Music

As mentioned in An die Musik I had my Choir Solo/Ensemble Contest on Wednesday where I sang 'An die Musik' (To Music) by Franz Schubert. I also sang Shenandoah with seven other girls (so we had two soprano, three first alto and two second alto).

When I woke up that morning my throat was super sore and I thought "Great, why today?". It was a little hard to catch the high notes but all in all it was a lot of fun spending the day just listening to other artist instead of sitting in school for math, language arts, etc. :)
And I also met some friends from Calvary who go to Tech!

My ratings for both performances were 'Superior'. I was so happy! Since I was a little sick I thought I won't do very good, but I just did as good as I can... wasn't like I could do anything about it ;)

Oh and I looove this song! My dad listens to it a lot and when I got to hear it the first time my English wasn't that great so I didn't catch all of it, but "Music is my first love" is not that hard and the music itself of the song is amazing :)

Music

Faithful

Wow, it's been a while again :)

I was bored the whole day for the first time since I arrived here in America: and it feels awesome!
Because I have a pretty bad cold, I'm tired almost the whole day and that's why I got up at about noon today :D I took a shower and when I opened the door Steph, Malachi and Tirzah were in the laundry room which is right next to the bathroom and Steph said: "Good morning!". I think that was pretty funny.

After I had 'breakfast' I skyped with my Dad, what took kind of long (about 2 hours) :) It's weird because every time I look back and try to find out what we were talking it's always just a little bit. But it's fun.

When we were done skyping I wrote with my aunt and a friend from Germany and I also answered a message from my godmother and her daughter. I read it again after I already sent it and realized that I would like to blog a lot of things that I wrote down in the message so I'm just going to copy these parts :)

Right now I'm just enjoying being bored after lots of busy weeks! Because I'm done with volleyball I have a lot more time^^

I enjoy going to church/Small Group/Youth Group a lot :)
And I would like to be baptized again here, because it's now that I understand the Gospel more and more each Sunday and I accept Jesus as my Savior :)

I'll go to Minneapolis tomorrow to go to the Theater with a friend of YFU right after church and I'm pretty excited about that.

It's so awesome her at school, it is not as hard as the German schools so that I don't have difficulties to understand the things we are studying. I was kind of afraid that it would be hard since it's in another language even if I think that I know English pretty well because I studied for 7 years already. But it's not as hard as I thought it would be and I'm sooo proud of myself that I have an A (~98%) in Math right now (I used to have a D in Germany ^^).

We had a bone lab in A&P and were able to see and feel the bones of a cow :D Including the knee joint and it was pretty awesome to see how all the muscles, tendons, and ligaments work together :)

The class (A&P=Anatomy&Physiology) is my hardest because we have lots of tests and I have to study vocabs and other things all the time, but it's so awesome and interesting. If I'm really going to study medicine I'll know lots of stuff already from that class :)

We have lots of projects and funny things in our Health class, too. We already watched two movies (A Beautiful Mind, and Philadelphia). Our first project was to pretend that we are HIV- positive. Our teacher gave us 9 little medicine bottles filled with Skittles and other pill-look-like candy we had to 'take' every couple of hours. They all had special instructions on them, e.g.: 'Take 1 pill every 4 hours on an empty stomach.', 'Take 2 out of this bottle every time you take one of bottle #1', etc. I made a schedule and set my alarm so that I don't forget to take them :)
Right now we have a project where we should write down what we eat (for 4 days). We went to the computer lab and typed everything into a special program and we printed 7 pages full of information about our diet. Now we should answer questions and write down how many vitamins, proteins etc. the diet included.

And I had a choir concert on Thursday and there will be a Band Concert on November 4th :)

Our whole Choir (Women's Choir of Apollo High School)

And again with our director Mr. Parker (I had my camera in my bag and Steph took the pictures Thank You!)

Chamber Choir of the UMD

And the whole Choir of UMD

I also got to know the American snow a couple of days ago :) It feels weird to have snow in October since I always had 'real' snow (enough to go sledging) in January. We were very excited in 2005 when we had snow on my dad's birthday which is on November 25. I don't really know what I should think about the snow: on the one hand I'm glad that the mosquitoes are gone, on the other hand I really enjoyed having a warm summer :) I also don't have a lot of winter clothes so that means shopping!

I hope I'll be able to post my next post very soon to keep you updated :)

Faithful

A whole new world

First school day! It was soooo awesome.

