First Week of School

I started off the school year at Fort Atkinson High School pretty smoothly. School is a lot different here than it was in NZ but has a few similarities. My high school here is co-ed and has no uniform, same as Wellington High (my old high school in NZ) and our principal is just as awesome and dedicated to the students as the principal at Welly High was.

The first major difference which I'm still not entirely accustomed to is that school here starts at 7.50 am. I have to get up at 6.50 every morning which is a lot earlier than I had to get up for school at home (8am with school starting at 9).

The second major thing is the layout of the school day here. We have 8 classes in a day which are all around 45 minutes in length and we have the same classes in the same order every day. I started off taking Spanish I, Jazz Ensemble, Creative Writing, Marching Band, Art I, Advanced Strength Training and Government with one study hall period every day.

At the end of the first week I auditioned for Showchoir and as well as getting into that was asked by the choir teacher to join the chamber choir. I switched my studyhall to Showchoir and dropped Art for Chamber Choir both of which are fantastic classes and are a lot fun.

One thing that took some getting used to for me was the way they eat lunch here. There are three different lunch periods, the first being at about 11 am and the last being at 12pm (that's the one I have). Everyone has a group that sits together in the cafeteria and pretty much everyone has a hot lunch everyday.

My host dad keeps my lunch account topped up with cash and I just have to scan my id card or give the lunch people my student number every day, it's completely different to NZ. The cafeteria serves 2 or 3 different meals from 2 or 3 different lines everyday made up of some kind of main like a cheeseburger or slice of pizza or nachos along with sides which are usually canned fruit or steamed vegetables and you have to take a small carton of milk to have with your meal (they are pretty much over the top with promoting the consumption of milk, like NFL player posters all around the school with different "drink milk" related slogans). It's pretty cool getting a hot meal for lunch everyday though and even though the american students like to complain about it, our cafeteria'

s food is always really good.

I love most of my classes, advanced strength training can be annoying sometimes because we have it straight after lunch and we have one or two days a week where we do a lot of running. The way that grading is done in my classes makes it pretty easy to get good grades. Creative writing is probably my favourite class so far but I also really love my music classes. Chamber choir is a favourite of mine as well, so far we have had two days where we have gone away somewhere and worked with university choir instructor's along with other choirs from around wisconsin. It's a really great experience being able to work with people of that quality and it's really improving my singing a lot.

Here's a link to a recording from the 2011 badger honour choir day that our chamber choir was involved with, the guys sang three songs, the girls sang three songs and we sang one together

http://www.waunakee.k12.wi.us/faculty/mpetroff/bchc.cfm

the first three are the girls songs, the next three are the guys songs and the bottom one is the combined song. We spent one day learning the songs and then performed them and recorded them at a concert that night.

I'm having a lot of fun at school with my classes and they're keeping me the good kind of busy. In about a week we have three days of choreography for showchoir which will be pretty intense and a lot of work. I am really looking forward to showchoir competition season starting. Next post will probably be about
homecoming week and the homecoming dance.

Warming up before the home invitational for marching band

The first week/s of life in Fort

Writing about this so late, I don't recall exact details very well but I'm pretty sure that my first day of soccer practise was the monday after I arrived. The first few days of practise were awful, the temperature was up in the high 80s (30-32 celsius) and we were running a lot.

The guys on the soccer team were the first people I met from the high school and they proved to be a really great bunch of people.

A couple of practise days in, Dick decided to take a group of guys (2 from soccer, 2 involved in music, myself and Martin) to Noah's Ark, a water park in Wisconsin Dells. That was one of the best days of my life! It was a scorching hot day, there were some great rides there and the people I was hanging out with were awesome. We met up with some girls from Fort there as well who were all pretty cool. I couldn't think of a better way to set up for the school year than joining soccer and going to Noah's ark that first week. It gave me a lot of familiar faces when school started up.

