Happy Birthday Art, good bye Art and why riding your bike is fun!!

Happy Birthday!

Good Bye!

Yes, everybody wish a Happy Birthday to Artturi(I learned how to spell his name ;D), and say good bye! He left yesterday, after only beeing able to stay two weeks overhere ): . He's going to some family friends in Illinois before he takes the first plane back to Finland. His parents just want him out of this area and back home after what has happened with the chasing by the gang I told you about. His 18th Birthday was on Friday, so we kinda did a little Birthday/Good-Bye Party in the garage, but more later.

Again the update on how my school's going: Perfect! :D I'm still having a lot of fun, though it's school overall, so it's not that much fun ;P. My grades didn't really change since last week, only in Math I managed a 125 % (Extra credit problem...) on the last test, so I'm on a B now and I just checked Edline (you can check your grades online there), and somehow I managed to get a B in Physics, too (I don't know how though, because I failed the last two tests (one with 60 % ( You pass above 60 -.-) and the other one miserably , but apparently he curved them very much :D)). So now I have 5 A's and 2 B's, and since this is the last week of the quarter I don't really think it's gonna change alot anymore before the quarter ends. I'm really happy with that :)


Nothing really interesting happened over the week, besides Art coming every single day (for the two weeks he had been here he was in the garage every single night ! :D) to play pool with me. That's the reason why I will miss him, nobody to train with, so i won't get better as fast :O
So about the party :D It was fun and about 15 people showed up, even the language coordinator of the organisation, Anthony, showed up with his wife and kids. We kinda just played pool and ate the pizza they ordered no dancing or anything like at the Valentines party :D

Art's birthday cake

Some of the people there

But again, it was mostly exchange students that showed up and even if they didn't all speak in their languages I always seem kinda awkward if it's just other exchange students, just because (this may seem stupid and rude but ok ^^) I personally think I'm here to experience the American culture not the korean/spanish/brazilian/... one, though it's interesting hearing about them and so on, but I would like more american people at the parties ;D So I mostly kinda talked to Art (well he was the one the party was about ;D) and the two Americans Lauren and Andre, that were there. It was fun though and I played alot of pool again :D (The score me and Art ended: 25 games for him/23 for me). The party pretty much ended at 1 when everybody had left besides Art himself :) .

Saturday: Road Trip ! YAY! :D

On Saturday we left Crown point and went down to Indianapolis for a birthday of two of Sandy's relatives. The ride was about 2 h each way, but the temperature difference from here to there was incredible it was in the forties (about 5 ° C) an raining in Crown Point when we leaft:

Where we came from...

Butwhen we reached Indianapolis it was sunny and up in the seventies (~ 25 °C), so it really felt like summer:

Where we went...

Since it was such a good weather I decided to borrow one of the relatives' bikes and went off for a bike ride most of the afternoon. It was really good to ride a bike againa after such a long time, but the neighborhood was kinda boring, the only interesting I found was a River and later a Burger King, where I bought a milk shake :D

The fartest point from the house I biked too, a place called "Dirtworks LLC" :D

It was really fun though and after that we had dinner there (Barbecue :) ) and watched the kids open their gifts before we left for crown point at about 5:45. We came here at 8:00, but the night was far from over.

First it seemed like nobody would show up and it would be a very "boring" night, but after I had told Lou I was bored because there was nobody there suddenly the garage got crowded in a blink :O About 15-20 people, all in Little Lou's age, showed up so we had another big crowd there with more pool (Me and little Loud managed to win 3 team games in a row, YAY! :D). I went to bed at about 3 o'clock (4 o'clock new time, daylight saving started here yesterday :)).


A rather short blog entry's end.

Fat "Mardi Gras" Tuesday, Poker and more Pool than you can imagine!!

Happy March! :D I really couldn't think of a fitting beginning this time really so I decided to start with the new month, since with March I'm always 3 months here already :O


Update on school in the beginning, like always ;D: I'm doing very fine my grades for the third quarter will be: 5 A's (W. Hist/Eng 10/Morality/MusicTheory/Latin III) and 2 C's ( H. Alg 2 + Trig (yeah, unfortunately I wasn't too good in the first and third test, and the math teacher is the only one that doesn't give any grades besides the tests) + H. Physics (Yeah well, I told you so often it's that hard, but for the 4th quarter I should be able to get it up to a B at least, since I'm constantly getting better (though the topic at the moment is very hard again :/))). I think that's pretty good, since both classes I got a C are Honors (you are considered to be one grade better in normal classes) and aren't really supposed to be taken by sophomores (3 sophs in my math class and I'm the only one in my Physics class), so I'm totally happy with my grades, even more 'cause I'm not really working too hard at all ;).


