Change on exchange

It’s needed to say that I have joined a little bit infamous group of exchange students who change their host families. I will not write the exact reasons there, as I was forbidden to speak about it and it’s only my and my ex-host family’s business. Let’s just say that not everything worked out and the differences in life-style were way too big for me. You may say I just wasn't open-minded and flexible enough; that I could make a lot of things in some other way and everything might be better; that if you were me, you wouldn't be like this and just get over everything... and you may be right, but please, don't judge - think and say whatever you want, but you can never really know what it is like until you are in the exactly same situation. Just to make you understand a bit – it’s like with a relationship – you just can’t date anyone and even if you both try very hard the overall result doesn’t need to be happiness and good life. I went through some bad times because of this issue; learnt a lot about myself and people around me – a few of them disappointed me in an unpleasant way, but mainly I again realized that my friends and those lovely Finns are the best people in the world. It’s hard to describe how I felt - let’s just say these days of changing surely don’t belong to the ones I would like to remember from my exchange stay. But as my dear support person says – everything will work out somehow. And so it did.

YFU found a new host family for me quite soon (although in that moment I had feeling like if it lasted for months) and I even didn’t have to change my school! I moved from Tampere to Nokia, very nice small town nearby Tampere, to host family with sister of my age, lovely parents, dog and cat. I have spent there so far only a few days, but I feel so at home and so happy with them! Fortunately, my host parents don’t speak English at all, but talks with me in Finnish a lot. Well, “talk”- they tell me a lot of really interesting things and I love to listen to them and communicate with them, but I’m still not able to speak Finnish much. But I try and now I get the strongest motivation ever to learn the language – to really talk with these great people, to tell them how much I appreciate how nice they are to me, to tell them also something interesting and just to 100% enjoy the time with them. The few days I spent with them were so great and so full of new things that I felt like if I came to a new country! These people are so unbelievably amazing that I would hate myself forever, if I messed it up (again). But no, this won’t happen, I swear. :)