phina travels

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 🙂