Familie Kohl

I'm going to let the story of how I got to Altheim and my new family stay with the Abele family because no one needs to know how inept I am at life.  So, onward.
Here I am. At my host family. They are Elke, Volker, Julian and Pascal. Elke is eine Hausfrau/stay-at-home-mom and Volker works with Mercedes-Benz as something super technical that I don't really understand, Julian is a student, and Pascal is also a student but does not live at home anymore. Julian is about my age and loves to be on his computer. I think he's a little shy; once I got him to speak to me about music but not much more. We'll see what the rest of my stay brings.

Looking back on it, I really can't believe that I was so scared before. This family is great. They've had billions of Gaststudenten before me and they've pretty much got it figured out. Other than Elke having surgery and being a bit out of commission because of her knee, things are about perfect. Thumbs up to the Herman-Hesse Kolleg for the good pick. Oh, I almost forgot. So, they have a parakeet. Wellensittich auf deutsch. His name is Carrie (I have no idea how to spell it, but that's how it sounds.) and is probably the biggest form of entertainment in the house. He gets to fly freely about the house and chatters constantly. I kind of like him.

Right now my brain is semi-befuddled since I have spoken nothing but German so far, and now I am writing in English. Can you get a headache from thinking? 
Yes, you can. And I have. Who would have thought that just speaking could be so hard. I mean, you do it every day right? Just talk. Well, trust me. It's a real big nut to crack, but I'm working on it and I've been told I'm doing better than average. Mini-pat on the back.

I had my first day of school here. Interesting stuff. It's set in this older house-ish building with many stories and on top there is a cafe area, table tennis, television and so forth. The students are allowed to kind of just hang out there before/during/after classes since we get breaks and sometimes people don't leave. Today we just took a placement test-which I bombed-and an oral test-which I rocked- so between the two I did pretty average. From there we will be place into groups for our classes. However, for the entire four hour duration today it was purely testing. Then to a bakery for some pretzels for lunch. If you have not been to Germany, let the pretzels alone be a reason for wanting to travel here. It's like biting into a little chunk of heaven with a bit of salt on top. Love 'em.

I would say that so far everything is going good. Tomorrow I have a full day of class and we'll see then how I deal with it.