I think it was my second week when I met my Liasion, Kathy Ihde (basically my go-to person if I'm having issues with home, school and such). Again I'm not too sure on order of events here but I think this is right. She took me and another NZer who just moved to Fort to live with his grandparents to Rhythm on the river which is a really cool music thing where they play music all night and have a fair and stuff. Shaun (other NZer) and I weren't there very long because after about 15 minutes we were invited round to a bonfire at someone's house but I had enough time for Kathy (who is heavily involved in the school music department as a chaperone/mom for marching band and showchoir and pretty much every aspect of high school music) to introduce me to virtually the entire showchoir who were semi-busy selling cupcakes as a fundraiser.

Kathy also took me along to a marching band rehearsal that sunday so I could meet the band kids. I'm pretty sure that I can't do the absolute shock of the whole high school marching band concept justice in writing but I'll try. I walked into the room and was introduced to about 15 people right away which in itself was overwhelming but that was nothing compared to what happened next. Pretty soon 80 or so high school students from all grades were sitting in the band room with saxaphones, trumpets, tubas, flutes, tenor drums, bass drums, any other marching instrument you could dream of playing through scales as a warm-up as if that was the most normal thing in the world! Also at the side of the room were two marumbas, two vibraphones, timpani, chimes and gongs! They had like everything you'd need for a full symphony orchestra, so different to any NZ music department that I have ever encountered. The sight of all this was totally overwhelming.

After recovering from the shock of marching band, I decided to join pit percussion for the band. They had already had summer camps and stuff to learn their marching drills and music so I couldn't join as a marching player. Pit basically set up in front of the band and play various percussion instruments (marumbas,vibes,cymbals,chimes, random snare parts not being played by the marching drumline) and there were 6 of us in pit this year. We go to marching band competitions every weekend day and I take band as a class at school so we rehearse then. Pit also has a sectional rehearsal every monday from 6.30pm til 9pm (just to give you an idea of how much free time I get right now)

We had our first soccer game after I had been to maybe 2 practises. We take those awesome yellow school buses to away games and both the junior varsity (2nd) and varsity (first) team play at the same place with JV opening for the varsity game. We won our first game something like 5-2 against a team from Portage/Poynette which was an away game about an hours drive from Fort. They take sport pretty seriously here, way more so than back home. If you get caught fighting or drinking you can get a suspension equivalent to a 3rd of the season and if you get bad grades (the coach decides the minimum acceptable grade) for any class then you can get suspended from playing for that as well. We also have a lot more practises here, it's a big commitment. Basically during the week we either have a game or practise but we don't have games or practises on weekends.

So yeah, I basically jumped into things pretty quick after I got here. Next post will cover my experience with starting school.

My bedroom in Fort

Post Arrival Orientation

We had our post arrival orientation at Columbus High School in Columbus Wisconsin (at least I am 80% sure that's where it was). We were split up into groups and went through a series of activities.

My group consisted of Odin (the previously mentioned Norwegian), Joana (a girl from portugal) and myself (we were the smallest group by far). Firstly we played a game involving naming flags from countries which participate in the AFS programme then we moved off to start our cycle of activities.

We started in the "school" activity room, which involved a discussion about how school works. We also got to practise with combination locks (which I still have trouble with on october 9th!) which was fun. Next up we had money, which was pretty much just going through the coins and what they look like/are worth. American money still frustrates me, the way NZ does coins seems to make a lot more sense (10,20,50,1.00,2.00 as opposed to 1,5,10,25). Our final activity was swear-words, stuff I already knew being an english speaker but was fun anyways. They basically just went through what words not to use and what swear words are acceptable/ are used between friends and stuff.

We ate lunch once all the groups were done. We had turkey sandwiches with salad and orange drink, a very american lunch. I don't remember exactly what we did after that (bit of a blank period in my mind), the next thing I remember was lining up to get our AFS Wisconsin t-shirts which are neon orange and totally awesome.

We took a few photos and had another lecture about something which I don't remember and I doubt anyone else does because at this point we were all like "JUST LET US MEET OUR FAMILIES ALREADY!!!!!!!!."