My bus came at about 7:50 a.m (my German classmates would sit in their classroom for 5 minutes by that time :D) and I arrived school at about 8. I went straight into room 110 which is a music and my Symphonic Band room to bring my saxophone and my sports bag in the locker. It's big enough for both of them and I hadn't enough time to go to my volleyball/sports locker as well.

After that I went to the office to hand a form in which I have to send to my German school (no mom I didn't forget that ^^). When I'd done that I had to go to room 717 which is my 'Planning room'.  The school here is 'A whole new world' for me because nearly everything is different than in Germany - but better.

For example the schedule:
I have the same classes every day and only 7 periods and not 10 like some of my classmates in Germany :) Here we have a 6-day-system. That doesn't mean that I have to go to school 6 days a week but that each school day has a number between one and six and some classes aren't on each day (e.g.: Concert Band is day 2,4 and 6). We all got a Calendar which is similar to this one but we have the numbers of the days on it.
Today is 1, Thursday is 2, Friday is 3, Monday is 4, Tuesday is 5, Wednesday is 6, Thursday is 1, Friday is 2,...

I know that is so confusing when you're not used to it. So to get back to the planning room I was 'talking' about: We'll meet every Day 6 from 8:20-8:50. The planning room is new this year but it'll be easier for the teacher to give us informations. It was difficult in the past because not all seniors have the same classes so a lot of teacher had to give them the information during classes and the other students (juniors, etc.) were bored. So I think that's why they changed it. Now they separated between grades and last name. In my room are all students who are seniors and have a last name which starts with Ber-Cal (I think - but doesn't really matter anyway :P).

After planning room I had US History in room 428 (by the way when you have a map of the school - bird's eye view - the rooms are like you have your numbers on a phone. All rooms which start with a 1 are on the left side on the top, rooms like 501 are in the center of the school...). My teacher told us about the class, what we are going to do during the upcoming year, the grading procedure and what kind of rules she has in her room. After that we got our huge and heavy books from the library where I also find out what my ID number is :)

Second period is Anatomy and Physiology which is veery interesting and I think I'll learn a lot of things I could need when I'll study medicine :) We already wrote a little vocab test where we had to connect the Latin/medicine words with their explanations. It was a bit hard because I didn't always understand the English words which were used in the explanation text, but I think I did quite good.
We are going to write our next test on Tuesday and then we'll get grades for it, so I better start learning :)

Next class is College Prep. Algebra which is way easier than I thought it would be, but I feel like it will get harder with the next weeks :D We got a paper with a few little exercises on it.
Here are some examples:

1. a(3b-8) when a=2, b=5

2. 24:8-2
3. 11a+6c+4a-a
4. 2³ (multiply) 2⁴

When I got that sheet I thought it was a joke because it's a class for juniors and seniors, but I think I really shouldn't go to far out on a limb :D (I hope you really use that saying in English... found it on LEO ^^)

Afterward I had Language Art which was awesome! We had to find a partner, got 15 question and had to write down the answer of the partner. After we'd done that we should choose two answers which we wanted to present so that we get to know each other. That was a lot of fun. When we wrote down the answers we listened to music by the way, same for Anatomy and Physiology :D

Then I had Women's Choir where we actually didn't really sing but talk about our summer. Well we practiced scales and stuff like that. However the class was super fun :)

To go on with music my next class was Symphonic Band where we just tested our knowledge about music, like how to read it and how long you have to play a note or what words like 'allegro' mean :)

Last class was Health II where our teacher read two children's stories. We should say what we think about it and what the message would be. It was fun to hear a kids story in High School :P

After Health I which was over at 3:10 pm I had volleyball practice from 3:30-5:30. I was soo hard this time because our coach didn't like the attitude we had yesterday during the came. We lost, same as varsity, every other team (JV1, Freshmen A, Freshman B) won, and we played horrible. So however we had to do our stations - which are about 26 or something and every one takes 25 or 35 seconds. When we would have stopped during an exercise we would have to start over again at station 1 so because we really didn't want to do that we were all very exhausted afterward. Then we practiced hitting, serving and 'communication on the court'. That communication thing is that you shout 'mine' or 'got it' as soon as you want to play a ball. We really need to learn that!

I just noticed that I didn't finished my math homework yet...so I stop that here. I think I wrote enough today and I also think that this is my longest blog post ever :P

A whole new world