school

school started again 3 weeks ago. right now it`s not that busy yet but it will be once my next internship has started! during four weeks I will teach 4 P.E lessions a week in a school close to where I live (about 10 minutes away). for those who don`t know: the school i`m going to is in Bern. the neighborhood is really cool and it`s fun to be there because the streets af filled with students. here`s a pic of what the main street there looks like.

there are school buldings spread all over down and I have to change building quite often. the one where we have music is on the other side of the river (it`s called Aare) and you have a great view from there because it`s on a hill.
in a couple of weeks I can substitute for a teacher I know in the school where I already did the musical during summer. so I already know the school and some of the kids. it should be fun!

cambodia

last friday i got back from a 2 week trip to cambodia. my sister is working there since january of this year. she`s an optician and is checking the eyes from kids and staff in the orphan homes in cambodia. a friend of ours and i decided to visit her! so here you can see our friend Anja, me :-) and my sister Tabea.After spending the weekend in the capital (Phnom Penh) we drove to the coast in Sihanouk Ville and from there we took a boat to a lonely island out in the ocean.
Usually the tourists stay just during the day and go back with the boat in the afternoon. but we stayed there 2 nights and 3 days. there are about 30 cambodians living on that island. mostly fishermen i think. 2 guys were running the one and only restaurant on the island and also took care of the bungalows.

this was our lillte bungalow. there was room for 4 people to sleep in and we even had our own bathroom. that was very special because all the other houses didn`t have a bathroom. there were 2 toilets in a seperate house. if you wanted to take a shower you just grabed something like a big cup, filled it with water from a barrel and poured it over you. it was fun, believe me!!
there really was nothing to to there besides reading your book in the hamock, swimming in the warm blueish green water or take walkes on the beach. on the other side of the island there was a big nice beack with no houses or people. awesome!
as you might guess we totally had a good time there, enjoyed every minute of doing nothing and tried to burn the great views into our mind so we could remember when we`re back home in cold switzerland.


after another weekend in town we could join tabea and the 2 cambodians she`s training on a trip to 6 orphan homes in the province to bring the glasses. of course the roads there are sometimes not what we think roads should look like. so the trip took a while even though it was not that far of a distance.
one of the orphan homes is built on the water. actually the whole village there is built on floats on a lake. during raining season a big part of cambodia is covered with water. so building your home on a float is not a bad idea.

the kids from the orphan homes were very trusting and came to us, sitting on our laps, holding our hands, jumping on us, playing around. it was so much fun. they seemed really happy in their homes!

it was very fascinating to see the look on people`s faces when they first looked through their new glasses. one lady was blind on one eye and couldn`t see very well on the other one. so they made glasses for her to see in the distance but also to read. my sister gave her a book - the bible- to see if the glasses do their job. she started reading out loud and her voice became all shaky because she was so touched! if you want to see some pics from the people we gave the glasses to, visit my sisters blog on www.tabeas.blogspot.com


i`m very thankful that i was able to go visit my sister in her environment there in cambodia. it was awesome and just a very refreshing trip!

aladdin

as some of you might now: since almost a year i`m practicing with kids from the school where i live for a musical called "aladdin". it`s based on the disney movie from 1992 an brought to stage. we adapted it, added some new parts, wrote additional songs. there are 150 kids on stage, 30 people in the orchestra and almost all the teachers from the school involved in this projekt.

yesterday night we had premiere. it was awesome! the kids were really focussed on their parts and did great. there are things that can and will be improved. but we have another 13 shows, so we have plenty of time :-)

here some pictures to het an impression of what we`re doing.


Bazar in Agrabah


Prince Ali`s cortege and town folks


Aladdin and Genie, the ghost of the lamp

motor bike

only just about 1 month after my last post life in switzerland is SO different :-) summer`s already here, cherry and apple trees had been in full bloom, everything turned green again and people are in total summer mood! i love it!

i myself am in summer mood too. since 10 days i`m owner of a motor bike. well actually it`s my sisters bike but she`s not here for one year and she allowed me to borrow it while she`s away. it`s so much fun!
last saturday i had a course with a driving teacher (he`s a student in the same school i go to. his original job is driving teacher, so he really knows what he`s doing). and today i`m going again.

here`s a picture of my bike (and me :-) )

What can I say?? Winter is back in switzerland. We`ve had the most beautyful days (8 days!) last week - blue sky, sunnshine!
And now look at this...

