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.

The pictures below are from a hike to Goasting. Laura (another exchange student from Australia) and I hiked to the top where we saw the sunset and the castle

The pictures below is from my class trip to Vienna. In German class we have been studying the play, "Faust" by Johann Wolfgang Goethe. It was an interesting play... the German was so complicated that I couldn't understand anything. To make it even better the play was around 3 and a half hours long. My favourite part about the entire trip was the free time with my class. A couple of friends and I just roamed around Vienna looking at all the sites and stopping in at all the advent markets. It was a blast

I've been so busy lately that I haven't had time to update my blog. In Graz right now it is Matura Ball season. A Matura Ball is like Grad in Canada but it is more fancy and formal. I have been to 2 balls so far and they have been so much fun. I also have found a lacrosse team in Graz. I joined the Graz Gladiators Lacrosse team and it's been a blast so far. I've made so many new friends. Next weekend we are traveling to Liabach for the weekend to play the Slovenian team. On Monday I am changing host families. I can't say that I'm excited but it will be a change hopefully for the better. It will be hard to leave the host family that I am with now. We are all so close like a family. 

These are the pictures of me dressed up in the austrian traditional dress (lederhose) i love it!!!

Here was the weekend I spent in Millstat with Nolan and Libbi. It was a great weekend. Most of the pictures are from us walking up the giant hill to Nolan's house. I swear we did that 4 times in one day. By the end we were all gasping for air. The lake that the pictures are of is called Millstater See.