On the 10th of February I said goodbye to my last host family and moved in with my third one - the Bernhards. They are very nice people! I have a fluffy dog and three younger host siblings - two sisters, and one little bro. This is the same family that took me skiing in the Alps in December. I'm going to be living with them until may. From the 16th to the 26th of February I took a small break from my exchange trip in Germany to go do some travelling on my own. I hopped on a plane and flew over to Moscow where I met up with Katya and Sophia, my (real) mum and sister! It was great to reconnect with family after about 6 months without having any of them; the three of us got to reconnect with each other and also with our other relatives in Russia that we hadn't seen in ages. We explored the city of Moscow for about a week, and then took an overnight train to St. Petersburg. These are both beautiful cities, and even though the cold was pretty bitter at times, we still had an amazing experience! During the time that I was in Russia, Germany was having its annual Karnival (aka. Fasching). Karnival is traditionally "the celebration before the fasting season," and in Germany, Karneval is actually a pretty big deal. The celebrations are mainly just an excuse to dress up in costumes and party, and to celebrate life. It takes place over three weeks (usually on the weekends), and luckily I came back to Germany just in time for Rosenmontag (Shrove Monday). This is the second last day of Fasching, and in many cities it is the most important day of Karnival. I landed back in Germany on Sunday the 26th, and the next day I took off again to Fulda - a town 2 hours away from me by train. I met up with with a group of exchange students and we got to take part in all the festivities. Fulda is home to one of Hessen's biggest Karneval parades, and so when we were there, there was a huge amount of people. But then something funny happened! An Australian friend of ours got lost in the crowd, so me and an American exchange student went to go look for her. We were looking for her for about 2 hours, and then we in turn got lost from the rest of our group... So that's when we decided to sneak into the parade, and maybe our friends would see us then! So we quickly snuck in behind one of those parade floats, and luckily I had brought my Canadian flag with me, so we just held it out and pretended we were part of the show! People started cheering and encouraging us, shouting "Go Canadaa!" and things like that. We even picked up candy and started throwing it at the crowd! The people in the parade behind us started talking to us, and asked who we were, but we just told them we were meant to be there, and that we were part of the parade. It was obvious we weren't though, seeing as we didn't have any costumes or anything other than a flag; but they were very chill about it and just let us stay in. It was just a cool and funny experience; we stayed with the parade for about 20 minutes, and then we found our friends! Oh and the Australian was found again too. (Just a cool thing! Back at the orientation camp in August we actually came to Fulda for a day, so walking through the same city half a year later was actually really interesting. It's fun to think of how much we've all changed in this time).
Thanks for reading! If you have any questions or want to know more please feel free to message me! Also a big thankyou to my Sponsoring and Hosting Rotary Clubs for making my traveling dreams come true, and thank you also to the rest of you for your continuing support!!
1 Comment
Aria
3/9/2017 12:16:21 pm
Hey David!
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