Hi guys. I know I haven’t updated in a while, but I have some exciting news to share with everyone. I found out in January after I finished interviewing, but I didn’t want to post about it until now because I wanted to wait and finalize my college applications and see where I was accepted.
You know how in an earlier blog post I mentioned possibly taking a gap year before I went to college? Well, it’s actually happening!
I am proud to announce that next year I will be going to Brazil as an exchange student through the Rotary Youth Exchange program. I will living with at least one host family, and most likely two or three. I am going to be living in the city of Natal.
Right now I am in the mountains at a retreat center where all of the outbound students (all of the students who are going to another part of the world on a Rotary exchange for the 2015-2016 school year) are attending a required Outbound Student Orientation. I am very excited because this makes my upcoming adventures seem all the more real.
These past few months all of the outbound students have had to make PowerPoint presentations about themselves, and various other topics. Today we presented our work and also had to do an introduction in the language of our host country. For me, that was Brazil.
Maybe you remember that I lived in Mexico for a year? Well, it was very hard for me to pronounce the Portuguese in a Brazilian accent, not a Mexican accent. Spanish and Portuguese are very similar so that has been screwing with my brain recently.
I have been texting back and forth with my host sister, Eduarda, over the past few weeks and I’ve been trying to speak in Portuguese with her. I keep on slipping into Spanish. I guess there are worse problems to have.
The thing I didn’t understand is why we had to do the presentations (part of it, at least) in the language of our host country because we haven’t learned that language yet. I ended up reading off of notecards because I was trying to memorize sounds, not words, since I didn’t know what I was saying. I am hopeful that the leaders will explain this to us tomorrow.
Well, I will keep you guys updated! And I will tell you about my college decisions in my next post!
Adeus!