Let's get to the more interesting part again, this time though it's not all on the weekend:

Art!!! ;D

Art (the new finnish exchange student now living across the street I told you last week about (actually his name is something like "artturi" (or sth. like that ;P), but it's pronounced so complicated, that nobody's able to do it, so everybody calls him Art :D)), is definately the most addicted Pool player ever :D. Beginning on Monday night, he came over every single night (besides Tuesday (look at the title to know why, or scroll down ;P)), and played Pool for at least 2 hours, so I got alot of practise this week, since he's pretty good! I even managed a combo cut bank shot (explanation : cue--->one ball--->cuts other ball(combo)--->bank--->long way --->pocket :D), I called :O. He's a very nice guy too, and he told us the temperature we're having right now (about 25-35 F (-5 - 3 ° C (approx. not calculated ;D))) is like june in Finnland :O.


So why didn't he come over on Tuesday?! We went with Sandy to her church to a Mardi Gras, also called Fat Tuesday "party" :D. If you're thinking what the heck is Mardi Gras, you're the same as I was ;D It's kinda like the "last day of karnival", since you also can dress up, but actually it's just having alot of (in this case very good ;)) food, because it's the last day before the 40 day lent before easter (I hope Germans now also know what I'm taking about, since led isn't the most common word ;D). There was alot of food and especially the dessert was very good :D. It wasn't really a party though, since it just ended up that all these more or less old people sat together and talked ;D But hey I had fun, good food and texted too much that night (50 (or more I don't know^^) texts in 2 hours are too much in my oppinion but hey I didn't text that much this week anymore so I'm doing fine ;D). But hey, I learned a lot of funny stuff (I texted like 5 or 6 people to tell me something funny ;D) in those texts, e.g: (which (I don't remember who thought me that in Germany, but some english teacher did i think ;D) btw not means example given, but comes from the latin 'exempli grati' ;P): stupid pickup lines like: "If you would be a burger at McDonalds you would be the McGorgeous" :D.

Erin and Monica (a friend of Katherine (a friend of Erin ;D))

Enough of that let's get to the weekend again :P : Friday I spent in the garage again (ofc, why do I even tell you?! ;P) and it was again a very crowded day with about 15 people! That always makes it more fun than with just the normal ones ;D. A full overview followes now:
My age: Sol, Me, Art (scroll up to read more ;P), Erin(you should know her by now^^), Andre (black guy, was in the blog last week...), Zac( n/c), Monica (friend of Katherine), Katherine(friend of Erin's ;D), Jun Hi(n/c), Lauren (in enough pictures already so no more explanations ;D ;P)!

Katherine, Me and Erin

Lauren!!!!!! :D

Older: Little Lou (Lou's son for those who forgot ;P), his friend Matt (he's in the army), Lou himself, Jeff (Drums?! :P), Andrew (a 21 year old I talked to alot, since his grandparents are from Germany so he speaks German (no we didn't talk German like Koreans would have talked Korean ;P) and wanted to know alot about Germany), and 2 guys I don't remember the names even if they bet me and Art in team game of pool ;P.

The partly German, Andrew, who also played poker on Saturday

In the front Matt, behin him Little Lou, and Zac's the one who's got the funny light thing in his face ;D (It's a straw, I don't know who did it though ;P)

The night ended at about 2 for me (I went to bed ;P), after too much Pop (Diet Mr. Thunder is nothing like real Dr. pepper btw ;D) and alot of Pool.

