Dear host family, First of all, I would like to thank you for hosting me for ten months! You are making my dream come true. This experience is very important to me. Thanks to your hospitality, I will experience a new culture and, I hope, make strong friendships. I look forward to sharing my experiences with you and learning all about you. What do you love? What do you like to do as a family? I really hope that we can bond and build extraordinary memories and experiences of everyday life together. I think I am a reliable, open, and flexible person. My friends describe me as talkative, sociable, and friendly. I am also playful and love to joke around. I love listening to music and watching movies. I recently started watching a TV series in English to improve my English comprehension before leaving Italy. I love listening to people, in fact. Indeed, after high school I would like to study psychology. My goal is to improve people’s life in a positive way. One of my great passions is traveling. I love discovering new cultures, trying food I've never tasted before, and understanding customs, lifestyles, etc. I am grateful to my family for taking me to so many beautiful places, but one that has remained in my heart is Malaysia, everyone there was so helpful and kind. I also love cooking. It relaxes me and is my way of saying “I love you” to my loved ones. I love baking, cooking typical Italian dishes, but also experimenting with food from other countries; I hope that together we can share days where we all cook together and then eat all the delicious things we have made. Another thing I like to do is crochet, it allows me to express my creativity. For example, I make tops, sweaters, toys, and bags. I also really like sports. I used to swim, but I stopped when I was eleven because of Covid. However, I found another sport: karate. When I'm in the USA, I'd really like to try sports I've never done before, such as cheerleading. What are your hobbies? What are your passions? I hope we can share some together! My family consists of three people: me, Angelica, my mother Elena, and my father Marcello. I had a brother, Gabriele, severely disabled, who passed away 3 years ago. You can imagine the sorrow we experienced, but it also made even more determined and appreciative of the opportunities life can provide me with, such as this program. We live in a house in northern Italy. We share everything: free time, vacations, household chores... My mother takes care of most of the housework, but we all help with cooking and cleaning. I have a great relationship with my parents: I don't hide anything from them and that's why they trust me. They give me a lot of freedom, and I have never lost their trust. In Italy, I attend a high school called “economico-sociale”, where I study humanities (psychology, anthropology, sociology, and research methodology), law, and economics, as well as English and French. On a school day, I usually get up early in the morning, take the bus, go to school and when I get home, I have lunch, talk to my mother about what I did during the day, and then do my homework and sport; in the evening, after dinner, my family and I like to watch a movie together. In the United States, I hope to maintain a moment in the day when we share how our days went. I hope I will manage to build a strong relationship with you: I would like for you to be able to trust me and consider me part of your family. Overall, in the USA, I’d like to grow as a person, learn how to relate to people with a different culture through daily life together. I’d like to find a new home away from home and to be happy, as well as making you all happy for having me there! Thank you! Love, Angelica