School started again this week. So far things are going great. I don`t have that many classes this semester because I`m busy with the musical I`m part of. It`s so much fun to work with the kids there but it`s also a LOT of work. The premiere is on the first of june. Still a long way to go and yet only little time left. We`ll be fine :-)

i told you that i would upload a picture of my room and what it looked like during the last couple of weeks. it was such a mess!! (you wouldn`t have seen that yourself, right..?)

after my exams were over and after i had recovered from my sickness i cleaned up the whole room. looks a lot better now, doesn`t it?
it feels good to walk through the room without steping on books, papers, pens... YAY!

yay!

yesterday i had my last exam of the semester! yes!! you can`t even believe how happy i am that it`s finally over and how exhausted i feel. it`s been a tough time - actually, i think that i have never studied as much as in the last couple of weeks..
i don`t have all the grades yet, but i know that sport went really well and i fell good about the other things. but i failed in math...
it was an oral exam and my worst dreams came true: i didn`t even understand the very first question the had asked. bummer! :-)

i took some pictures of my room so you can see what it looked like. i`m about to clean it all up and then you will be able to see the difference! but i gotta clean first befor i put the pics online..

so you will read from me soon!

sledding

sunday afternoon some people from church and i went sledding up on a hill close to where we live. it was a beautyful sunny day and we enjoyed beeing outside. it was just a blast!

here you see some crazy people (my 2 friends Angela and Janina) sledding down the hill. the ground was frozen so it was a fast ride!


of course we had a couple of little accidents too :-) it was still fun!









this week is full with study time because next week i`ll have some of my exams. i think i will be ready by then but it`s still a long way to go...

good morning

it`s saturday morning and i`m more or less ready to study all day long. school is tough at the moment because we have exams in 2 weeks. last year i only had 3 exams and just one of them was a lot of work. this february i`ll have 7 exams and 4 are quite some work. i`m not the kind of person that likes to sit down and study every minute i can..
i`d rather have some time off to enjoy the weekends. but it a couple of weeks it will be over! yeah!

but abong all the things i have to study there are some real fun ones - music history :-) it`s so interesting to see why the composers composed their pieces the way they did. it all makes sense as soon as you know some of the background. i wish i had more time to study things like that!

when i woke up this morning i looked out my window and it looked like this:



isn`t that cool? i love it!! even when it`s a day where you just have to study - how bad can it be when it starts like this?? :-)

JoJo

shock

1 week has already passed since my last entry.
right now i`m pretty shocket because on the way home from school something really bad happened. i always go to school by train. today all the sudden the train went "chooo choooooo" and then made an emergency stop. but before the train lost speet you could hear the dead sound of something that hit the train... we drove over something. as we later learned it was not just something but a person... we were all so shocked!! fortunately it was dark outside and we couldn`t see anything!
we sat there for one and a half hours and had time enought to think about what had just happened... goodness.

but let`s talk about other things now.

my sister left for cambodia this week. she arrived well and is already settled in a little bit. tomorrow she has her first khmer class (that`s the language they speek in cambodia). i`m very happy for her to have the chance to do something like that even though i will miss her a lot during that year.

today, a friend of mine left for china. brave ladies huh?!

all right, "talk" to you later. JoJo

winter

all right. now that we all know this thing IS working - here some more pictures (i`m just showing the ones where it actually does look like winter). this winter is NOT what it`s supposed to be. usually this time a year there`s snow everywhere, it`s cold and you have to wear heavy clothes, gloves and boots. winter this year is all confusing. it`s more like fall - rainy, quite warm and... NO SNOW... :-(
over christmas my mom and dad and i went up on a mountain where the feeling of winter was all around us! it was a wonderful day and i enjoyed it a lot!



just so you don`t forget what i look like. one more :-)



but now, school started again and i will be pretty busy over the next couple of weeks. i have some exams in early february and then i`ll be in an internship in a school for another 2 weeks.

and very SOON, i will be in CA!! can`t wait to see all my friends again!

Test

let`s see if this thing is working :-)