Brick by Boring Brick

Here, have some pictures! The first 3 are stolen from Jess because I always forget to bring my camera to school...

Snow at our school!

Our last day before break. We had soupe de chalet (classic swiss winter soup) in the courtyard to celebrate the beginning of break and everybody nommed on the yummy soup together!

Massive pots of soup!

and last but not least, me and my darling sister being super cool over skype and doing sister high fives. cause that's the way we roll.

Have a song as well. These guys are amazing and I've been listening to them nonstop!

joyeux noël!

The planets have aligned and all is fantastic with my life!

In Switzerland the 24th is more of the day to celebrate christmas, so all day we've been doing presents and eating and bonding with family. the whole 9 yards. I was expecting homesickness, but it's the complete opposite! I'm so frickin happy right now to be where I am, and I am so thankful for everything I have in Switzerland. I'm leaving in 30 minutes to go sing at the midnight mass with my choir, and then after that I'm off clubbing for the evening. (Still a little confused about Swiss nightlife... but no complaints!)

Perhaps I'm also freakishly happy because I will be reunited with my one and only soul sister in AMSTERDAM! Potentially. See heres the thing, the band Matt & Kim are playing in Amsterdam in March, so obviously I'm planning a trip to go see them. and it just so happens to be around the same time my darling sister is flying over to study in france for the spring. So the most logical thing is that she flies to Amsterdam first for a little family reunion. I AM SO EXCITED!

Right now everything is how I imagined it to be. Life with my host family is fantastic, I had a marvelous christmas with lots of presents and money (yessss!) my french is slowly improving, and I'm just very content right now :) I have a marvelous life here, and yes, I do miss my american life, but it's hard to be unhappy when I have so much going for me. I hope everyone has a fantastic christmas with lots of love!

Find the joy in your life

I'm going to take a brief moment to brag about the awesomeness of my life.

- In 2 weeks I am flying to Istanbul, Turkey with Grace so we can visit my cousin Sarah who is studying there

- In April I am going to Croatia for a week with my class

- In June I am going to Barcelona for a long weekend with my host family

AFS stressed the point that this is a "cultural experience" and not a travel experience. But not gonna lie, I really wanted to study abroad for the travel aspect. Yes, I love being in a town and learning the language and experiencing the culture, but I came here with a pretty strong intention of traveling and I've been very fortunate to get these experiences. I love making lists, so of course I have my Life List that I've been working on since I was 14. Since being in Switzerland I've managed to cross off 5 things on my list:

7. Go to London

33. See someone famous (Gaga)

42. See the London Eye

49. Study abroad

83. Go to Platform 9 and 3/4 (yes, that actually was on my life list...)

by the end of my exchange I'm also hoping to accomplish the following:

65. Go to Venice (I want to go so frickin bad!!)

67. Learn a foreign language (slowly but surely!)

72. Go to Spain (This will be accomplished in June)

88. Ski in the Swiss Alps (Just bought my skis this week, so it's coming soon)

91. Travel east of Switzerland (I've been to a lot of western european countries, but have never gone west, but that's what Turkey is for)

So basically all I have to say for now is that I'm extremely happy I decided to come to Switzerland :)

Leave all your love and your longing behind

So far december has been a pretty quality month! Friday the 3rd I went to Lucerne (about 1.5 hours by train) with 2 of my friends Jess and Mylisha. We met up with a couple other exchange students and went to a fest thing called Klausjagen. In all honesty it was really bizarre, but still a lot of fun! There was a parade and crazy guys with whips, and just a lot of nonsense...

The parade.

Those things were paper mache and had real

candles inside, which seems to a bit of a fire hazard in my opinion.

The whip guy!

The next day (saturday the 4th) was St. Nicolas! In a lot of Swiss families it's celebrated even more than christmas, but my family isn't too into it, but it was still a lot of fun! I am in a choir here, so we sang at a massive church service in town at the Cathedral of St. Nicolas. The church was built in the 1400's so it's so beautiful!

Cathedral of St. Nicolas

Before the church service starts there is a massive parade through the town and St. Nicolas walks through the streets. He then comes to the church and climbs up to the top of the cathedral and gives a speech to the crowd below. Since we were getting ready to sing we got to be inside of the church during the speech, so we snuck up to a balcony on the outside of the church and were able to see all the people below! It was so amazing because there were thousands of people in the street who all came to here St. Nicolas' speech! Afterwards we climbed back down and sang a couple of songs during the service. It was a bit bizarre for me because it was a catholic service, which I've never attended. and then on top of that it was in french, so I was pretty lost the entire time... but it was still cool!

The people of Fribourg!

Sunday was a pretty awesome day, because I went to the Ke$ha concert in Zürich with 4 other friends! It was pretty much nothing compared to Lady Gaga last month, but I'm still super glad I went! Not gonna lie, I wasn't expecting anything over the top from her, but I was pretty impressed with her talent! She sang a lot of her classic songs, which made me pretty happy.

Me with Whitney and Grace.

Obviously confetti was involved at the Ke$ha concert :)

For some reason the people of Switzerland don't appreciate Ke$ha as much as us crazy americans, so there was literally no security at the concert. So afterwards Whitney managed to sneak back stage and ended up meeting Ke$ha! She said she was really chill and was like "do you want a picture or an autograph or something?" She didn't seem too concerned that crazy people had managed to get backstage....

Whitney with Ke$ha and another girl who snuck backstage as well

A few random things:

1. I got my psych test back last week and I got a 32% which is pretty quality seeing as how I guessed on everything

2. You are not allowed to take pictures in H&M

3. Swiss security guards do not appreciate it when you climb on abandoned trains

4. Hot wine (vin chaud) is very tasty!

That's all for now. Ciao!