Today we had a really special event in school. This year marks the 20th anniversary of “World‘s Greatest Shave”. Since 1998 Australians shave their heads to help beat blood cancer. The idea of the event is to sign up as a participant to get sponsored to shave or color your hair and thereby support Australians with blood cancer like leukaemia, lymphoma or myeloma. The raised money will provide practical and emotional support and additionally fund the research that will save lives. So today after assembly we all came together in the hall and all the people who got their hair cut or heads shaved were on stage. There were several boys shaving their heads including a boy from my year. Two girls in my year cut of a big part of their hair to donate it and there was one girl that even shaved her head. Later at lunch you could get your hair colored with colorful hair dye and hence donate some money. I have so much respect for the people that participated in this event and I hope that the money raised today will help a lot of Australians to beat cancer.
Category: school
Mock Up Photos
Friday we had school photos. For my year this meant that we all had single “normal” photos where we wore our uniforms and additionally a “mock up” group photo where everyone dressed up somehow. I went with the hippie theme 🙂
Grateful
Sometimes it‘s the little things in life that can make you truely happy. Yesterday I had one of those moments.
It was the first time I took the bus from my new school to my clarinet lesson and I wasn‘t entirely sure how to get there. So I had a bus driver that explained me the way. I had to change the bus at one station and missed it by a minute. So the nice driver of the previous bus passed by on his way back to the station, not in service, to restart the route and stopped to ask me why I was standing there. I told him that I‘d just missed the subsequent bus and waited for the next one. So he asked me where I had to go and told me to hop on and gave me a lift directly to my clarinet lesson. This little act made me really happy and I am just so grateful that there are such amazing people in this world. He was so kind to me and did me a big favor out of nowhere. Happy that people like this exist 🙂
Swimming Carnival
Today is Monday and it was no usual school day but we had a swimming carneval.
According to our last names all the students at the school are divided into houses that are named after the beaches in our area, Shelly, Wanda, Jibbon and Silver. Every house has a color but since I’m year 12 and this was our last carneval we had a different clothing theme which was “when I grow up”.
After the carnival was over a friend gave me a lift home. A big difference to Germany, teenagers are allowed to drive here from 16 on but they have some regulations and stages they have to go through until they get their full license.
Cooking in Marine Studies
Cooking in Marine Studies
1oth August 2017
Yesterday marine studies was on my timetable and since my teacher enjoys fishing in his free time we were very lucky because he brought some fish he caught as well as potatoes to cook fish and chips 🙂 !
To prepare the dish we used a deepfryer. We cut the fish into fillets and mixed flour and beer into a beer batter. Once the potatoes slices and the fish fillets were fried we ate them with so called seafood sauce… they were delicious! 🙂
First blog post
Let‘s start!
I think it might be a good idea to start this blog with some general information.
My name is Josephina von Bluecher. I‘m a 16-year-old German exchange student and I am spending a year in Carigbah at the Southern beaches in New South Wales in Australia. I am staying with a host family consisting of a mom and dad whose children don‘t live at home anymore and I have a host sister from Switzerland. My high school is the Endeavour Sports High School which isn‘t far from where I live and luckily my bus stop is right in front of the door! Right now I‘m in grade 11 but since this school year only has three terms I will start year 12 in September. Talking about school there are some main differences in school here. The first thing I realized was the relationship between teacher and student. It still depends on the different teachers but some of them have a rather friendly relationship with their students which sometimes also has a negative side since some students don‘t take them seriously. Nevertheless all students I talked to so far are all very sympathic and open. Secondly the subjects are different. I only have six subjects and I found out that the only subject that is compulsory for Australian students (at least in year 11… I don‘t know about the other years) is English. We, the internationals, have to take English and Maths but we can chose the levels and the other four subjects. I have English Advanced and at first I chose Maths general but I changed to Advanced since they did topics I already had in Germany. The other four subjects I chose are geography, CAFS, SLR and Marine Studies. Geography is pretty self explaining I guess. CAFS is short for Cultur and Family Studies and right now where are talkig about family structures. The next subject is SLR which stands for Sports & Lifestyle Recreation. This subject implies theoretical lessons where we talk about technics etc. as well as practical ones. My sixth subject is Marine Studies. In this subject we talk about the Sea in theory but also do some practical lessons. For example in the first lesson we deepfried Kalamaris and in the next lesson we talked about different ways of preparing fish. Another big difference are the school uniforms. Every school has its own unifrom. So some schools might have dresses for the girls while others have skirts. My uniform consists of a knee-length red skirt with grey and white stripes, a white blouse with the school logo and you can chose between a red jumper with the school logo or a black and red college jacket with the school logo. I chose the college jacket. As shoes we have to wear black lace up leather ones but most of the students just wear black snickers. I wear all black Superstars. Since Thursday is sport day every student has to wear the sports uniform. It consists of black knee-length shorts with the school logo as well as a red-black-white polo shirt with the school logo.
After school most of the students either go to the Miranda Mall which is very near to our school and has a food court or to Cronulla which is the beach here.
I have already been to Sydney with my host sister on our first weekend and several times to Cronulla. I will add some pictures and impressions in the following.
Have to stop writing now since dinner is ready… every Sunday is pizza day and my host dad is a great cook 🙂
Cronulla Beach 🙂
