“Katereina” should have made it home to Russia now. So I am writing a few concluding thoughts on the year, as well as some advice for new host families.
- Sharing a room got old. She would sleep in later than me on the weekends, so I spent a lot of time in the living room instead of my bedroom so that I didn’t have to be quiet.
- We don’t have a public transportation system here, so driving her around sometimes wasn’t very practical.
- She had excellent English, however when a conversation pushed the limits her vocabulary (such as the day we were trying to talk about marsupials), we figured out that it was easiest to look up the subject on Wikipedia and then translate the page using BabelFish. The grammar was a little off, but it got the idea across.
- Some of our agency’s representatives changed midyear. We didn’t get a lot of support or information from the new representative, but luckily we didn’t really have any problems so it wasn’t a big deal. The new representative never held the end of year meeting for the students to go over Reverse Culture Shock and that sort of thing. But oh well.
Well, I think that about wraps it up. If you have any questions feel free to email me at: hostfamily08 (at) gmail (dot) com. Additionally, please check out my other blog: Adventures of a College Student
Advertisement
onelifelog said
Thanks for sharing this year. I just returned from Moscow. I hope you will get the opportunity to visit Katya’s country. I don’t remember if you ever wrote what her home city was. Do you mind sharing?
Jessica said
I hope you enjoyed your trip to Moscow.
Her homecity is Ekaterinburg.
Sophie said
I’ve now read through your whole blog, and I think it’s really interesting to get the typical exchange student story from the host family’s point of view :3 Thanks for writing this, it have helped me get rid of some of my nervousness about getting placed in a host family (:
Jessica said
I think once you are able to relax, you’ll have a great year.
Sure there are the ups and downs, homesickness, and culture shock, but it can be such a great experience.