 Good afternoon. Welcome, everyone. I'm glad to see such a large crowd. Thank you so much for joining us this afternoon for what I am sure is going to be a very exciting presentation on accepting the Global Challenge. I thought that with where our speakers start, we would do a brief sort of Baptist style call and response. So please repeat after me. Ni hao. Ni hao. Anya naseo. Anya naseo. Straspoetila. Straspoetila. I have to go to my notes now. Marhaban. Marhaban. Marhaban. Marhaban. Namaste. Namaste. Alright, wonderful. You have just said hello or said some approximation of hello in the languages of Chinese, Russian, Arabic, Korean, Turkish, Hindi and Persian. Why these languages? These are languages that you can study under the program we're going to be talking about this afternoon. Nizli, which stands for National Security Language Institute for Youth. This is a program sponsored by the United States Department of State that gives students the opportunity to travel abroad and engage in the intensive study of languages that are critical to the future diplomacy and foreign relations of the United States. These are languages that are less commonly taught in many secondary schools in the United States. Now, under the leadership of our foreign languages or world languages group and Dr. Lee and Karen Rossi and Tanya Smith and Pilar Hallard and others, NCSSNM has amassed an incredible record. Since the year 2009, we've had 19 students, 19 who have gone abroad to do intensive, immersive language study and they have done so in countries including China, Egypt, South Korea, India and Morocco. So this afternoon you're going to hear about the amazing experiences that some of these students have had and that you yourself may be able to have. They're going to explain to you how this program works and how to apply for it. So before I turn things over, because I have a captive audience I want to put in one plug. If you're interested in traveling to a fascinating country, there will be a mini-term this year. He Laosher and I will take a group of students to China. It's a wonderful mini-term and there is an interest meeting tomorrow at 4.20, right after school in bell 9. You don't have to know how to speak Chinese, although many people who apply for the trip do. But if you're interested, please come to our interest meeting. Alright, well now without further ado, I'd like to introduce our first speaker. That is An Li Zhang, who is a senior originally from Ujo, China, who now lives in Asheville, North Carolina and who spent a fascinating summer in Morocco. Learning Eric, please welcome An Li. Casa Blanca, Morocco, back to America. And I was crying because it was the last moment in Morocco. But I was also thinking about how can I present you guys my life-changing summer experience? How can I tell you guys how much this summer meant to me? And then I thought and thought and then I said I couldn't. So, but this is what the presentation for. Hopefully by the end of the presentation, you will, if you are a world traveler, you should apply for the program and immerse yourself in a completely different country and discover yourself and discover the world. Okay, let's start. So, this summer I went to Morocco. As you can see, it's actually my home now in Morocco. I love Morocco. It's an amazing and beautiful country. So, I lived in a robot for six weeks and plus one week pre-orientation in New York City. Carter hasn't talked about what is Nestle-Y. So, it stands for National Security Language Initiative for Youth. It's sponsored by the U.S. Department of State. You don't have to pay anything if you get accepted. Previous language study is not required. I didn't know any Arabic before I went and I studied Arabic from scratch in Rabat, Morocco. So, Nestle has two different programs. You can apply for summer in an academic program. Summer is about six to seven weeks and academic year is about ten months. And then, if you are interested, you should definitely check out this website. They have a lot of information online. So, languages in countries. Seven languages and you get to travel to Morocco or Jordan, Oman, all those different countries. So, I chose Arabic and they put me under a Morocco program. I didn't have choice to decide which country I want to go. So, different people will have different experiences. For me, it was just a life-changing experience. I still have homesick from Morocco and then I cried last week after I got with my health care in Morocco. And I think what makes this trip life-changing for me is I integrated my previous personal experience to this program. I was born and raised in China for 14 years and then I moved here four years ago. And that's when I started learning English as my second language. And since I was little, I have that I'm in love with Parisian romantic lifestyle. And then last year, there were many times when I went to Paris for a week and I fell in love with Paris. I thought I was going to learn French as my third language, but new opportunity popped in and I decided to learn Arabic as my third language. But I