Life in Die Schweiz!

August 22nd, my first full day!!!

After waking up at 12:00 (I know it's late, but I was jetlagged!) I was picked up by my rotary counselor Rolf. He then took me to get a Swiss bank account (mwahah!), finnish immigration and introduce me to my principal. We drove around the sweltering Zug (38 degrees celcius!!!!!!) and I noticed somethings--all the machines were so hi-tech in the immigration office, and everyone was so friendly! Also:

1. Everyone is weirdly tan//beautiful here. If you didn't know it, you would think you were in Italy!
2. The town is SO well put together. There is no wasted space--even the trashy places look nice. There are no gross roads filled with huge parking lots like in Seattle, even their McDonalds was in a nice building, and put NEAR the road, so YOU DONT HAVE TO DRIVE THERE, you can walk!
3. There are negative floors on building, some malls have escalators without stairs, and sometimes there is a yellow light between the red light and green light. 

Here is a virtual tour of my street, right before Rolf picked me up. It is quite quaint!

When I got back, I went to meet Eva and Michi at the lake. Eva is my host sister, and lived in Canada for a year, so here English is PERFECT. I would think she was American if I met her. Michi is her Canadia cousin, who's Mom lives in Geneva, so he biked over here to say hello (pretty long bike ride if you ask me...). They are both so nice, and it is great to talk to them. Then we went to the lake!!

This is lake Zug! It was so refreshing after a hot day.

There were a ton of people there! Everyone rode their bikes though, those healthy Swiss :p

This is a shot of the mountains in the backround--the Rigi is the tallest one.

August 23rd

Today, I went to school! It was AMAZING. Our school is HUGE and basically like a college. Everyone is in a class, whom they switch classes together with. You sometimes have like an hour or two gap with your class, so you can hang around the school and go to the cafe, or for lunch, walk to town to buy food. It is so nice walking in the sun with your classmates everywhere! And lunch we just ate in the beautiful market//indoor mall, which I will put up pictures of soon. I love my school! I wish VHS was like it!

Here is my schedule:


You cant really read it, but the day is divided in 45 minute periods, and the dark ones are free periods for my class, so school starts and ends at a different time everyday!

School itself was definitely hard. I can't understand German! The teachers would teach a whole class, without me understanding a word, which is hard and boring. But the girls in my class are very nice. I'm in the music major, which means my class takes an extra 4 hours of music every week. And the building itself is so modern and HUGE! I think there is 9 building of 6 floors! With 1700 students, because it is the only high school for the whole Kanton of Zug. I'm excited and scared for school, because it is interesting, but I feel like such a burden having to make the teachers translate just for me. At least I am getting along with my host family great, they are such nice and funny people, and tonight we went on a walk in a thunderstorm! Definitely a great way to end an interesting day :)

To end my blog of the day, here is a video tour of Steinhausen, my neighborhood suburb. I will put one up of Zug later--enjoy!