Hi there everyone!
I've finally got round to setting this blog up. I shall try and update it on a regular basis (once a week or so) so that if you're interested you can have a look at what I'm up to, just so that I don't have to send out mass emails to everyone all the time, although if you do want an me to email me you just send me one and I will reply.
I thought for my first post I would just give a big general fill-in on the trip over, what it's like where I live, who I live with etc, etc, so here we go!
The trip over was pretty horrible, twelve hours from Auckland to LA, although the seven other Kiwi kids were pretty cool, however, when we got into the airport three of them got held back in immigration for three hours because they forgot a rather important visa form, silly children. For a while we didn't think they were going to get through but after several messages from a scary Mexican guy who worked at the airport they managed to come through.
After that little setback we went our separate ways to our various gateways, except for Emma (the other NZ student flying into New York) and I who had to sit in LAX doing sweet FA for another seven hours until our flight. About twenty minutes before we boarded though we ended up involved in this minor fiasco in which twenty or so Italians for some reason didn't have boarding passes and made it onto their flight just as the doors were closing.
Anyway, Emma and I flew into NYC which took another five or six hours. I was quite annoyed because as we flew in we couldn't seeanything at all, but oh well.
Once we got to the airport we went our separate ways as Emma was being flown to upstate New York right near the border of Canada while I was sent to a hotel to wait for my bus which was due in about twelve hours. We weren't allowed to leave the hotel so once again I'm kind of annoyed that I barely got to see New York at all, but oh well. When I first got there I went to get breakfast and ended up sitting at a table with these six or seven intimidatingly beautiful Norwegian girls who just sat there speaking Norwegian well I sat there feeling very awkward, my Norwegian not quite being up to scratch and all. But there must have been close to a hundred AFS students at the hotel waiting for various busses and most of them were lame and formed these tight-knit little national groups; the Norwegians were particularly bad. There were about twenty of them and they spent the whole time sitting in a corner together speaking Norwegian and tap tap tapping away on the really flash Apple laptops they all had. I did my best to mingle though (I was the only Kiwi so I didn't really have much choice anyway) and ended up in this cool litle multinational group consisting of myself, a Flemish boy and girl, two Danish girls, an Italian girl, and an Indian boy.
As I say we were trapped in this hotel for about twelve hours but then the time to catch my bus finally rolled around. There were approximately ten of us on the bus to Harrisburg/somewhere else but for the most we all just fell asleep and didn't talk. On the way out we drove though a part of the Bronx, and my god, I am so glad I don't live there; bombed out buildings, graffiti, homeless and destitute, poverty, pollution, it was pretty depressing. However as we left the city we drove over the George Washington bridge, which was incredible.
Now in a hotel in Harrisburg for our orientation myself, Kaja and Anja from Norway, and Victoriano from Chile are met by my host sister Julie and her boyfriend Joey (who both volunteer for AFS) plus another AFS volunteer called Bob for our orientation. Basically what this entailed was stern emphasis of the rules of AFS (no drugs, no driving, no hitch-hiking etc), a warning to Victoriano and I that apparently American girls are VERY aggressive and a reaffirmation of how we'll only get out of this experience what we put in, which seems like a fair enough statement.
After this we were picked up by our host families; Victoriano was staying somewhere in Hershey (yes, as in Hershey's chocolate, it's about a forty-five minute drive from where I live), I honestly cannot remmber where Kaja went but Anja lives about a five minute wak from my house and will be going to the same school as me, so I've been hanging out with her a bit.
Anyway, once the other three had been picked up Julie and Joey took me home to meet the rest of my family.
Now before I go any further I would just like to state that I am the fifth AFS student they have had, and there is a little wall of fame type thing just outside the kitchen with pictures of all of them, a photo of which I will attach.
So, I live with my host-father Drew Hagerty, my host-mother Nancy Hagerty, my host-sister Julie Hagerty and their two cats Sebastian and Daisy. Sebastian is incredibly huge, as in beyond belief, if you thought Buster was a big cat (those of you who know him) you know nothing of big cats, and then Daisy is incredibly old clocking in at sixteen.
They/We live in a moderately sized house on 35 Bobby Jones dr, Etters, Pennsylvania, although the Etters bit is a little confusing as we actually live in Valley Green, Etters is just the name of the post office, go figure... Valley Green is... I'm not quite sure what it is, it's sort of like a developement with just houses, or like a detached suburb of Harrisburg (the capital of Pennsylvania) which is about a ten minute drive to the north.
They're all really nice and have made me feel really welcome, Julie and her boyfriend Joey in particular who have taken me out a lot and shown me things and hung out with me and just generally been really great.
After I'd been here for a few days my host-parents also took me and my Norwegian friend Anja to a baseball game, first American thing w00t! It was so much better than cricket, kekeke.
It was good fun though, and the Amerians get really into it all, stamping and screaming and singing and carrying on and such. I would NOT like to be the guy who has to catch the balls that the batter misses though, because the pitchers throw SO fast, and not a bowl or anything, they just throw it really really hard.
And check out what I found on the way to the baseball!!
I've also been drafted into the school marching band. A few days after I got to my host family a boy who lives two houses down called Greg (who looks unsettlingly like Jesse) had a little graduation celebration thing and my family was invited so I went along and spent a bit of time hanging out with Greg and his friends, most of whom were a part of the Redland Highschool marching band (although two or three of them had graduated). It somehow came up that I played drums and they all started trying to convince me to join because someone in it had just broken their ankle and was effectively going to be out of action for the whole season. I'd just like to note as well that Greg is an incredible snare drummer, I would say that he is probably better tha Walter (for those of you who know who I'm talking about) and he's all of like eighteen or nineteen. Anyway, I told them I probably wasn't going to do it but then a few days later Greg just turned up at the door and was pretty much just like "I'm taking you to band practice tommorow" so I was kind of like well I may as well go once to see what it's like and it could be a good way to meet people to. So I went along to this band practice with him and it actually turned out that it's really fun and it seemed like they really wanted me to join so I figured I may as well.
Although, doing this is probably the biggest commitment I've ever made to anything in my life, there are practices from 6 till 9 every Monday and Thursday, then we play at football games every Friday evening, and then have pratice and competitions on Saturdays from 9 in the morning till 5 in the evening. Normally this would be quite an issue for me, but the way I'm looking at it is that it's a great way to meet people, it's fun, and also it'll be done by the first week of November, so that means two months of intense band with not much else but then I come out of it with a whole load of friends (hopefully) and I still have the other ten months of my exchange to do everything else I want to do.
Also, in my first four or five days I somehow managed to lose six kgs, I'm back up two but I'd like the other four back, go figure...
Well that's all I can think of for now, I've probably forgotten things but hopefully you get the gist of things thus far, and I apologize for this post's obscene length also :D
Lots and lots of love