was surprised when I found that almost every Moroccan speaks French. So, in average, every Moroccan speaks modern standard Arabic, Moroccan Arabic and French, because it was colonized by France before. So, why Morocco and Arabic? Like I said, I don't have choice on country, but I'm so glad that I went to Morocco. It's a very diverse country and I chose Arabic because it's very different compared to my own personal background. I wanted to do this completely different compared to Chinese and English. And also discover the history. I didn't know anything about North Africa and Middle East. In this summer, I learned so much about the culture, the language, the religion, Islam, and adventures. So, here's Morocco in North Africa. It's very close to Spain and Algeria. I lived in the capital of Morocco for six weeks with a local Moroccan family. So, my daily life in Morocco. In the morning, we have modern standard Arabic. I think about like five to six hours in the afternoon. We will have excursions such as cookie workshop, Islamic workshop. We will have, we had robot sleep tour, NGO visit, and community service in orphanage. I also had calligraphy workshop every Tuesday in Moroccan Arabic, which is called Darija, every Friday. I learned modern standard Arabic in the school there, but I spelled Moroccan Arabic with my husband. Because most Moroccan speak Moroccan Arabic. Okay, so we went to, so Morocco, Moroccan royal family hosted a party for an orphanage. And then we were, luckily we were invited to go to the party and had an IFR, which I would talk about, breaking the fast, dinner with them. And that's the party and the picture on the upper right. That's a very, very famous singer in the air world. And he was invited by the princess too because the princess very likes him. And then the lady in the poster here, she's actually my host sister-in-law. Surprisingly, my host brother, she's an actor and filmmaker in Morocco. I didn't find out that until like the second week, at the end of the second week. I was surprised. Yeah, and I was just walking on the street in Rabat and I saw her poster. He was pretty cool. We also had calligraphy class every Tuesday. That's a picture of me in Rabat during alphanar expressions. Hanna. So Hanna is a verb of leaf, means good life. You will see in Morocco, you will see almost every girl wants to have my canna on their arms or ankles. That means good life. That's actually my hand. We had very traditional Moroccan storytelling in Marrakesh. That's a carnival in Rabat city. So Ramadan, we were there during Ramadan. Ramadan is the ninth month of the Islamic calendar. It's the holy month for Muslims. So this month, they fast. They have completely different sleeping schedule. And so they stop eating after sunrise. And so they have two main meals during the day. After sunset, they will have ikhar, which means breaking the fast. And then before sunrise, which is about 2 or 3 a.m. in the morning, they will have another meal called sohu. So they can eat after sunset and before sunrise. I remember you can still see the kids playing around on the street at 3 a.m. in the morning because they have a completely different schedule. And one night, my husband woke me up 2 a.m. to have another meal. But it was fun. And then ayid is the last day. It's the festival at the end of Ramadan. People usually get together with family and enjoy food and celebrate. So that's my meal every single day. Moroccans tend to overfeed us. You can see eggs and milk. They eat a lot of nutrition during Ramadan. We had an ikhar service in Rabat. We serve ikhar for those people who cannot afford mail. We had a cooking workshop. That's main team. I think it's the best team in the world. Awesome. So we also had weekend excursions. Except for weekend 3 and weekend 6. Weekend 3, I fasted. I stayed at home and I fasted. It was a really fun experience. And then week 6, free weekend, we said goodbye to our host family and friends. So week 1, we went to Sahara. It was a live changing experience. I don't know how to describe my feeling when I climbed up all the way to the top of the center. It was just fascinating when you stand there and look at the sunset and think. And then appreciate your life. When I was on the top of the center, I felt like my life was complete. Of course, selfie. Yeah, and you'll make more on Camel. And Chef Shaolin is a city of blue. So the entire town is pennant blue. And Tanger here is a city in the northern tip of Morocco. It's called Tanger. And you can see Mediterranean Sea over there. And people there speak Spanish a lot. That's in Chef Shaolin, our group. Or Chef Shaolin. We had lunch facing the Mediterranean Sea. That was awesome. And that's the World Famous Traveler, even Batutas. House in Morocco. Marrakesh in Casablanca. So this is the World Famous Square in Marrakesh. It's a Moscow place in Marrakesh. It's very touristy, very hot, but very fun. Also very fun. Meknaz, Fez, and Volulis. So this is in Volulis. It's a city between Meknaz and Fez. It's in partially excavated Roman city in Morocco. This is the Arch of