Staying with a Hostfamily???

Okay, First of all i will admit, i was scared as hell to stay with a host family for a weekend. I was appeased by the fact that I would be with another student, which they told us we would be, and then i found out that i WAS ALONE! With a strange family!! Somewhere in England! Ahhh! Thats what went through my head... exactly.


They were The Tonks. Funky name. Cute house. I'm in Mamble, England. The father is a police man, the mother is a dog groomer (and has her business in the next door office), and they have two kids, Olivia (6) and Joseph (4) who are about the cutest things I've ever seen. I honestly want to bottle them up and drink them and gain their accent. The little girl Olivia has an entire pink room. Her walls are pink.... her bed is pink...... she has pink ponies....... and pink barbies.. pink everything. The little boy Joseph LOVES dinosaurs. I thought i knew a lot about dinosaurs from my awesome "DINOSAUR EVOLUTION" class, but no, i was mistaken. A four year old knows more than me. He has a GREEN room like grass, and watched jurassic park 3, seven times while i was there. The mom Caren said she's memorized the words of the movie.

We went to Ludlow for the first day. There is a castle there. How coolness. British Olly from Butler says he lives around there. Found that interesting. The town is so quaint!









I could almost picture the medievel times when the townspeople would have jesters and dump their garbage into the streets from the upper windows and wear cool old clothes... yeah. Well, this is kind of what the neighborhood looks like:

Pretty cool, huh?
















Here is the castle. Unfortuntely, it wasn't open in January- fricken A man. Would have been a neat thing to see though. I could have imagined more things.... like a feast with a giant pig being rotisserized and everyone drinking wine out of golden goblets and laughing about their jolly lives and watching court jesters!




Lastly, here is a beautiful cathedral that Caren took us to on the last day- everything is gold. I just wanted to take some of the gold and put it on my teeth and be Mr. T. But here is the alter. (oh and we also went to Worster Cathedral which is on the 20 pound bill! Whoooo! They had a crypt... creepy stuff. King Arthur is buried there too! Sneaky!)









This is boris the english cat.











Olivia rolled around my bag for like 20 minutes. I tell you, kids are amused by anything.










The Tonks