New family and the events of the last few days

I haven't posted in the last few days because I've been a frustrating blend of tired, sick, and busy. However, this just means I have more to talk about now.

Two nights ago Iva and I cooked dinner for our host parents. This involved a trip to a ginormous wholesale store  and a lot of US-to-metric cooking conversions. I decided to make my Mom's mac and cheese, which I've never actually done before. Iva, on the other hand, went with a traditional Chinese meal that she's cooked many times before. So there the two of us were -one flustered and nervous, the other a little more self-assured- picking through the pots and pans and trying to figure out how to use the oven. Under the circumstances we did astonishingly well. By all rights I should have produced a pot of blackened cheese laced with rock-hard macaroni, but it all worked out quite well. For dessert I produced root beer floats; an unheard of concept in Germany. Although no one in our family had heard of root beer before, I managed to find some cans in the 'USA' isle in a local store (next to the easy cheese, Kraft mac and cheese and barbecue sauce.) I topped it off with vanilla ice cream and swore that there was, in fact, no alcohol whatsoever in root beer.
They seemed to like it pretty well.

The next day we went with our language classes to the zoo. Aachen has a nice, small zoo that has everything from red pandas to a herd of goats. We were given German worksheets designed for middle schoolers, and proceeded to get completely and utterly confused. My small group spent the day alternately staring at what animals we could find and playing on the multiple playgrounds concealed in the zoo. We didn't do any of our homework.

What you normally do at the zoo

I was picked up by my new host family on Friday, and I've been here ever since. I'm living in a village just to the South of Aachen, which means I get the feel of a small town surrounded by nature while still not being far away from a city. My host parents are great, but I'll have more to say about that later.