Victory. This is in a very famous artery complex in Fez. Of course, we went to the tannery and we smelled the weather. This is a cafe clock. The entire group loved the cafe. It's owned by an Englishman who fell in love with Morocco five years ago. And he decided to move to Morocco and open this cafe. But even though it's owned by an Englishman, people who work there are all Moroccans. So the food that they serve, they make tea that are very authentic. Arabic class. We learned modern standard Arabic, but I kind of had to learn Moroccan Arabic because my host family spoke Moroccan Arabic with me all the time. And it's very intense. We had different levels. I was in the beginner's level. We also had intermedia and advanced. We had picture exam, final exam, oral exam, and final presentation, which is all in Arabic. So it was very intense. A girl who studied Arabic before, she said six weeks in Rabat. She learned a lot of things that she learned in one year back in her high school. So it was a life-changing trip. It was really awesome. It changed my future study career path. One thing I learned was how to appreciate your life. Being in Morocco makes me appreciate my life more. The feeling and also the epiphany you get when you're abroad, those are awesome. And I just discovered myself, too, because before I went to Morocco, I was that kind of overachiever, who you guys are, too, overworked, planned, planned, worked, worked, over-programmed. But then there's alright, learn how to relax, and I think that's very important for us to know the importance of relaxation in our life. And the friendship, the connection with the local Moroccans, they're awesome. And this is my blog. I spend a lot of time on my blog, and if you're interested, you should check this out. I almost blog every day, so if you read through it, you will get a very basic idea of what I've done every day in Morocco. Thank you. She's a junior at UNC Chapel Hill. She is a Nestle alumnus in 2010, and 2011 to 2012. And she's a junior at UNC Chapel Hill for the summer and academic year program. And she's also the Nestle Chapel Hill slash Southeast representative. Let's welcome Lily. You're obviously a speaker here, right? Yeah, so I said, like, isn't I in front of Audrey's speaker? She's a guest speaker. And I'm not a guest speaker to Russia. You can speak Russian. Thank you. I'm a senior at UNC Chapel Hill studying international relations, and I graduated from MLB in 2011. I went to Russia for, as Ami said, a summer and an academic year. And I'm also an SUI alumni representative for the Southeast and Chapel Hill. So I organize interviews. So if any of you end up applying and you get through to the interview round, I'll probably be bothering you with emails around December. And then when she comes back, I'm going to give you a brief review of my summer, but Erin also went to Russia for a summer, this last summer. So I'm going to talk more about the academic year program. So I ended up in Kiev, Russia for a summer, in 2010. And here, when I got there, people asked me why they sent us there, because it's a provincial, for intensity of about 500,000. And it's almost 100% Russian. So they sent us there because nobody's using English there. And not nobody, but you get the point. You go on the street and you start speaking English and have people reply to you like in Moscow. So I had classes. So for about 15 hours a week, I studied with a group of 10 other American students. And we studied grammar and conversation. So we would study in the morning, and then almost every day we had an excursion after class. And we went to places like museums, like this awesome Soviet Union museum, and churches. That was the Soviet Union area. And I also stayed with the host family, so that's something that was really up there. They were the coolest people I got there. I was like, I don't see a question. And they were cool with it. They helped me along. My host family printed out all these words, like trash and note, and I don't know, angry and happy, and put them on the wall, and they stuck them up in Russian and English, even though she didn't really speak English very well. So, I don't know, they helped me a lot through it, and it wasn't as terrifying as I thought it would be, because I got to the airport in Moscow, and we got out of the plane. It's like 40 kids and writing teachers. You know you're an aircraft, like an airplane attendant or whatever, and you want to see that. It means it's another problem, you have to feel it. So these leaves are screaming at us in Russian. I end up here, it's just terrifying. And by the end, of course, I don't want to leave. So I got through that. So, does anybody know what flag this is? Okay, it's the flag of Tatarstan, which is one of Russia's 13 autonomous ethnic republics, and it's located right there. It's called autonomous ethnic republic, because it's the potentially national republic of the largest ethnic minority in Russia, who are the Tsarist. It's being language pretty close to Turkish. And so they ended up in Tatarstan for the academic year in Kazan, which