A ginormous party and a brilliant certificate!

I am so very exhausted! Yesterday was my school's summer night party which was soo cool! So many people were there and it was fun talking to old friends and seeing all the stands that were prepared by other classes!
But as I said it was really exhausting: I did not really sit down that much since four in the afternoon (when I helped building up the stage and lifting the piano with some others down to the main stage, up again to the small stage and so on) until one in the morning when we finally finished putting everything back.. The concerts were great too! So many people came to listen to us and I think it went quite well too :)

This week a letter arrived that I should pick up my Cambridge English Certificate! I am so happy that I have passed and I am sure that it will be a great addition to my CV for the future :D

Today we'll have a welcome-back party at a bowling alley in Zürich! I am looking forward to meeting some of my friends from Camp again :)

Preparing for two concerts and planning awesome summer holidays

I had so much to do this week! Next to a lovely birthday party for my cousin I had lots of practise for next Friday's Sonafe. It's the summer nights party hosted by my school and they expect about 6'000 people attending this year! There are lots of different stands for food and drink and of course performances and shows of various kinds. In two of them I play too; one is the BigBand and another the Jam group I attend every week. This Friday we had a exercising session of three hours but I think we've got it now and are ready to perform!
I'm going to tell you more about it in the post that's about to come next Saturday ;)

I am so excited that we've booked for our holiday for the next summer holiday. We are going on a sailing boat into Croatia and I am sure that it will be just simply amazing!!

Exactly one year ago...

Today, the 15th of August, one year ago I started my exchange year in England. I remember quite well how it was to just say goodbye to my parents and friends for nearly one year. I also started this blog back then and look at it now; we're already at 18'000 pageviews!!! Thanks a lot for that guys :)

(You can read the first post here)

This week everything got back to normal because I started my school again! I missed this school so much; there are so many amazing people there and I met even more last week! And the amount of music I am able to do here is just fantastic! The piano lessons and playing with my friends in the BigBand or just in one of the two hour lunch breaks and the music workshop which I am part of too! Or just sitting in the lovely park with them :D Also the food is lovely, they make it freshly every day and some of it even comes from the house garden!
I also got into a completely new class last week because I decided to repeat the year I missed (imagine all the maths you miss or french grammar..). The new class is really cool too like the old one! Sometimes a bit too loud but I think that's how it'll be.. The people are funny and nice to talk to but I love being around with my old friends too :)
One last thing I missed and not really realised I did was the classes. I did not have geography and all these other subjects for a year and I need to admit that it's really cool to have them again.

I also think summer is over soon because very heavy rains started in the last days and we had a couple thunderstorms.. It is now not 30 degree anymore (which is good because we had plenty of that!)

Party Time!

Sorry readers for the delayed blog entry but I was at a very cool party yesterday at a friend of ours who turned 60 and I stayed there until two in the morning sitting around a firepit talking to my long not seen friends :)

On Friday I met up with some of my music-bros at a house of a friend to do a jamsession. We played so much and it was really cool! I missed playing with other people so much since I did not really have the opportunity to do so in my exchange in England.

I also met up with my best friend Timo that week because he has got a new puppy. It is so cute and we played around with it and cuddled it a lot! Last weekend I also went through all my photos of the exchange. All together it was about 12'000 shots! I really want to sort them out one time and make a collection of the best pictures of my year; that'd be really amusing and cool!

Visiting Lausanne!

Since my dad went on a very hard mountain bike trip in the Alps with some of his friends me and my mum decided that we'll go somewhere and visit a place too (we're not that much into cycling..)

One thing that came into our minds was that we haven't been in the Swiss French part for quite a while, so we booked a youth hostel and took the train to Lausanne straight on the next day.

We did a lot of things in Lausanne and I need to say that it is a very pretty city and we saw a lot of cool things there! On the first day we just went around the city to discover by our own. We dropped the luggage in the hostel and took the metro (only one in Switzerland!) up the hillside. By just wandering around we found a quartier called Flon. There are a lot of cool shops there and nice cafés.

After that we continued going upwards until we reached the cathedral from which we had a lovely view on the city and the lake "lac léman". It was already quite late so we ate dinner and went back to the hostel to play a round of pool :)

The next day we went to the lake that was just a couple minutes from where we slept. In the restaurant we "stole" some bread that was left over to feed the ducks. And there were so many of them! After a while the seagulls took over though because they are so much faster than the ducks and swans. After a walk along the lake we saw a very nice park by an enormous hotel. Apparently this was the hotel in which Coco Chanel used to stay in a lot. Suddenly we spotted an orange squirrel in the park with a handful of grass and moss in the mouth. And I actually got some really cool pictures of it (see them below ;) After that we went up to the Olympic museum but actually only to eat lunch.. We wanted to go into the photography museum that was just next to it but unfortunately it was closed.

Besides the city there is also a huge park in the city called Hermitage and that's where we went on Tuesday. Next to lovely houses on the hillside there was also a pond with loads of ducks and swans. And of course we were prepared with bread again to feed them :) Also there were a lot of very pretty dragonflies but it was so hard to capture them on camera so I only got one...

On Wednesday an old friend of my mum came to visit us. She once studied in Lausanne for a year but the funny thing was that we kind of showed her around and not the other way around. But I think that is acceptable after twenty years not visiting a city. With her we went into the photography museum. Some of the art in there was just brilliant but a lot of it was simply confusing and did not make that much sense and was weird.. We also had really lovely crêpes later on in the day.

And that was nearly it with our trip to Lausanne.. Nearly because on Thursday morning we walked along the lake in the other direction towards the EPFL, the école polytéchnique fédérale de lausanne where they built a very cool learning complex a couple years ago that me and my mum wanted to visit because we both like pretty buildings :))

Yesterday was the first of August. I went with some friends and my parents to a show performed by some poets of our region and a friend of mine Simon Libsig who is a brilliant poet too. After that the city made a brillant firework like every year and I took the opportunity to take some pictures of it since we only have fireworks here once a year... Take a look ;)