The picture below is from Easter with my third host family

The group of pictures below are from the holiday I went on with my host family. We went to a small village called Werfenwang. The closet big city is Salzburg. We were there in an old cottage which has been passed down several generations. Heidi my host mom's sister and her family were also there. We spent the 10 days skiing and eating. It seems like there is always someone in the kitchen cooking. The scary looking guys with the masks are called Krampos or Perchten. They dress up in big costumes and hit you with either branches or a type of whip.. It actually hurts pretty bad. I'm not sure why they hit you, but they have giant bells that jingle when they walk. The purpose of the bells are to scare away winter... I'm looking outside now and I don't think it worked. 

The next group of pictures below are pictures of Christmas with the Hafner family. I changed host families on the 7th of December. It was a different experience. In Austria they celebrate Christmas on the 24th of December. With the Hafner family their tradition is to set up and decorate the Christmas tree on actual Christmas day. Also it's not all about presents. The day was fairly normal. We went to Midday Mass and Had lunch. Then around 8 o'clock we opened presents. After that you can see that we made something called Brotchen. It was so good.

The pictures below are of the Rotary Weekend In Salzburg. It was the last time we would see our "Oldies" again. The Oldies are a group of people from either Australia, New Zealand or some South American countries. Their school year ends in January so thats when they leave for exchange. We call them Oldies because when we arrived they had already been here for 6 months. It was a sad time but soon we will be getting another group of new exchange students, then my group that I arrived with will be the Oldies.