me that i Need for my stay. A couple of miles away fom our house is an area where they have all Kinds of diffrent stores like Wallmart and some cool restaurants. John and I had quite a long talk in which he told me a little bit about his childhood and in what kind of house and environment he grew up.. It was very interessting to learn about the way that his life was so much diffrent compared to mine. When we got back from the trip not Long after Kimberly arrived. That’s their older daughter. She is great at languages and was able to answer so many questions that I asked her about the American slang and in general about English. I also tried to illustrate how sililar some german words are compared to the English ones. I picked the 2 most convinient welcome(Willkommen) and hello(Hallo). She did a good Job at pronouncing them. Still everytime I let them try to pronounce German words, this also happends to Linda, John and Nana, you can easily tell that they are Americans.
Evening
The evening was really Relaxing and fun. Linda cooked a great meal and also made a very good salad and we ate all together. After that we had to clean up some leaves in the garden which went pretty quick because we were 4 People doin it. After that we watched a movie together even though Nana wasn’t there anymore. Nana told me about their way of collecting Souvenirs. That’s a picture of their very beautiful spoon collection. See if you can find the German spoon.
Second Day (4.8)
Morning
I woke up and felt pretty good. I was relaxing a bit in bed and checking on social media watched a few videos and took a cold shower to wake up. I went downstairs to check if someone was up already and realized that Linda already left for work at 5 a.m.. John was in the pool and Nana wasn’t in the kitchen too. I went outside had a little chat with John and he told me what i could get for breakfast and I asked him about if they would eat together. He told me that they usually don’t leave the house at the same time and have lunch at work so only have a warm dinner together. John had to go to work after our talk. Right when John left Nana joined me and we had breakfast together. We tried some selfmade bread from Nana and Linda made from a german recipe. It was pretty much like any darker bread from Germany but they did put potatoes into it which kinda added a new kind of flavor to it which tasted great. We blessed the meal! After serial with milk and a slice of the bread with cheese i was repleted. John made some great green tea so everytime i was thirsty I could refill my glass. I had a great long talk with Nana in which we talked about a lot of stuff that is going on right now and how America was before. She introduced me into her way of thinking and about her belief in god. She also told me about a lot of her ancestors and her Family and husband who passed away in January in 2001 just before their 50th year of marrige in October. She is 88 and still extremely fit and doesn’t even have to take any medication.
Afternoon
Nana and I had lunch togther after she showed me around the house in more datail and instructed me into some things already like the rfrigerator, freezer and stuff like that. Since they still had leftovers from a stew Linda that Linda had cooked. We enjoyed the meal and prayed before it. After the meal we had a little dessert of pistachio ice cream. I went to sleep again just to get some more rest because I was still pretty tired. After I got up again Linda was already home and dinner was right around the corner. Nana come and Linda tried to reach out for John who was on his way home from work and golfing with a friend of his from work. We started out a Little bit early and made some Pizza. One of they was just cheese so kinda like Magarita and the other one had olives pepperoni and pork on it. John joined us a little bit later but we finished out meal together and did the cleaning together. After that Linda wanted to take me for a ride on a bike and show me around. We cycled through the neighbourhood and around the golf course.
Evening
The evening started with a liittle break after dinner. I went to see and look for them and they asked me if wanted to watch a movie. I said that I would highly appreciate to watch a movie with them and so we did. Crocodile Dundee in LA. That movie is amazingly funny. John and Linda went to bed afterwards and Nana did’t even stay for the whole movie. I did’t wanna stay up for too long so I checked up on social media and went to bed…..
Arrival and First Day ( 3.8)
Since I traveled for at leash 24 hours I was extremely tired but my family took me around the house real quick and left me to go to sleep. The house is big and great! It is equipped with everything it needs and more. Also my room is really comfortable and I wanted to test the bed right away and fell to sleep….
Travel and Flight
First Flight (Stuttgart-Frankfurt)
I was very nervous because it was the first time that i had ever attended a flight. I was well prepared with the help of my family and especially my mother. I had all the documents followed all the luggage restrictions and so I got through the security check effortless. I met up with another YFU student (Leila) that had to travel to Frankfurt as well. During the flight I was feeling like on a rollercoaster because we had turbulences and it felt like the plane got hit by something. Even through the Pilot warned us to stay seated and they couldn’t even hand out their Service for the passengers. It turned out fine and we landed without any problems.
Second Flight(Frankfurt-Washington)
We had long waiting times but the flight wasn’t too bad because I was able to watch 3 Films ( Guardians of the Galaxy, Logan and Fast and the Furious Fate).
Third Flight (Washington-Dallas/Fort Worth)
We had kind of a Long delay in Washington because our plane couldn’t start until the weather got better. After the flight I wanted to pick up my luggage and I was overwhelmed by Nana, John and Linda waiting for me. They were extremely gentle and I gave them a big hug immediately. They even provided snacks and a drink for me and on our way home in the care they showed me a Little bit of Fort Worth already.
Foreword/Vorwort
Vorwort:
Hallo an Alle die sich hier gefunden haben und Deutsch sprechen. Ich muss euch leider enttäuschen, denn ich möchte meine englischen Fähigkeiten so schnell verbessern wie möglich. Um dies zu erreichen habe ich mich dazu entschieden ALLES auf englisch zu schreiben…
Falls ihr Anliegen, Fragen, Kritik oder andere Anregungen habt könnt ihr mich gern erreichen unter:
E-Mail: RaphaelHerrmann@gmx.net
Instagram: herrmann.raphael
Snapchat: raphael.herr
Facebook: Raphael Herrmann
Gegebenenfalls ihr seid der englischen Sprache nicht mächtig werde ich ab und zu auch auf Deutsch antworten.
Foreword:
Hello and welcome everybody! On this blog there will only be posted english content and some pictures. If you want to reach out to me please try to contact me like this:
What’s App/Cellphone: +1 702-824-4238
E-Mail: RaphaelHerrmann@gmx.net
Instagram: herrmann.raphael
Snapchat: raphael.herr
Facebook: Raphael Herrmann
What will be posted on here ?
I will share pictures and kinda a diary of my day here. I am not promising to post everyday or anything close to that but I will try to make it as informative and interessting as possible for you to read and see.
Raphael USA 