Saturday: Sometime in the morning we picked up Dae Sang, a Korean exchange student at Andrean (yeah but he doesn't speak Korean with koreans all the time, so he's cool ;P), who also then spent the night. The day of the big poker game I announced last time! I can just tell you at the beginning I didn't make it :P. It really was fun though and I lost with a 50/50 chance so not too much my fault ;D. We were 11 people there, I don't know all the names though the ones I know: Zac, Me, Art, Bill (Zac's stepdad), Chase (Bill's cousin), Andrew and the rest doesn't matter ;P The first place was Chase, who took 175 $, second one was Bill himself, the host, who took 75 $ and the third one just got his 25 bucks buy-in back. The game started with 2 tables and lasted from 4:30 to 10 :O. I was out at about 7:30 though ): .

After that we again went over to the garage, but that night there weren't really a lor of people, just Sol, Me, Lou, Andrew, Erin(came late), Andre(came late), Dae Sang, Jun Hi, Art and Zac and Jeff. (Yeah I know, alot of names, but I explained every single one somewhere in this post, just search for that ;P) Since Dae Sang and Zac were staying over night we stayed up till about 4 before we went to bed, but it was ok I surprisingly didn't feel tired at all today, even if I was woken at 10 o' clock.

Sunday was rather boring and since I wrote so much confusing stuff already I won't tell you anything more ;P just a random picture of the Pop /Alcohol (not by the young people, all done by the older ones :O) finished on Friday, not even all of the pops though, Lou threw half of the cans away that night :D:

The End

P.S: Everybody gogogo ask questions, since this blog is probably even more confussing than the one with the Valentines party ;D

Uniform Violations, Embarrassing moments and a (rather) quiet weekend!

The first time I don't want to write this blog, cause there's not much to talk about, really, it just kinda happened to be a rather quiet weekend (ok, compared to weekends of other people it's still quite exciting), but hey you're expecting to read something tomorrow, so I'll fullfill my duty ;P

Again the beginning will consist of another school week, and this time even some funny stuff :) I'll start off with telling you again, I'm doing very good in all classes, even in Physics I'm getting better, I just checked the grade for my last quiz and it's a A *cheer*, for all those who are asking themselves, how did he check his grades on Sunday?!? Since Andrean is a privileged (;D) private school we have a thing called "Edline", where we can check our grades, homework and other news about our school in the internet, it's actually pretty cool, since you don't really need to remember homework anymore ;D (well, some teachers just don't use it (My latin teacher (too old ;P) and my physics teacher (doesn't want to :D) , but still it's pretty cool.) . So what funny things happened this week?!

Well to start in the order of my headline, the Uniform violation :D As I told you last week I bought new shoes, which I wore to school on Tuesday/Wednesday. I didn't think it was any problem, because 90 % of the people are wearing shoes other than the allowed dress shoes, but apparently it was for me :D On Wednesday Mr. Torres saw me with the shoes at lunch and I got a "Uniform Violation note" on Thursday :D I don't know why he picked me and not the other 123949 kids around me wearing the wrong shoes, but ok ;). It isn't anything bad though, I just wasn't allowed to participate in the "Dress down day" on friday, I had to wear uniform when the other students were wearing Andrean wear (Andrean related shirts/sweaters...).

The next more or less funny thing ( not really for me :/ ;D) was that I somehow (I really don't know how :D) managed to fall off my chair in music class. I was just sitting there right, not even tipping the chair or something, when I suddenly found myself on the floor again ;D But, hey if had to pick a class to fall off my chair it would certainly be music, there are just 8 people and I like them all, so it wasn't that embarrassing, just gave them a good laugh ;D


Now the rather quiet weekend: Again of course I spent the 2 evenings in the garage, with Friday being very, very quiet, only Zac, me, Sol, Andre (he was in the blog sometime before ;D) and Bryan (a very good friend of Lous, I think I mentioned him sometime before) and of course Lou (he's always there, so I don't mention him most of the time ;D) being there. I played some more pool, but at the moment I seem to be getting worse ;D. I headed to bed at about 2:30 since there wasn't really anything happening :D.

On Saturday I was woken by Zac texting, and then calling me at about 10:30 in the morning :O He asked me if I wanted to go to Best buy to buy a PC-game so we could play together later that day. That's pretty much what I then did the whole day, played PC-games with Zac/Jun Hi at their house, it was fun though, Jun Hi tought me some Starcraft, the most popular game in South Korea which is as popular as soccer in Germany, it even has its own tv channels :O


The garage was filled a little it more though that night, since I had invited Lauren, Erin (she brought a friend, Robin), Rachel (she didn't show up though, cause she was at her dads) and Andre again. Jun Hi, Zac, Sol, Jeff (the friend of Lou where I play the drums) and me of course where also there and later two friends of Lou (I'm sorry I don't remember the names ^^) showed up.