is, has anybody heard of Kazan? Of course. What do you know about Kazan? Yeah, it's a big city. It's Russia's eighth largest city, and it's getting this nickname called the third capital of Russia. So there are people, about 1.2 million people there, and about 50% are Tartars, 50% are Russian. So the Tars, they speak a Turkish language, and they're also a majority, 99% Muslim. And so there, as you can see, in the Kazan crown, a church, and also a mosque, which is new. And despite being super diverse, I mean, because of the super diverse, it's a pretty chill ethnic republic. People are pretty peaceful there, and it's one of Russia's richest republics. So that's my group. And I went with a group of 11 students for the first semester and eight students for the second semester. And they gave us a resident doctor, so a guy in America who lived on the ground and answered any questions we did. So anything from being violently ill to where I get to face. And he's over here on the bottom left. And he's the best. So we had about 20 hours per week of classes. Like in summer, we had grammar and conversation classes every day in the morning. But then we also had classes like phonetics and area studies, which we had second semester in Russian. So we learned Russian geography terms, which was really helpful, actually. Especially after you start speaking Russian outside of class with people like their host family, et cetera. And we also had classes in Russian covering religion and culture. And one of the coolest principles for this program was that we get to study with other international students. So we got to meet international students who come from Africa and Central Asia and the Middle East and East Asia. So this is narrowed. Does anyone know what the holiday narrowed is? It's actually the Persian New Year. But it's spread also through Central Asia. So we get to celebrate it in Kyrgyzstan. And these are, I think, Iraqi students who are doing international rugby dance. And this is also, I think, my three-day. So probably the best part was not school, but local life. So my group and I became really, really close. This doesn't always happen, but there were some of the coolest kids ever. I'm still in touch with them. And we did touring at local schools. So I went to a school there where they taught me the entire language. And I helped with English classes, which you may get the opportunity to do over a year and going if you go. We went to places like theater and museums. There's this really cool Soviet-style museum in Kazan where we went and sang every week we would sing, like, Soviet songs. And we also went to, like, masks. And this is called the Temple of Our Religions. It's actually a museum. It's a really cool building. This is a poster for elections. So we also got just, like, I went with my parents. My house turned to the polls to see the book for the person. And then we also got to travel around Russia, which is, I guess that was the coolest part, because we had to go to Moscow, which was us in Moscow. I'm in Red Square. And we went to Yekaterinburg, which is like, pretend this is Russia and this is Moscow. It's around here. I know that it's super discreet to go here with me. And this is a picture of the city. And we also got to travel by train, which was the coolest part, because you get to come to these tiny apartments and you share a lot. You share food and you share memories. And everyone can hear you, because the walls are even thin. And then we also got to those entire villages. So about three villages we went to during the course of the year. We also stayed with those families for a night or two. And I think this is my hostess, too, from one of them. It's kind of a bizarre thing that I don't know if you ever do here. Like, go to someone's house in America and stay with them for a night. But it was a really cool, I guess, experience for cultural exchange, especially because you have to see what life was like in the province outside of Kazan. And my hostess was the best. I've seen a retired couple who had grown children to their grandchildren. They were kind of relatives I didn't even know if they were running around, which was great, because I had to practice Russian. And I also ended up with, like I said, a really cool group. I don't have really cool friends. So international students and local students. This is us at the synagogue. And we went to synagogue. The girl in the middle is a local student who took us there. She's actually Muslim, but she went there for, I guess, lessons every week. And she took us along with her. And so they got, like, in Russia and lessons for Muslim, which I guess that wouldn't happen here because we're not in Russia. So that's pretty much all I have for you. There's a lot more I can start or could speak a lot about, but I want to give Aaron a chance to talk about Akshina and how policy in Petersburg is. But keep in mind that even with places like Russia where politics are changing quickly, they're going to keep things through and hopefully the program for Russian in the area is now Moldova. So