Dear Host Family, I hope you’re doing great. It’s an extremely pleasure for me to have the opportunity to go on an exchange year and maybe go through this journey with you, thank you for considering me! My Name is Jakob and at the moment I am 14 years old. Together with my family I live in southwestern Germany near the Black Forrest – a really wonderful place with many trees, fantastic wildlife and many cute places. My parents are my mum Christina and my dad Daniel – Mum is a lawyer and works in her own chancellery. My dad is an anesthesiologist and emergency physician. He works in a hospital and sometimes he flies to his patients with a helicopter – so he is some kind of a medical flight attendant. There are also my 5 years older sister Lena and my brother Philipp, who is 3 years older. Lena finished school last year and works for the last months in a social project as a paramedic. Philipp has one more year to finish school as well – after that he will start to study at university. So as you can see, I am the youngest member of our family! And I will be the first one to be part of an exchange year! This is absolutely awesome and I am really happy to get this wonderful opportunity. I would describe myself as an open-minded person. I'm interested in meeting new people and exploring new cultures. In our daily family life it is usual to meet for dinner and spend some time together to talk about all the interesting news in the world. We often discuss important situations that happen in the world and for me it is important to get an own view and make my own opinion. Looking back in my 14 year old life, there are really two extremely important experiences for me in my life: when I was 3 years old, my family and I started to visit the world every year: we started with a journey to the famous Seychelles, visited Bali/Indonesia one year later and spend our next holidays in Tanzania/Africa, Maldives/Indian Ocean, The United States of America, Mexico, Costa Rica and certainly many european countries as Italy, France, Spain, Austria and the very near Suisse. Because I was very young when we started I cannot remember every trip in detail, but traveling around the world seems to be a fundamental part of my life! It is so interesting to meet the world, to learn a lot about the culture and religion of different people, to hear new languages and taste their food. These impressions brought me to my strong wish to continue my interest in traveling after I have finished school by working as a flight attendant for some months or years and make traveling my profession. When we visited the United States of America in 2018 I was very impressed by this great country, its nature and the open minded people I met in New York, California and the national parks in the west. From this first visit I decided to learn more about the USA and get more practice in the language. After a second visit to the US in this spring my decision to be part of an exchange program was strengthened! As you can see, traveling around the world is my first important experience – but there is another one: For me dancing is a fantastic passion and it’s the most important thing in my daily life. It’s not only dancing! I love also choreographing my own dancing routines and watching other people dancing. My main dance style is HipHop but I also dance Heels, Female and a bit of Popping. There are so many different types and styles of dancing, so many different people and so many interesting moments while performing and exercising the dances. Very often we dance in a group – and these moments in moving together is a really wonderful experience! Dear host Family! Being part of your family for the exchange year will give me the opportunity to tell you a lot of our German and European lifestyle! I am really interested in your life and your opinions! Perhaps I will be able to be some kind of a connector between our continents and our countries! I am looking forward to trying this! Kindly regards Jakob