Erin, Lauren and Me

The people in my age all left pretty early (Lauren at 11, Zac + Jun Hi soon after that, Erin and Robin at 12 ) and since I was woken up that early that day I decided to go to bed pretty soon at abou 1, with only Andre being left, who was enjoying playing pool with Sol.

Me and Robin, in the back Jun Hi

The End of a rather short blog entry, next week I'll participate at a Poker game at Zac's house, with 25 $ buy in and about 15-16 people showing up it's gonna be alot of money to win and I'm really looking forward to it :D (If I win (which i don't think, Bill (Zacs stepdad) beat me twice in heads up after the party last week (starting with 6 people)), I'll buy the Dr. pepper bike Sandy found on the Internet and ship it to Germany :D).

A random picture of the drumset I'm practising on, it's very good actually nice cymbals, very good sounding toms, just the snare drum is kinda bad, but I'm probably spoiled from mine at home ;D

P.S: Today another exchange student arrived at our street, living at Jeffs (the one with the drums, remember ;D?!) , from Finnland, his name's Art (well actually it's something unpronouncable, but he goes by Art ;D) and he seems pretty cool (ahaha joke there ;P You got it?! (from Finnland, it's cold there---> cool xD)), he transfered from another host family, because it was living in a rather bad neighborhood, one time he was being chased by a gang with a gun :O

Parties with exchange students, bowling and shopping in a mall!

Happy Presidents Day people in Germany! That's why I was off school today, and not, because the teachers didn't want to teach like in Germany at the Karolinen-Gymnasium ;P

So again a little (it's gonna be less each week, I mean, it's school overall and not too interesting to hear about) update on my school life: The week went fine, with me actually managing to get a 80 % in my one physics quiz! At the moment I'm doing very well in every class and having no problems, I'm on straight A's through all classes besides Math (1. test was a C, 2nd one a A and he doesn't give grades other than the tests, but I'll fix that B ;)) and Physics, which is a C at the moment, but I'll certainly be able to get tthat up to a B, even if it's my hardest class, and my teacher has the reputation that his tests are unpassable :O. Actually I'm enjoying school a lot, since I don't have any classes I don't like, like I had in Germany , and most of my teachers are very nice. The most fun class is physics though, just because Mr. Clark has a very fun way of teaching (even if the material is very hard) and it's interesting, but I also like Math (of course ;D).

I think that's good enough for the "boring" stuff ;D Let's get to the more interesting part again the weekend *cheer*

Friday was a pretty normal evening, with only Sol, me, Little Lou (Lou's son for those who don't remember, I mentioned it in some other post), his friend mat and later another friend of him who I don't know the name of anymore ;). Little Lou promised me + Sol to take us paintballing when it gets warmer and I'm really excited about that, it should be a lot of fun :D. Zac wasn't there because he was at his fathers on friday (public schools had friday of (-.-")), so there weren't any more people my age besides Sol and me, but it was fun playing some pool and also some darts (I didn't even realise they also had a dart board in there before this weekend, but that's because they never used it, since nobody's really good at it ;)).

So now for saturday and the (Valentines (it had nothing to do with that really...)) party! Saturday started off quite boring though, preperations for the party had to been done, so I cleaned my room (well it wasn't too bad, but it wasn't bad I picked it up and cleaned it either ;P), vacuumed the living room and helped to clean the garage a little. But then the party: Sol and me actually invited a lot of people from AHS (Andrean High school, that abbreviation will now be more frequently used, since I don't want to write the full name ...), but Valentines day was apparently not such a good pick, since many people did stuff with their girl- + boyfriends, which they had told us, so we know there weren't too many to show up (3 people from AHS ( 2 left early), 3 from MHS (merrillville ...), + 1 from MMS (... Middle...))

