bitte durchlesen und verbessern wenn möglich
danke schon mal im voraus
Dear host family,
First of all I would like to thank you for welcoming me in your family for almost one year and giving me the chance of getting to know how an American family lives.
I am very curious about this exchange and I am looking forward to experience your country.
To get you to know me a little better I would like to tell you something about me, my hobbies, my family and why I chose the USA for my exchange year.
My name is Christian and I am 16 years old but when I come to the USA I’ll be 17. I live in a small village that has about three thousand inhabitants (about 60 miles north of Cologne). My family consists of four persons: My father Klaus, who´s 44 years old and works as a self-employed financial adviser. Then there´s my mother who´s also 44 and does two times the week gymnastic with children aged from three to ten. My sister Carina is 17 years old and goes to a professional school. There she wants to make an education as a design-technical-assistant. In my opinion, I´ve got a good relationship to all family members. With my sister I can talk about nearly all themes. Of course there are sometimes little conflicts but mostly we forget them very fast. At home I help my parents or my grandfather, who lives with my grandmother next to us, e.g. in the garden to mow the lawn, bring out the rubbish, vacuum-cleaning or tidy up my room. To earn some extra money I work with a friend on a court, there I help his father by different tasks.
I´m a student in the 10th grade and I go the Mariengymnasium in Bocholt. School starts at 8 am and usually ends at 1:15 pm. One lesson lasts 45 minutes so we have 6 lessons a day. Of course we have breaks between them two big ones, they last 15 minutes and three small ones, over 5 minutes. In the breaks I actual always sit with my friends in a small kiosk where we can eat and drink something. My favourite subjects are Math, Computer science and Sport. For me, sport in school is very important because you can move and have fun with your classmates in different games or practices. I´ve been learning English for 5 years and my second foreign language French for 3 years now and, of course, my mother tongue is German. After my high school year I´ll still have to graduate 2 more years on the Mariengymnasium. After finishing school I´ll maybe go to a university or make an education with the focus on computer science.
My hobbies are doing sports, meeting friends and play different card games with them, listen to music or chat in the Internet. The most important one is soccer, which I do 3-4 times the week in a club. There it never becomes boring because I meet my friends and we laugh very much together and my coaches are also very nice. At the weekend we have one match which we challenge homewards or outwards. In addition I´m a big fan of FC Schalke 04, it is a soccer club close to us, and so when we have got tickets I go with my father and my friends to a match. That is each time very exciting because the atmosphere is always magnificent.
When I was in grade 8 I already learned something about an exchange. We did a school trip over 5 days to England (in Hastings; direct by the southern coast). There we stayed with 2 or 3 pupils in a host family. I liked it and it was very interesting to live in another family for some days. Of course you can´t compare it with an exchange over one year but I think that I did some good experiences.
I think that my high school year will be a big chance to learn more about myself, the USA; especially the popular ´American Way of Life´, and another big reason is of course to improve my English. Besides I want to become more independent and maybe to form international friendships for the life. Because you want to accommodate me for almost one year I believe that you will be interested just as much in the German culture like me in the American and so I want to make the German culture a bit accessible to you and your family.
I hope you enjoyed reading my letter and getting an association who I am.
So I am looking forward to staying with you and I hope we will enjoy the time together.
Yours sincerely,