I needed something special to start this entry off, so I googled "weird quotes" and this popped up.
My group is a really bizzare mixture of people.
4 undergraduate and 4 graduate students, plus a professor, make up the mixture. All of us are women, except for Cory, one of the undergraduates. Our personalities and backgrounds are so different.
I live about an hour outside Bern in a town called Grenchen. Camille, a graduate student, and Cory also live in this town with me. My host parents, Esther and Frankie, are about my age, have only been married a few years, and just had their first baby - Noelie - 11 weeks ago. Needless to say, this experience is quite unusual for me, having 'parents' who are only, like, 4 years older than me, max.
Also, besides talking deep with Camille (who's a couple decades older than me), Cory (who's 24) seems to really gravitate to me, which is so weird for me, never having had a gay friend before. Sometimes I don't know how to respond to his attention, so I just fall back on being myself, and he keeps liking me... I'm just gonna let this thing go where it goes. He's depressed. Sometimes I can make him genuinely laugh aloud, though, which I feel is a feat worthy of praise.
I don't think he realizes I'm the kind of person he sometimes rants against, though. That I come from those people. He told me today that his parents are Christian, so I guess he may have come from that background too. I mostly just listen when he talks, so far.
According to my host, Esther, only 4% of Swiss people are practicing Christians - evangelical Christians, she calls them with her lovely Swiss-German accent. Ironically enough, Camille, Cory & I are all living with practicing Christians for our host families. What in the world are the chances? All three hosts go to the same Methodist church here in Grenchen.
Esther drove Cory and I into Bern for the host family meeting today, and we listened to a Hillsong Australia CD the whole way, with a couple breaks for Bruno Mars on the radio.
Stuff is weird. People get so close, so fast, because we have nobody else. And suddenly here we all are, good friends, with so little in common.
Cory and I talked to Kaity for awhile today. She's one of the other students, and she's been an "au pair" in Marseilles, France for a year. I asked her tons of questions.
I have tons of reading to do for class and a mini-paper to write each night, so it's not all fun-and-games. Switzerland is a real place - it's not the magical, dreamy memory I have from that weekend last summer. (Although I must say, the river running through the city of Bern has the most magically colored water I've seen in my whole life.)
