With my school I went to a monarchy the past three days . In the 12th grade my school organizes a special week for every class. For the ones who don’t study economic: a week, where they about economic learn in a practical way , and the ones who study economic go to a monarchy for a change. It is a little bit ironical but it does make sense.
Anyway. This tuesday my classmates and I headed off to the monarchy in “Engelberg” (middle part of Switzerland). We got separated from the girls after a stop at Luzern. Then we went on with our teacher right to the monarchy. After arriving and welcoming we went to our first prayer. In a catholic church, which was part of the monarchy, we stood on two sides faced to each other and read some psalms for about 20 minutes. It would be our first prayer out of nine with the monks. The rest of the afternoon we received our rooms and got some instruction from one of the monks.
We ate dinner with the monks in silence. No word was spoken. Only one…. READ MORE!

Hello everybody!

Yes, I am still alive and I haven’t given up my blog. The last 4 weeks were just really busy for me. So busy that I couldn’t even update my blog.
So, you are probably asking yourself what did Raphy do in January? Well second of week of Januray I went to a snowboard camp! I got suspended from school for a week, which was really awesome! In that camp I got trained to a snowboard instructor. We stayed in a really nice hotel! Twin rooms with televisions, bath and shower included! I expected some military barracks with really uncomfortable beds. The whole week the sun shone, the snow was perfect and I just had a blast in that snowboard trainee camp.
Third week back in school! I had to catch up with all the materials I missed. Or better I should have. Still I had to study for some exams and write two essays: one about the city “Basel” and second a portrait of a teacher. The teacher one was actually fun to write.
Week four of January I got the chance to show off all my new learned skills in snowboarding. I went to another snowboard camp, this time not as participant but as a leader. My brother came along as a participant. Sadly he does skiing and not snowboarding. (snowboarding is way better…) Otherwise I probably would have been his instructor. The camp was a snow sport camp of my school. Every grade until the 12th grade has such a camp once a year. READ MORE!

It is monday and I am sitting in the train with all my classmates (only 16). We are all “really” excited to go where we are going. This week we will have a “week of study”. Our goal is to create a news paper about the town we are going to, called Kreuzlingen. We paired up into groups of two and each group has two write a reportage about a subject. For example: “Kreuzling and Economics” or “Water supply of Kreuzling” and so on. Everybody had to write a reportage BUT me and my partner! We got lucky! Our goal was to create like a trailer of the news paper which will be presented on a parent meeting before we hand out the news paper. (This wasn’t my idea!)
After a for Swiss standards ….

Two days accomplished. My first school day wasn’t as bad as I thought it was going to be. My new main class teacher was an old teacher that I already knew. (In Switzerland you are in groups of like 20 people and each group called class has their own main teacher and you stay in that group for almost every subject. But I don’t want to go too deep into the Swiss School System right now…) He could remember me, but he couldn’t remember that I was gone for one year. He was also outside of school for a half year. But at the end he figured it out and the whole class laughed because he asked me before how the past half year was and I just said it was really good and he didn’t noticed I wasn’t in Switzerland.