Dear host family!

My name is Tinus. I‘m 15 years old and I live in the west of Germany.

I live in a city. My hometown is not as big but it isn‘t small. I live there with my big family. I have three brothers and two stepsisters. My parents are divorced, and I live with my mother and my stepdad . Every second weekend I’m at my father‘s house. He lives about 40 minutes away by car, with his wife. We also have a dog called Kaija, a Golden Retriever.

In the moment I’am writing this letter I still have summer holidays, but after the holidays I will be in the 10th grade at a Gymnasium. My favourite subjects are Mathematics and Sport. After school I love to play Badminton and to play with my siblings. I love to do all kinds of sports. On the weekend I meet some friends or I’m at my father‘s place. I love to be in our garden with my siblings or just playing.

My parents work in different jobs. My mother is a teacher at a school for socially and emotionally disabled kids. My father and my stepmother are working at a bank. And my stepdad works for a company.

On vacation we go to the Spanish island of Mallorca every year, because we have a house there. But this year I couldn’t go because I did an exchange to Chile for two months.

The pleasure meeting another country and culture fascinates me. I was in the south of Chile and did a tour to the north to the Atacama desert. It was such a great experience, that I wanted to do an exchange for one year. I want to go to the United States because I was there two years ago for holidays and it was great. We visited Florida and Kansas.

At first we went to Florida and visited the Universal Studios in Orlando. After that we drove down to Miami and to Key Largo where we visited the host family of my stepmother, who was an aupair about 20 years ago.

When we flew from Florida to Kansas city we drove out of the city, and to the farm of my father‘s host family. He was an exchange student for a year there (my mom was an exchange student in Montgomery, Alabama for six months). In Kansas we saw lots of animals and we went fishing.

Kansas City and Miami were big and impressive cities but a little too big for me.

In the US I went fishing and it was so good that I wanted to do it in Germany too. So I found out that one of my friends loves to go fishing also and we both decided to get the fishing license together. And in December I’m going to get the license with my friend.

I did two exchanges, the first one wasn’t a real exchange, I only lived in England for one week with six other students from my class. It was very awesome to live in another family, but it was very short so we didn’t get to know much about the family. My second exchange, as I said, was in Chile for two months, but we also had a Chilean boy in our house for two months. I went in the family of the Chilean boy. To live in his family was very lucky for me because his family was very similar to my family in Germany. He had some cute dogs and three siblings which were very friendly to me. We played a lot of the chilean board games and I went to school for two weeks in Chile. I was only two weeks in the school because they had winter holidays.

I want to do the exchange because I would love to live in a new country and I want to experience the culture of America and the American way of life not only on a holiday but in a family as a family member.

Best regards

Tinus

Interested in hosting—whether 6-8 weeks or the entire school year?