Next thing we knew we were lining up to walk into the school gymnasium where all of our host families were waiting for us. We lined up across the gym and stood with a stand full of american families in front of us. They made us all introduce ourselves, say where we came from and who our host family was. I was first in line and was looking around to see if I could find Dick Schultz (my host dad) ahead of time seeing I had skyped with him and knew more or less what he looked like. I couldn't find him until I announced who my family was and he stood up with Martin (the closest thing I have to a host brother over here, he stays with Dick periodically but lives in an apartment with his mother and sisters most of the time).

We joked around a lot on the way out of the school and I knew right away that this was going to be a good man for me to be living with for the next 10 months or so. Martin and I also hit it off right away which made things easy for me from the beginning.

Next post will be about the first couple of weeks of US life, pretty much from arriving at my new home in Fort Atkinson to the end of the summer break.

Columbus High School (location of post arrival orientation)

Arrival

I'm breaking down the past 1 and a half (almost 2) months into several posts because I have so many awesome things to write about. In this first one I'm going to stick to talking about arrival.

We (the other NZ'ers heading off to the USA and myself) left as more or less a bunch of strangers from entirely different parts of the country. We made our way through customs with the odd bit of awkward conversation and were talking a little bit more by the time we boarded for our 11 hour flight to L.A. The plane trip was long and largely uneventful although the food is worth mentioning. I don't recall exactly what we had but I do recall that it was definitely restaurant quality stuff, the meals were probably the highlight of the flight for me.

When we arrived in L.A. we were met by two AFS USA volunteers. There's no way any onlooker would have guessed that our group had only known each other for a day. We had all become a lot closer on the journey and it was sad to have to say goodbye to so much of the group so quickly. I was lucky enough to have another kiwi from the group flying to the midwest with me.

We went to good ol' Maccas for breakfast and shortly after boarded a 3 hour flight to chicago. O'hare is one of the most spectacular airports I have ever seen. As soon as we got off the plane we walked into a stream of people traffic going at what seemed like 50 km an hour in every direction. It was extremely disorienting for two NZers trying to locate the baggage claim. To make things worse when we found our way over to an elevator, the buttons had weird numbers next to them instead of G,1,2,3 etc so we guessed at one and got it right.

Shortly after we were met by another lovely AFS volunteer and took a freakin' rail (never imagined an airport with a metro rail type thingy to take you from one point to another) from where we were to the part of the airport that we needed to take a shuttle from.

After a really long wait, we took a shuttle along with some brazillian and thai AFS students to a hotel which was basically a holding pen until another bus arrived to take us to the state we belonged in. For me it was only about an hour before the bus for Wisconsin arrived but Chelsea (the other kiwi I was with all the way from auckland to chicago!) stayed the night at the hotel in Chicago.

With about 10 minutes to go before my bus was due to leave I was feeling pretty sad about leaving Chelsea as everyone else seemed to have a whole group of fellow countrymen with them. I was dreading the bus ride to Wisconsin because I didn't think I'd have anyone to talk to which would have made for a boring 2 hour bus ride (I think it was 2 hours). Literally as soon as that thought entered my mind, an Australian girl came and sat down at the table we were at ( we were in like a conference/function room eating dinner at this point) who was also Wisconsin bound. I ended up having a great bus ride chatting, listening to music and watching "Easy A" with Myffanwy (the Australian).

Finally we arrived in Wisconsin, had a briefing about the post arrival orientation which we had the next day, and were given our rooms (there were 3 of us to a room). I shared a room with a boy from Norway (Odin) and a boy from kazakhstan (I can't remember his name). there were only two beds in our room and I opted to sleep on the couch which was actually more comfortable than the beds (I tested them to check). Never in my life did I consider the possibility of sharing a hotel room with a Norwegian and a Kazakh!

I didn't expect to have so much to write about two days but they were pretty eventful ones. The next couple of posts will be about post arrival orientation and the first week of american life.