here's a lot more Moldova I can get in the area program, which is super cool. How many of you know where Moldova is? Look at her smiling. It's good. It's a tiny venturing between Russia, well, like, here's Russia, here's Moldova, and here's Romania. And they speak the language that's close to Romanian. But they also speak Russian there, so it's because of the Indian. Please feel free to email me if you have any questions. It's my pleasure to introduce a neighbor, a student who lives in a neighborhood, but who attends Durham Academy, Aaron Seawall Beats, who this summer studied in Russia. Thank you so much for coming, Aaron. Thank you very much. We've got Chino-Russia this summer, which is a small town about the size of the Durham. Smaller than it's on. Just south of St. Petersburg. So, in some ways, I think that I got the best of the sites in Russia, just because we got to have a small town where we didn't have to deal with the crazy transportation, which the public transportation was crazy. You could have a bus that was supposed to be there, I don't know, at 10 o'clock and it would arrive at 10, 30 Russians have a really, really weird sense of being on time, which I never really understood, but we also got to travel to St. Petersburg, which was an amazing experience, because it's kind of the center of the imperial Russia, and there are tons of museums and churches, which we got to visit all the weekends. So, this was my mystery-wide room, and the restaurant and cafe we went to every day for lunch, called Cafe Shanghai, where we had a Russian food. So, I assumed that they had some kind of Asian food on the menu, but I didn't presume that it was there. So, I decided to stay in the town of Gatschina. Gatschina has a beautiful palace that's for the Romanovs, very simple. It was, and then it has the private palace, which is in this picture, which was a hunting palace with bazaars, which was about, I don't know, a mile away from the other palace. I'm not sure why, but and we got to visit these palaces after schools on Wednesdays, like people have said, there are cultural extortions every day after school, and one example was we went to the palace, another day we learned how to cook meat, which are little Russian crepes. Another day we went to the museum and got to know a lot of Soviet propaganda about how wonderful their planes were, which was a great experience. It was, it was really interesting because the guy kept telling us things about how this is true, it is a fact that we would just continue with something that all of us just didn't believe a word of, but it was instructive. So, I loved Russian food. It was one of the highlights. I was very wary of it initially because I was told that it was something that was going to be a bit of an adjustment, but in reality it was great. There were, I mean, maybe a few to many potatoes, because I think every meal I had there were some potatoes, but it was, I really loved it. Like I said, that's that's gorsh, which is beet soup, which sounds kind of gross, but it's quite tasty as well. So, we had, as I mentioned, food at a condition high every day, but then we also had food with our host families every morning and evening and no weekends. And there are many different kinds of Russian food. They have a little speaking when you go to the dacha, which is their country homes. They can grill that and then we can have things like cashew which is which I really love, but that's about the only thing I didn't like. So, as I mentioned, we went into St. Petersburg on two of the weekends. So, this is Peter and Paul's Fortress, which is where all of the tombs of the Czaras are. We got to go inside and do that because it's really cool. This is the church on the spilled blood. We didn't get to go inside it, and it really stood out. St. Petersburg is a truly European city and then there's this which doesn't look like anything else there. And then this is the air montage, which is an amazing art museum that we got to spend three hours in, which was kind of ridiculous because I think you can spend weeks there and not see everything. And then that one was I believe Isaac's Cathedral which was used as a museum during time. So, we made that now part of it is returned to being a church. And then other weekend excursions that we did were go to the areas surrounding Peter's Fortress. So, this is the picture of the main cathedral on Kronstadt, which we went to on April day, which was extra fun because of course, during the summer, Russia and the U.S. weren't exactly on the friendliest of terms. We were told to not look American or speak English loudly because who knows what could happen when we have German sailors. But then on the top is a picture of Davokov's country home. Davokov was this Russian writer who wrote Lopida, if you know where he's from. He had to flee Russia after the Bolshevik Revolution because he was part of the aristocracy. And then the palace on the top over there is Tappan's palace, which is an amazingly ordained palace which has everything's gilded. I think almost everything's gilded in