Dear host family,

My name is Sara, and when I’ll leave my city in the north of Italy, I will be 17. I will miss my city because I have a lot of good memories here; it’s not a bad place, but I would like to see other places, meet other people and cultures, I want to see how the people live in the other parts of the world.

I’m attending the third year at the High School of Science: we study a lot of maths and physics, but also humanities subjects. In my school you have to study hard to get good marks, but I’m not a worried or an anxious person, I just do the best I can.

Let me tell you a bit about my family: I’ve always lived in a happy and loving environment. My dad works for a company and he’s originally from Egypt. My mum was Italian and worked as a science teacher — she passed away three years ago. I wanted to share this with you, but please don’t feel sorry for me because of it. My brother is younger than me, he is 11 years. My brother and I are half Egyptians and half Italians, but unfortunately we don’t speak Arabic fluently since we always spoke Italian at home! Anyways, we enjoy spending time together playing cards or going to the street market on Saturday. Usually we go to our relatives in Egypt every three years for holidays, the years in the between we go to the seaside. But I like the mountains too, in fact every year I go hiking with my friend in the Dolomites. I’d live in nature forever rather than in the city.

About me, when people know me they say I’m a little peculiar, and it’s true, but don’t worry about it because my mind is funny, my thoughts are actually hilarious sometimes. I’m very busy in my life and I never get bored (probably it’s not always a good thing) because I like a lot of things, I’m bold and I have a lot of hobbies: first of all, I like to think. Despite this I’m very outgoing and I like to talk or discuss with everyone. I like also reading and writing. My favourites are fantasy books but I read novels too. In fact thanks to the book “Shantaram” I decided to become an exchange student and visit the world. About writing I’m not bad at it in Italian… but I am not able to do that in English yet.

Then I can say that I do athletics and this is an important part of my life: I need to train; it would be hard for me to stay a year away from my track. I train five or six times a week, I enjoy struggling and pushing the limits of my strength. I hope to learn a lot seeing how the athletes train in other countries. I’m not very good at my sport but I work hard and I like it. I have a lot of friends who train with me and every day we laugh, we run, we cry together and we see the sunset and the moon.

Another part of my life that I love is my deep passion for my guitar. I have been playing classical guitar for six years but I also started the electric guitar. It’s fantastic and I hope to have a band one day! I would like to talk about chess, which I consider the best board game around the world. I can’t explain how truly amazing is playing chess. You can guess that I’m a person who does what she likes.

I’m very curious about everything I see so I make a lot of questions but for most of these I’m still looking for an answer. This is why I would like to be an astrophysicist, to answer questions about the universe. I can’t wait to go away to discover new worlds and learn what I don’t know. I hope it will be a great experience for me and for you.

Best regards,

Sara