My trip in America!

There is nothing particularly amazing that happened when I was there. It’s just the feeling of returning home to were you once lived. My trip starts at Helsinki airport where I take a struggling 9 hour flight all the way to Minneapolis airport were I meet my dad. I do the flight alone with my younger brother. I’ve traveled alone many times but I always have butterflies in my stomach and the feeling that I’m going to miss my flight. When I meet up with my dad we started driving home, but we stopped and get something to eat (fast-food) that they don’t have in Finland.

The first couple of days there was just relaxing and getting used to everything. After that the baseball season starts, which is one of the main reasons why I went there. Baseball is my favorite sport. I love watching it and playing it. When I was there, I, my dad and my brother went to a major league baseball game which was really exciting. The game was tied most of the time, with one team getting in the lead and then the other team tieing it up again.  The stadium has an amazing 39504 seats so you can imagine the noise. We got to the stadium early so the gates were still closed. The big lines were just waiting to get in. When the ticket collectors came to open the gates everyone cheered and rushed in. When you walked around the stadium you could see all the different foods and hear the sellers trying to sell shirts and hats.

But enough on baseball, if you haven’t noticed I’ve been saying a lot about food. My favorite place we went to eat was a BBQ restaurant called “Famous Dave’s BBQ”. The name tells it all and the food is the best. The food is traditional American. They serve pork ribs, chicken or beef briskets with you choice of BBQ sauces (and my favorite cornbread). The restaurants are decorated with old pictures and paintings which gives a traditional feeling to the place. Also from inside the restaurant looked like a log cabin.

Also the weather in Minnesota is something I loved. The humidity on sunny days and the lighting storms that went on for even a whole day. The weather was mostly sunny. The humidity was so strong when you got out of the house or car with air-conditioning, the heat wave will hit you and would make you feel “lazy”, like staying in a hot tub for a long time and just wanting to lie down. The storms were continues and usually came at night. You could hear the thunder continuously every minute or so, shaking the windows and making a loud boom.

In the end I encourage people to go see Minnesota at some point in their life. You can see the city, the food, or the wild life they have it all!

How I learned English

I was born in Minnesota, USA so you can guess how I learnt English. I lived in Minnesota most of my childhood with my mother, father, older brother and younger brother. I never remember learning English at school or at home, I only remember speaking it to other people and learning new words.

When I was six years old I moved to Finland with my mother. It was a big change for me because I was not much of a Finnish speaker. Luckily my mom and dad got me into an English speaking school. On my first day of school I felt nervous because I did not know anybody, but thought that everyone else knew each other and were all great friends. Luckily they were not, and I am still friends with most of them today. I remember sitting at my desk on the first day of school, my teacher was calling out our names. There was one student that sat in front of me, and for some reason I could only remember his name. Maybe it was the fact that he sat in front of me or then his name was different.

In second grade we had English class almost every day. I couldn’t spell, I could barely read and I never did my homework, the only thing I could do was speak English. Although I was bad at English I had a very nice English teacher who helped me a lot with my spelling and some of my reading. We had spelling tests every week on different words that we had learned throughout the week. I did not get good scores on the tests so I started studying harder and harder for the tests. Eventually I started getting better and better. But writing was not the only thing holding me back. Reading was always a big challenge for me but at school they had a book series that had different levels of reading (level 1: easier and shorter texts, level 10: harder and longer texts). They were a big help for me and went at a good learning speed that was appropriate for me.

But I did not only learn English at school, I also learned it at home. My dad bought me a book series that we read together and we would always race who read the book first and then talk about it after we both read it. I also spoke English with both my parents and my brothers.

When I was in fifth grade I got a new home room teacher and he was my new English teacher also. The only thing I can say about him is that he was more hard working and gave more homework. He had a different style of teaching. We had the same kind of word test every week except he would put us into groups. There were three groups: Green (very good), yellow (good) and red (bad). Green had hard words and red had easy words. I was always going up and down between red and yellow but never made it to green. We would always write the ten new words after the test so we would have time to study them, but I did not really use that time studying.

In the end I do not know when I got good at English. Maybe it was from all the reading with my dad or all my spelling tests or maybe it was from everything. But this is where I am now, exe English class, Kaarinan lukio.