Dear future host family,

First of all, I would like to give a huge thank you for giving me the opportunity to live with you for about 10 months and to become a part of your family. I appreciate that so much!

I’m already very excited to meet you soon.

Until we meet each other, I would like to tell you something about me, my family, my hobbies and why I’ve chosen to come to the USA.

My name is Laura-Sophie but everyone calls me Laura. I’m sixteen years old and I live in German in a town in East Germany. There are four people in my family. My dad, my mom, my brother and Me. My brother is 13 years old, so I’m a big sister.

We also have two guinea pigs, their names are Bonny and Sally and they are 3 years old. I really love them. I’m a really pet-friendly person but I think I wouldn’t like it if I lived together with too many pets.

Sometimes on the weekend, me and my brother play a game on the PlayStation together. This is always a lot of fun. Our favourite game is Minecraft. We love to be creative and to design and create our own world. My brother has been an ice hockey player since 2018. Sometimes I go to hockey games with my family. I think it’s kind of fun to watch. It would be so cool to watch an NHL game in real life and not just on TV. Maybe I could bring some hockey souvenirs for my brother from the USA. He would be very happy.

My parents both really like to cook and for me their food is always delicious.

My favourite dish is Thai curry I guess but I also like so much more. I love vegetables and fruit but I don’t really like meat or fish. I am not a vegetarian but I don’t eat meat that often.

In my free time I really like hanging out with my friends, going shopping or to the movies. Our sleepover parties are always so funny, I really love them!

I also really like to paint. I went to art school for about 6 years when I was younger. Art is just so relaxing and you can forget your worries while drawing or painting something. Another thing I also really like to do is baking. I often bake something for my family, sometimes for birthdays or special days in the year and sometimes when I want to try new recipes. One time, that was for the birthday of my brother in 2022, I made a cake which had six layers. That was a lot of work but also so much fun. I would really love to bake something for you and maybe show you some German recipes or try out some American ones.

I have already told you some things I do in my free time but I haven’t told you about my biggest hobby. I think it’s a very special hobby and not so many Germans do this. But in the USA it’s very popular. My hobby is cheerleading. I have done cheerleading for about 5 years now and I still really like it! It’s such a great sport and it’s so much fun. I have cheerleading practice three times a week, every Monday, Thursday and Sunday. I have taken part at so many competitions and my team even won the National championship last year! This was such a great experience and I hope I can continue with cheerleading in the USA. It would be my biggest dream to be in on a cheerleading Team in the USA and to practise every day after school. I know cheerleading in Germany but I think there is a big difference between being a cheerleader in Germany and in the USA.

In Germany there is a different school system than in the USA. I go to a type of secondary school that specifically prepares students to go to college/university after graduation. I enjoy going to school. It starts at 7:45 a.m. and ends at 1:10 p.m. That’s pretty cool because it’s not that long and after school you have a lot of time left. My favourite subjects are English, Biology, Geography and Sports. I really love Englisch and I’m even taking some bilingual classes.

Which means that I’m taking politics and history classes in English. I have seen in a lot of YouTube videos that in the USA, there are so many cool subjects that you can choose. This is one thing I don’t like about my German school. We don’t have this.Biology is such a cool subject. It’s so interesting to learn how our body works.

My biggest dream is to study medicine and to become a doctor. That has been my dream since I was in kindergarten and it has never changed. I also want to study abroad, the USA would be a very great country for that. I think when I work hard, maybe my dreams will come true. But for that I have to improve my English even more. I think because of that, an exchange year in the USA is a good idea. I also think it’s just such an interesting country and I want to get to know the American culture, try the food, see if the high school is so cool like in all American movies. It would be also so cool to be a cheerleader at a football game and to support my high school‘s football team.

I also forgot to tell you that last year, in the fall of 2022, I took part in a student exchange to Mexico. It was just three weeks long, but I loved it there. The nature, the people, everything was just so different than in Germany. I really enjoyed this trip, but it was so short. So I told myself: I want to do this again.

And I was like, hm why don’t you choose the USA. This country fits you perfectly. Yeah, I think it really does. I am really looking forward to this exchange. Making new experiences is important, otherwise you are just going to miss out on some of the greatest opportunities that life has in stock for you.

I hope I could give you a little insight into my life and me as a person.

I am very excited to meet you soon!

Yours,

Laura