Big Korean guy: Tommy; Big guy on the right: Zac from MHS, Asian in the middle: Alan from Hong Kong; On the left: Georeg + Lucas from Brasil; in the back left: People from spain/mexico

The picture shows pretty good that it was quite crowded though, because we had invited all the exchange students from AHS (and some from different schools) who were at the meeting I told you last week about. So the party didn't turn out too bad, though (like I had guessed when we invited all the exchange students) it was a lot of little groups that all spoke in their language (Korean/Spanish/Portugese), no other Germans though, just a girl from Belgium, but I wouldn't have talked German anyways, since I'm in the US at last, so there's no point :/ That kinda sucked, but still we had a lot of fun especially me, the kids from MHS/MMS/AHS and Dae Song (hope it's right like that ^^) another korean who wasn't speaking korean all the time (YAY! ;P).

From left to right: Me (ignore the stupid grin there please ;P), Lauren from MHS (she was in the post last week already) and Dae Song from MHS

Legendary was the moment when suddenly German Polka music started playing and I was made to dance to it (Most people at that time were in the house watching a movie, so they didn't see my miserable performance ;P), as you can guess I was really bad, but hey it was fun (probably more for those watching ^^) , even if I managed to brake a sign in the Garage (I really didn't mean too, I'm just too large for that garage ^^). I hope nobody got pictures of that ;P.

Charyl (one of the three girls from AHS) and me
Me, Lukas (a guy from Brazil) and Sol ducking down, scared of the camera ;P

The party officially ended at 12, but some people stayed overnight, so it went on to about 2 with that people (Sol and me ofc, Maryan (Ecuador), Lucas (Brazil), Tommy (Korea), Dae (Korea), John (Brazil) and Zac + Jun Hi of course, since the boys slept at their house). We went over to Zacs house at about 2 and went to sleep at about 4 (Dae, me and Zac sleeping in zacs room).

The party was officially over on sunday, but since the people who stayed overnight were staying a little bit longer, we had some fun playing Zacs video games and some Football (really fun, even if my team lost with 3:5 touchdowns) after getting woken by the smell of the breakfast (actually just Zac who then woke us, but hey ... ;P) at 8:30 (!). The day just kinda "drifted along" with dae, tommy and John (all living at the same host family) first being picked up after dinner, playing football a lot (just the one time with teams though), and later the day going back to the Garage to play some more pool and hang out.

But the day wasn't over yet :) After Tommy, Dae and John had left, Zac, me , Jun Hi, Bill (Jun Hi's host dad), Erin, Rachel (you should know them from last week, they're (respectevily) from MHS/MMS) and Chris (a gay (yes, I was scarred at first too (really ;P), but he turned out to be quite normal (most of the time ;P)) friend of Erin/Rachel) went bowling. We had to wait 45 minutes for a lane though, and just were able to do one game, but it still was alot of fun. I definately did my worst game for some time though, scoring only 92 points (my best was 153 once, and normally at least a hundred), but my team won by 3 points at the end, since we had Erin, who plays in the bowling team of MHS, who scored about 180 points on her own :O.
After we went back, I decided to sleep at zacs house again, since one of his other friends wasn't allowed to come over so he wanted somebody to hang out with. We fell to bed at about 1 o'clock after being really exhausted of the party and the football the next day after just having slept about 5 h.

Monday again wasn't a pacticularly quiet day either. I left Zacs house at about noon to head home, but at about 2 o ' clock I left again: Jun Hi, me, Erin, Rachel and Chris (btw: I know all the gay jokes that you guys are gonna write already, so please don't do it, that's not very nice ;P ;D) again went to the mall. (Sols legs were sore (no idea why, but...^^) and sadly there was no more room for Zac (you seriously need to plan 2 seats for him ;P). We had some fun there walking around, and I actually feel ashamed that I managed to spend 100 $ :D : New shoes/a shirt with the american flag (hey, I need souvenirs ;P)/a american eagle sweater (I didn't know it was a name brand, but I guess I should have guessed, since it was 30 $ and already marked down from 60 $ ;P) and 300 more minutes for my phone + something to eat. Jun Hi was riddiculous though, he seriously was shopping exactly like the stereotype of a girl shopping is: Trying on 123949 million different clothes, just buying name brands, stopping at every single store but just buying 3 pieces overall O.o, not even chris (who you would maybe expect to shop that way) or the girls were that picky or took that long. We left the mall at about 7:45, with Chris and Jun Hi stopping random people to ask them which shoes (they both bought new ones) they liked better. Somehow Jun Hi managed to win with a total of 6 people voting for him and 5 for Chris ;D.

