Host Family Weekend

My host family is great. I was living in a flat with my host mom, her daughter, and one of her friends and her parents live in the flat across the hall. They’re all so friendly and welcoming, They made me feel like I was already a part of their big, extended family right away. My host roommate, Natalie, is from Canada and moved in with my host family after her original Germany housing plan didn’t quite go as planned. She’s really cool and I’m so glad that I’m living with a family that’s all fluent in English. Zoe, my host-sister, is 11 years old and a big animal fan so I lucked out big time and I’m not the only crazy animal person in the place.
Bonn was pretty crazy my first night because there was this big free music festival going on the night that we got there. I was kind of interested in going but I found out later that I wouldn’t have been able to because so many people showed up that they just stopped letting them in. I ended up going out with my host mom, Maggie, to a deal that her theatre was doing. They had this big carpet laid down in the middle of this square in front of the house where Beethoven was born. They had lines painted on the carpet which were supposed to be walls and they had a sink, stove, refrigerator, TV, piano, and everything else a house would have, that all worked, set out on different places on the carpet. The lines were set out like rooms in a house and the actors and just random people from off the street could “move in” and pretend to live in this house while it was there. It was pretty cool. It was the sort of closing night for it all so people were bbq-ing and they had a piano and a house musician so there was music constantly going on. It was a lot of fun. Apparently I looked German to a bunch of the people there because they would all come up to me and just start talking to me in German. Maggie had to keep telling them all that I was from the US and didn’t know any German. It was kind of cool but kind of awkward at the same time because I would have no idea what they just said to me and no idea how to tell them I don’t know any German.
On Sunday, I went with my host family/roommate to a play my host sister was in called the Magic Flute. It was all kids that were 11-17 years old in the play so it was pretty much just all of their families there. The play was in German, so I didn’t understand a word of it, of course. It was still pretty cool though because I was still able to have a general idea of what all was going on just from how they were all acting. I guess it was a bit of a lesson in how important body language can be.
After the play, they took me to my host-uncle’s Irish pub and I met my host-aunt (like I said, big extended host family). It was a pretty cool place. You definitely don’t see places like that in the states. After talking to a few people there for a while, we went back to the flat and I watched some TV show episodes with Maggie and Natalie (my host-roommate). I can’t remember what the show was called at the moment but it was an English comedy with the same guy that did Shaun of the Dead. It was definitely a different type of humor but it was still really funny.