Teresa Hofer

2009-10 Inbound from Germany

Hometown: Braunschweig, Germany

Sponsor: Braunschweig-Hanse Rotary Club, District 1800, Germany

Host: Gainesville Rotary Club, District 6970, Florida, USA

School: Buchholz High School, Gainesville, Florida

Bio

Teresa's Bio

Hi. First of all I want to thank all of you, who made it possible for me to become a Rotary Youth Exchange Student. It is a great gift and I am very happy about the opportunity to spend an entire year in Gainesville.

My name is Teresa Hofer and I am 16 years old. I live with my parents and my 13 year old brother in Braunschweig which is an ancient town in the heart of Germany. Braunschweig has 250,000 inhabitants and it is certainly worth a visit.

I really like going to school but even more than that I like to meet my friends, we go to the cinema or spend time together at home.

I hope that with the exchange year I can win more insights into my life, get to know new people and discover different aspects of life. I would like to use the time to think and consider who I am and what I eventually want to be, in a new and unknown situation. Maybe in such a situation I can discover new change and challenges or at least gather new strengths that I can then develop on.

November 25 Journal

Hello! I just came back from the Universal Studio's in Orlando, where I was for 2 days. It was a great and so nice present from my wonderful host family for my birthday. It was a great weekend out of a lot fun and thrill.

That reminds me that in only 3 weeks I see all the other exchange students again for the great Disney World trip. I am very looking forward for this , because if we are all together, everyone is always in a good mood and everyone has so much fun. Especially the weekend in St. Augustine was nice, to live with another exchange student in such nice host families. This weekend was wonderful, the great atmosphere, the nice city and the great day at the beach. The Halloween Party in Jacksonville was was so great too :)

My life here in Gainesville is so nice and since one month I play soccer for my High School, which is so much fun! It is such a great experience to play a sport for my High School, because in Germany this wouldn't be possible. My school in Germany has no school spirit at all and here the school spirit is so amazing. And this makes it even more fun to play soccer. I also joined the Rockclimbing Club of my High School, that I can go climbing in a rock gym every Tuesday and Thursday. Other clubs I joined are the German Club, of course, a club called Generations of Love, that is a club who celebrates with older people their birthdays, if they don't have a family anymore. And I joined the Interact Club of my School.

Last weekend I was at a big foxhunting event, which was very impressive. First I thought that they would kill the cute foxes, but it turned out that it wasn't a live hunt and the "fox" was a rider on a horse with a bag of dog food :) It was fun!

Now that it is almost Thanksgiving, time runs so fast, my first host family change is nearly there, which is kind of sad because I really like and love my host family and they made my life here so much easier, so it is going to be very sad, when the time is there to say goodbye! But I also look forward to see how life is in my second host family.:) Now I am excited for my first real American Thanksgiving.

Happy Thanksgiving to everyone!

March 18 Journal

Hello. I just came home from a nice bike ride with my host sister. It was nice, the weather was nice and warm too. But the weather wasn't like that all the time this winter/spring. Once I had a conversation with my friend, who is an exchange student in Alaska and it was warmer there than here in Florida. This was in the middle of January.

And I saw snow, snow in Florida. Ok, you can't really call it snow, I was on my way to a soccer game and it started to "rain" little snowflakes. We stopped and tried to catch the snowflakes, it was so much fun. Because for everyone here, it was I think in years, the first time it snowed, so it was even more fun. We made a little snowman, as our mascot for the soccer game we had. And it helped, we won both our games we had that day.

Sadly the soccer season was over after 2 more games. But it was a real experience to be part of such a wonderful team. To play soccer for your high school, to meet your soccer friends every day after school to practice, to become a team and in the end of the season we were that team, so it was hard when it came to the end and you had no practice after school anymore.

So I thought that I want to play another sport after soccer, so I started to play lacrosse, a sport I only had heard about in books or movies, but had never seen it played before. So I thought it would be a great idea to play a sport I wouldn't be able to try in Germany. And it was the right choice. I fell in love with the sport, and will miss it when I go back, like so many other things. Time is going by and so is my year, I can't believe it. I am having a good time trying new things I have never done before. Like lacrosse and soccer, I never sang in a choir, food and so many other things I would never try in Germany, I learned so many things about different countries, the United States, different people and myself.

My Rotary Club organized a big Wild Game Feast, which is a fundraiser for the club, around 2000 people came and it was awesome. So much food and fun. The food was “wild”, they had frog legs, gator tail, python... A big thanks to my Rotary Club for inviting me!

Also I want to thank my wonderful Rotary Club for sponsoring the two awesome trips we did. In December we went to Disney World for four days. It was “disneylike” magical. I had such a great time. Being there with all the exchange students and experience Disney world. The rides where incredible and it was so nice to make such great friends there. I will miss everybody when I have to go back.

The other trip was in January, it was the trip to the Florida Keys. After 12 hours in the bus, we were there. I fell in love with Keys. The view, the sea and the Seacamp. It was all in all wonderful. The weather was so good too, when we left Gainesville, the weather was still very cold and rainy, but when we first stepped out of bus, it was evening, it was still nice and warm! The next day was the first day we went swimming and snorkeling, first we had to pass a swim test and our teamer didn't want us to go into the water with our wetsuits for the test, and the water was sooo cold. But after 5 minutes you couldn't feel it anymore, and then it was ok. Then our first trip out on the sea, was so much fun, this time we had our wetsuits on and it was very nice to snorkel, the sad thing was, that due to the fact that it was so cold this winter, many of the animals and plants died and were gone and you couldn’t see that far, because it was really windy and though the sand the water was really cloudy. It was still amazing. The whole trip was great, and I think we all had a great time.

I will move soon, and it is sad, not that I don’t want to move, of course I am looking forward to it too. But I really enjoyed my time with my host family and it is going to be hard to say goodbye. Thank you so much!

Yesterday was Saint Patrick's Day and it was quite an experience for me because I knew about it but I never really "celebrated" it. In the morning, I was woken up by the smell of pancakes, but this weren't normal pancakes, we had awesome green! pancakes, and they were really good! The school was interesting too! You HAD to wear green. Because the rule was if you don't wear green you got punched from the others, but luckily my host family reminded me in the morning.

That’s it for today! I want to thank everyone who makes this my exchange year for me possible.