2.24.2004 New places, new people, new adventures! It´s been 3 months since I´ve written and so much has happened I don´t even know where to begin. Since my last report I´ve been to Bad Hofagstein, Salzburg, and Bad Aussee. I´ve experienced Christmas and New Years in Austria. I moved to a new host family. And I went skiing and snowboarding for the first time. With bruises to prove it! First, early in December I attended a rotary meeting in Salzburg. It was so amazing to see everything that I had seen in The Sound of Music in real life. We were also able to see some other historical sites such as the house where Mozart was born. How many people can say they´ve seen that?? Then Christmas came. I was surprised at how similar it is here as it is in the states. You have a tree, family, and presents. It´s impossible not to be happy at Christmas. I got a beautiful ball ornament, a book about Austria, and a new camera which I am soo thankful for. My other camera broke and without this one I would have no way to preserve the memories of all of the things I´ve done. My New Years was spent with another exchange student. That was also a lot of fun. We did this thing that is supposedle an Austrian tradition where you hold a chunk of metal over a flame in a spoon and when the metal melts you quickly put it in water. Then you decide what the finished product looks like and get your fotune told from it. I got a fish which means I´ll be lucky in lotto this year. Too bad I´m not old enough to buy lottery tickets!! A couple of days later, I went skiing with a friend of mine and my host parents in a city called Bad Hofgastein. It´s one of the most beautiful places I´ve ever seen with tons of snow. The first day my friend and I tried snowboarding. It took about 45 minutes just to get the board on my feet but once I accomplished that it went pretty well. The only problem was that the only way I could stop was to fall so you can imagine how fun that was. The next day I realized my butt couldn´t take anymore so I traded in my snowboard and boots for skis. That was much better because I got the hang of it right away. I was surprised at how easy it acutally was. Oh, I almost forgot that I went to a ball. It´s not exactly what you´re thinking because what they call y ball, we call a dance. But a really big dance. Sort of like a prom. Anyway, that was a lot of fun. There was a big room for people who actually know how to dance and then a disco next to it. Needless to say, I spent most of the night in the disco. Ha ha. I did come out for the shows though. The theme of the dance was "Like a Virgin" so first they had kids dancing to the song Like a Virgin and then the teachers had a whole routine worked out for it. There´s nothing funnier than seeing your teachers dancing. You can´t help but crack up. I also got...I guess you could call it a report card for the first semester in school. Being the fact that I don´t recieve grades in any of my classes, the only classes I got grades for were Religion, Art, Gym, and of course English. The grading system here is the same as in the states except instead of A, B, C, D, and F they get 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 and they don´t get percentages only that one number. Anyway, I got two 1´s and two 2´s. I´m not sure if I should be proud of those but I was happy to get a report card just the same. The latest news is that I changed host families. I can´t believe I was with the first one for a whole 6 months. The time went by so fast. I´m extremely thankful for all they have done for me but I know that it´s better to change families and learn different traditions and things. My new family is extremely nice. My host father is a doctor and my host mom is a house wife so she´s always cooking tons of food. I´ve only been with this family for a little over 2 weeks and I think I´ve already gained weight. I also have 2 host sisters but they don´t live in the house. Christine is 26 and Michaela is 28. They have 2 houses. One near a city called Froschberg. Which translated means frog mountain . And another in a city called Bad Aussee. That´s where I was for 4 days last week. I had the week off of school because it was the end of the semester and my host parents said we could go there with Michaela. The second day I went snowboarding with my host sister. That was a lot of fun. For about 45 minutes or so before we went up the lift she pulled me half way up the hill about 50 times and let me go down so that I could learn how to stop without falling which is always good to know . I know that couldn´t possibly have been fun for her but she´s one of the most patient people I´ve ever met. That´s pretty much all. My German is a thousand times better now. All of my dreams are half in English and half in German and I find that in conversations and writing it goes much faster in German. Sometimes my English teacher will ask me what something is called in English and I can´t for the life of me think of what the word is. Well, on the 13th of March I´m hoping to go on a ski week with Rotary so I´ll try to write again after that. Until then, Ashley Conon