Letter to my Host Family Hi, my name is Linus and I would like to introduce myself as well as my family in the following. Due to my father’s job we moved in 2010 to Frankfurt and two years later to my father’s hometown of Berlin, where we live since then. From my father’s side I am German and from my Mother’s side also half Ethiopian. My parents met in Addis Ababa, the capital of Ethiopia, where my father was working for 4 years from 2000 to 2003, building and upgrading 6 Airports, the capital airport as well as 5 domestic airports. My Hobby is playing tennis in a club where I met one of my closest friends. With my other friends from school, we meet often at the weekend where we either play football/soccer or we just talk about things we are all interested in including hobbies, school etc at one of our friend's house and sometimes have like big sleep overs form like five to eight people. At football/foccer I’m not very good but I do like to watch the games, that’s why we sometimes watch games of clubs we like and if there not to expensive. We love to go to festaurants, like for Sushi, Indian Food, Mexican Food etc. If I’m not playing Tennis or being with my Friends I either study, watch a movie or my series or go out with our dog. When I am at home, I like to cook my own food, because it makes me happy to see that I am good at this and every time I eat my food it’s like a sense of achievement. I also learned from my grandmother how to bake an apple cake with our own recipe. Maybe I can show you how to bake a German style apple cake or Cheesecake, I am still learning how to bake our Cheesecake but I think by the time I’m in the US I will know it. My Dad and I really like Steak so sometimes I can cook our perfect medium rare steak for us. All that was now about me, let's talk about my family. As I said my father is from Germany and my mother is from Ethiopia. If you don’t know Ethiopia, it’s a country in east Africa and it’s bigger than Germany. I was now in Ethiopia three times to visit my grandmother, uncles and aunts. I really do love the food in Ethiopia; my favourite is Injera. My grandmother's paternal side lives in Brandenburg, which is a State in Germany. I also have one older sister; she’s now 17 years old, and will be 18 by the time I start my exchange year. She works at a small fancy restaurant and café. At the time I go to the US she will have her high school graduation. What do I expect from my year abroad? It has been a dream for me to have a year abroad since I was a kid, my father inspired me, because he also went a year abroad back in the 80s and he always told stories about it and I really liked them. I want to spend this year abroad not just because of the stories from my father but also because of the culture, the school system, the people, history etc. as well as improving my social abilities. I also did once a three week student internship at the airpot fire brigade. It was truly one of my favourite school projects I have ever had. I had to be there at 8 am, which was sometimes really stressful, because even though my father works at the airport, he sometimes does work from home. So my father couldn’t drive me every morning, so I had to go there on my own out of Berlin. With the trains and busses, I needed one and half an hour to get there. My favourite experience there was extinguishing a dummy airplane. To do that, I used a joystick to move the arm of the firetruck. This firetruck contains 12.000 liter of water in there. To extinguish a fire you can also use foam and powder, luckily there wasn’t a fire at the time of my internship, but if there were they could have used foam or powder. The reason why we didn’t use foam and powder in exercises is that it is terribly environmentally harmful. I also really liked the turntable ladder. I could use it twice, but we couldn’t go to the limit once because the wind was too strong that day. When I first used it we could go all the way up to 41 meters (134 feet), and I had an incredibly nice view over the whole airport. On our photo set we will upload, you can see how massive these firetrucks were. In the summer holidays we often travel through Europe. Lately we didn’t travel so much/so far, because of Covid. My favourite vacation was 2019 where we had a caravan and went to the Alps where my Dad and I had a great climbing on the second highest mountain of Germany. We stayed there for like 4-5 days, after the Alps we drove further to Venice/Italy. There we just went sight seeing and had one of the best Ice Cream I have ever had. Then I had the great idea to continue to Croatia which is not very far. Croatia is a wonderful country on the Mediterranean. There we visited the most attractive campground with lots of things to do. I hope you could get a nice and friendly impression from me. I am looking very much ahead to spend this year in the US and I am sure that it will become a major event in my life. Yours, Linus