First of all, we would like to introduce ourselves. We are Sandra (Sunny) Leidig and Katharina (Kathi) Buehlmaier from Neckarsulm, which is a little town in southern Germany. After our holidays we’ll go into the 12th class of the Albert-Schweitzer Gymnasium in Neckarsulm.
We are 17 and 16 years old and we love doing sports, shopping and drawing. The reason why we wanted to come to America is to improve our English.
We arrived in Fresno on the 28th July 2010 and until the school started, we spend the three weeks with our host family, The Riekers, going on several trips so that we saw a lot of the surroundings.
In the beginning of our plans we wanted to spend our whole vacation in an American high school, but that wasn?t possible because only the two last weeks of the time we should spend here were during the school year.
But now we think it was perfect because we had three awesome weeks before school started and two wonderful weeks in your school! We were able to have ‘real’ vacation the first three weeks and now, we can experience two weeks of life in high school. Five weeks of school during our vacation would have been quite hard.
For us it is fun going to Fresno Christian High, but not everything is how we expected it.
When we’ve been thinking of an American high school we connected school uniforms and that the school has many students a lot more than in Germany. We also thought of cheerleaders and sports like in “High School Musical.”
But when we came into the gym, we thought that the imagination of High School Musical is very close.
When we arrived the first day, the cheerleaders were dressed up. When we went to the church everybody joined singing and everything was so peaceful.
We sang songs and praised God. We got the same schedule as Victoria Hindes (junior) and that was pretty good because she showed us everything and, she is really really nice.
Every student here has a different schedule, which is a difference between Germany and America ’cause we have the same schedule for one class and our periods last 90 minutes.
What we really like is that there’s a school spirit and pride at Fresno Christian; it’s so cool when everybody wears there symbols on sport events for examples. It’s another attitude you get than in Germany. The Eagle T-shirts are very nice. We have a school shirt too, but ours is so ugly and we not even sell one!
Another difference between our and your school is that you have freshman and seniors in one class. We always have people with the same age in one class and these are almost always the same from the 5th to 10th grade.
Also interesting for us was the lunchtime. Most of the students don’t leave school and they are all sitting under the trees in the schoolyard. In Germany we have a huge cafeteria with fresh cooked food and we have the possibility to leave school and buy lunch in the town or we go home or do homework.
The student’s behavior during class is different, too. In Germany we are much louder than in this school during the lessons. But the biggest difference is that Fresno Christian High is a Christian school and everything has to do with God, Jesus and the Bible.
We have Religion as a subject in our school one time a week and German teenagers don’t go to church and nobody has such a fantastic youth group or church as you have! We had a great time and the summer of our lifes. It was totally awesome!
Against our expectations you didn’t have any school busses coming to school with lots of kids every morning. Instead every student is driving his or her own car or is picked up by the parents.
We know the distances here are longer but in Germany you either walk, ride your bicycle or go by bus. Only few parents don’t work and are able to drive their kids to school and almost nobody owns their own car because we are not able to drive on our own until we are 18. In addition driving a car is mostly too expensive. It kind of feels weird to see all the pupils in same age or even younger, driving their huge cars while we have to wait for our host mum picking us up!
But we really enjoy going to school here. We get to know high school life and can make friends with so awesome people!
Thanks for letting us be a part of your life in Fresno Christian High. We had two fabulous weeks and thanks for being so nice to us!
