sarah nguyen

I’ve been terrible about posting. My host family has e-mailed me tons so that’s exciting, but for now I’ll just say that my parents booked airplane tickets to leave San Jose on Saturday, July 26, at 7:45 AM. We’ll spend about a week touring the East Coast and visiting family before my parents drop me off in D.C. on the 3rd of August.

Basically, Friday the 25th will be the last opportunity to say “Smell ya later” to me in person. The following is the rather adorable countdown I’ve created for all of you to easily reference. Fun!

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After school on Friday I checked the mail and found an unusually fat envelope from ASSE. The first line said:

Dear Sarah,

Wonderful news! Your ASSE German host family has been found!

A few pages later is my host family placement form, which is filled with pretty basic info (age, occupations, contact info, pets, and activities) about my new family, the Schmidbauers.

Both of my host parents, Thorsten and Heike, are relatively young, and they have a 13 year old daughter named Annika. I’ll get more into all the details later as they’ve already e-mailed me, so for now I’ll entertain you all with some pictures of Haan, the itty bitty town I’ll be living in next year.


stolen from oddtodd’s travelblog

I love the streets! And the buildings. They look so, well, German! Unlike Frankfurt and some other big cities I’m sure. The following is a side by side comparison of San Jose, CA (where I am now) and Haan, Germany (where I will be next year) from Google maps. If you enlarge them (click), you’ll see that Haan is MUCH greener and had much more open space than San Jose. I don’t know if that means it’s farming country or if there will be many fields to frolic in, but I’m fine with it either way.

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I just got a letter from ASSE with my flight information. We have to be at the airport in Washington, DC (Dulles) on Sunday, August 3 from 1-4 pm. The international flight is at 5:23 pm on August 6 and we arrive in Frankfurt, Germany at 7:10 am on August 7, their time. It’s a 7 hour and 47 minute flight, by United if the information on expedia.com is accurate at all…Interestingly enough, I can click to view the seat plan from expedia.com, and all the more upfront (though still economy) seats are filled. Exciting! We’re supposed to send in the details of how we’re going to get to DC to ASSE.

I’m super excited because I can finally plan my summer. My parents may decide to take a week long vacation on the east coast before August 3. That’s it. Sweet!

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