Yep, we’re different, all right

It’s been almost a week with our new ‘daughter’, Larissa. She seems to be adjusting well and fitting in nicely. Soon the newness will wear off for all of us and we’ll hopefully just consider her one of us. Right now, I’m still trying to ‘make a good impression’. That basically means I’m not yelling at my kids, I’m folding laundry, I’m making dinner every night, and trying to keep up on the war against clutter. In a way, it’s kind of like you would feel if you were being filmed for a reality tv show, only we have an audience of one. I want her to think we are organized, nice people. (I don’t know why I try, she’ll soon learn that while we ARE nice, we are NOT organized.)

It was nice to read her blog and NOT see anything about how insane her host family is. No lamenting about how she got the lamest family ever, so that was reassuring to me. She did list a lot of differences, however, between America and Germany. As I read over her list, I can agree, that yes, all of her observations are true.

She said,

Well, this is a short list of all things which are different here (okey, actually there are too many things to write them on this blog, but these are the things I regognized immediately):

Evereything is bigger (cars, houses, meals, shopping centers, school, streets)
You do everything by car (including the 5 minute walk to your freinds house)
People eat differently (the meals are just different, I can’t explain it :D)
You do what your teacher tells you to do
You don’t always have to raise your hand if yo want to say something in class
If you need to go to the restroom or need to make a call in class you need to use a hallway pass. If you don’t use the hallway pass, you get extra credit (=better grades)
You (at least at my school) can look up your grades, teacher’s comments, schedule etc on the internet
People here are just friendly. The neighbor that you don’t even know says “hi” when you see him, everybody helps you when you need help – with a smile 😀
Everything’s easy going (except school, but now I also saw that it isn’t hard to get a good grade if the teacher just see’s that participate a little little bit)
If you buy something you usually look at the price. Let’s say, something costs 1.50$. You will always pay more than the prays say’s because of taxes!
Here are many fast food restaurants (but I guess that’s not new)
All meals taste very good, milkshakes are sweeter than in Germany, salads taste better etc. (Today there was a girl, my host sister’s friend and she bought a pizza in the school’s cafeteria, but she didn’t like. I wanted to try it. I liked it and told her: “Hey what’s up with this pizza? It tastes normal, just like German pizza.” She said, she would never buy a pizza in Germany. What I want to say: American pizza must taste really good, because I even liked the American “bad” pizza :D)

While I wouldn’t know about school in Germany, I would agree with her assessment. Yes, we are friendlier here, and yes, things are bigger. When she saw our Suburban in the garage, she just about fell over. Yes, welcome to Utah, home of large families and large cars.