Hello everyone !!
My first month in Montréal can hardly be described, everything is kind of overwhelming:
College turned out to be a whole bunch of work, the city wants to be discovered and of course there are a lot of new people to be met. But all in all I have had a really good time until now, so I´ll just tell about some highlights:

My homestay family has a lot of relatives and friends from El Salvador, which is where they originally come from. They already introduced me to many of them and they are all very open and kind When you come to visit their houses you always feel welcome.
My family also took me to a friend´s  ”Sweet 15th”-Birthday Party, which looks pretty much like a wedding in pink. For people from Latin America a girl´s 15th bithday is really important, they consider them “real” women after that. They had a huge, pink cake and the girl wore a wonderful dress and a tiara! Everyone was dancing, talking and eating, it was a really nice evening for me, as I was even allowed to bring one of my friends to the party.

At the same weekend we also made a trip to Ottawa, the Canadian capital.
In Ottawa you can actually see the British influence on Canada: the Parliament of Canada looks very similar to the Houses of Parliament in London and their government is organized in the same way as the British one.
The day was really beautiful, we were lucky with the weather (in Ottawa, it usually rains).

I also was in downtown Montréal a few times. The city is really nice and certainly a good place to spend one´s freetime and money in The only problem about it is to get there. Even though I live in Kirkland, which is still located on the “Île de Montréal”, it takes me around two hours to go downtown by bus because the busses actually come and go whenever they want to, so you never now what time to get to a bus stop and usually wait a really long time when changing.  This is why I rather stay in Kirkland weekdays.

The other reason is college. Work, work, work! At the beginning of the semester, every single teacher kept on saying “This isn´t highschool anymore” and every single student was like “Whatever, he´s exaggerating, he doesn´t mean it,…”  Turned out they were not and we were wrong. To break it down to one sentence: Missing one day in college is similar to missing at least one week in school. So we really have to do a lot!
But the college provides a lot of learning centres and tutors to help students with their work, and everyone from geek to football player uses them regulary.
I´ll write my first tests next week, so I´m kind of nervous what they´ll be like…

During my free lessons I usually go outside to sit with others in the yard, just to enjoy the last warm days. It´s already starting to get colder, but until now it was really nice and warm, a big suprise to me as everyone usually only talks about Canadian winters but never mentions summer

I´ll write more in a few weeks
Hannah