So recently, a few cool things have happened. First of all, there was the Klausjagen, which is basically a giant traditional festival in the village of Küssnacht. Also, I have moved to my second host family!
Klausjagen:
On Friday, December 4th, was the annual "Klausjagen" festival in Küssnacht. My host mom is originally from that Village so my host parents go almost every year. Before we went, my host mom showed me many pictures from the festival and told me all about it. I learned that it's one of the oldest festivals in all of Switzerland and the idea of it was to make as much noise as possible to scare off evil spirits (I swear I'm not making this up). Also people dressed up in white jackets with hoods, which made my host-father refer to it as the "KKK festival".
So anyway, on the Friday after school I headed home quickly and we left the house shortly after. When we got to Küssnacht, we had dinner at my host-mom's mother's house before heading out into the street. As we were walking towards the main area, we could hear loud cracks that sounded like really close gunshots. I had no idea what was going on but when we got to the main square I could see that there was a bunch of people dressed in white, cracking whips in the air. It was super loud but definitely very cool to see (even though it did hurt my ears)!
After a few minutes of that, the actual festival started. All the lights in the village went out and the banging on the drums started. It was super loud, just like the whips. Then eventually people wearing giant light up bishop's hats that looked like stained glass windows started walking down the streets. It was very cool to see and I was able to get some great pictures:
Host family change:
Last Friday I moved to my second host family. For those of you who don't know, exchange students with Rotary move families at least once or twice in their exchange year. In total, I will have three families. My second host family lives in the village of Sagogn, which is about 20-30 minutes by car from Chur, and about 50-60 minutes using public transportation. It's definitely quite a bit farther from school than my last family was, however its not a very big deal. The family I'm staying with now has a mom and a dad named Christian and Ingrid, and I also have a host brother who is my age named Noah, and a cat named Woody. They also have another son named Jan, however he is away on exchange in Canada right now. So far they have all been super nice and very welcoming to me.
That's all for this post! If theres any questions feel free to leave a comment or send me a message on facebook. Tschüss!
PS. heres some more random pictures of some stuff I did recently :)
Very cool Mitch....keep the posts coming!
ReplyDelete