Since I came home I have been writing this blog, so it took a long time, you should be thankful of how much time I spend for this ;P

I hope this entry was somewhat understandable, since it were a lot of different names from different countries a lot of places and if you somehow weren't able to understand anything write in the shoutbox, I'll try to explain :)

The End, with another picture:

Pool!!!!! ;D

Baby showers, the garage and "apples to apples"

YO YO YO YO YO YO YO YO YO YO YO YO YO YO YO YO, What's poppin' ? ;P (what's poppin' = what's up... and just to get this clear: This is NOT how I or other people talk in the US, I just thought it to be a funny start ;))

Another week, another blog entry, YAY! So what is up?! First the brief update on school again: Everything's going perfectly fine and I'm enjoying it as much as school is enjoyable ;). The biggest difference in the school from Germany, I think, is that there are NO grades on what (and if you at all) you say in class, so sometimes nobody even cares to respond to a question, because it doesn't matter. Also the homework is always graded and takes a pretty big part in your final grade.
Also there aren't really any breakes in school (Homeroom though mostly ends up being a break but ok) just the 30 min lunch. But still I really like school so far...

But now to the more interesting part, as always, the weekend :)
Friday night was more of a quiet day in the garage, only Sol, Jun hi, me, Little Lou (Lou's son) and his friend Matt were there. (Zac's sick that's why he didn't show up, like he normally does)
It was fun though, I'm getting quite decent at pool, beating Sol twice, while loosing twice (all of those were really narrow games though) and the best thing: Little Lou promised me to take me to paintball some time when it gets warmer, Yeah! We went to bed at about 1:30, not too late, but I woke up at 10 o'clock since Sandy was vacuuming ):

She was cleaning the whole house, since there was a baby shower (for those who don't know what it is: You throw a party when somebody's pregnant so they get a lot of presents ;)) at our house. Since it's very girly (apparently, the whole house was decorated in pink :O) me and Jun Hi decided to flee the house and take a walk, since it was the warmest day since I came here (I think about 12/13 °C) and we went to check out the neighborhood the first time, finding some shops where we bought some ice cream (you need to take the chance when it's that warm ;P) and met a guy from the bus, Andre. We then went back and spent the rest of the day in the garage hiding from the baby shower (;P) and later trying (yes trying, we both were kinda bad ...) to throw a football. In the evening we then also met Erin, Andre and Lauren, all people from the bus and played some football with them, before we headed back to the garage.

Lauren and me

Erin, Andre and me

So we stayed there for some time, but eventually Lauren and Andre left, so Jun Hi, me and Erin went over to a little park, where Erin's brother and friends were hanging out. We stayed there for some time, but went to Erin's house soon, since it was getting quite chilly again. There we (well actually, just the girls did, but ok) played a Singstar like game before coming to the last part of the heading:

"Apples to Apples" A really fun cardgame ! It's very simple but very funny though :) Each round there's one theme card and everybody needs to put down cards that, in his oppinion, fit the theme, from his hand of 7 cards. (e.g: Theme: Awesome You put down: Watermelons or Independence Day or Girls or....) each round somebody then needs to decide which one's the best fitting card, and this person gets a point. It gets really funny when there are totally different words on the table like for example: Soft--- Barbed Wire, and since somebody's judging most of the time it ends up the most funniest thing wins (e.g: disturbing---> Girlfriends :P (No I didn't put that one ;D)).

On Sunday I slept till 12:30 so after I got up I immediately left for a meeting of the exchange students with the organisation. They didn't tell us anything interesting though, so I won't tortue you with a more detailed description of what they told us besides the fact, the WILL DEFINATELY send us home when something happens that shouldn't ;D

The rest of the sunday I spent doing some homework, practising to throw the football again with Jun Hi and just hanging out with Jun Hi, Erin, Lauren and two more girls from the bus...

DR. PEPPER!!!!!!!!!!!!! :D (Yes, Cherry and Vanilla tastes good too :))

The End.

P.S: All wish me luck for my physics test tomorrow!