there. But then on the last weekend we went to Kronstadt which is known, sorry that's Kronstadt, we went to Beeper Wolf, which is known for its fountains. That's a picture of the main cathedral. I think that the last night we went to St. Petersburg and watched the bridges rings and then went to the airport and standing there we were all really sad because going to Gachina was an amazing experience. We all heard a lot about ourselves about Russia and I think we went to Russia during this summer was it was a crazy experience because on one hand you have the ridiculous international stuff going on, we were there when the plane was shot down. And I don't know, we were all kind of scared of a level going there that everyone, once they found out that we were there, they would hate us. That just wasn't the case. We think of international relations on a very country to country level but once you get down to the personal level you're really threatening at any rate from there with Americans and Russians and you also kind of realize by yourself that maybe we don't consider the perspectives of other countries as much as we do and I don't know it was an amazing program that I hope all of you apply to because it was a great experience. Okay, last but not least for one of our students, Noah Gavin, this is going to come up and he's going to talk to you about this summer experience in China and also talk a little bit about the nuts and bolts of applying for the program. So please welcome Noah. I went to Joshi China this summer out of there for six weeks. We had two days in Washington, D.C. before we left to go over there for orientation. So how the program was set up during the weekdays, we had class from 8 o'clock in the morning to 12 and we actually lived in the school. It was a little bit of a different program. We lived at a residential middle school, all our roommates were middle schoolers. During the weekdays, we had free time in the afternoon, it says free time but really we were usually on a trip doing community service or twice a week we had what they called peer partners which is where high school students came in and we got to start Chinese with them and they could take us to karaoke or somebody made us like karaoke in China. So, and then during the weekends, that's when I went to a stand-in. These were some pictures of when we got to Shanghai that's the airport we flew into and it was about an hour drive from there to Joshi and the jet lag was pretty intense. This is the school that we stand in. This is the track of the soccer field with the kids there. They go to class from 7.30 a.m. to around 8 o'clock in the night with lunch, breakfast and dinner and then an hour break and they usually spend it playing basketball or soccer. And actually 6 to 8 is like their homework time. It's kind of like super studying here for us but it's two hours long so it's a little more intense. This was the whole school they had door buildings over here and classrooms in the middle. So, this was the first cultural trip we went. We went to the Urena which Joshi is known for its water towns. There's a lot of canals that go in and out. And this is the big little old city and this is more of like sort of touristy. There's a lot of shops and not many residents in there. And then the next trip we went to Shanghai we had a security briefing at the U.S. Consulate. We're a big American guy that sort of scared us and told us how not to get bugged. And it was very unnecessary and it wouldn't happen. And then we went to the Yu Yuan Garden and the Chinese people they really there's a lot of value they like their gardens they like their rock work it was really pretty to see. And then we got to see the Pearl Tower and go all the way to the top and that's this tower right here and that was really cool. And then in Joshi there's the South Lake which is where the Communist Party was founded a boat just like this is around there and both the Communist Party was founded. So there's a lot of political things there. And it's also got really beautiful boats and statues that people put up. And it's the picture from the top of the pagoda. And this is the whole lake out here and they have a lot of bridges and little boats that go through. So our first community service trip that we took was to an orphanage this really opened my eyes I never had anything like this. A lot of the kids there were girls because some of the more traditional Chinese families died boys more from older and most of them were disabled. So we got to spend about two hours with those kids and I honor this guy they told me about an hour and he had to talk he was really closed up and he didn't want to talk to anyone and then there was that kid who was deaf and one of the American kids on the trip with me has a little sister who they adopted from China and she's deaf so he knows some Chinese sign language so he can talk to her sounds pretty cool. We went to Harjo, this is one of the trips this is the West Lake I had to take a lot of pictures of people fishing because we had to do a project that we presented at the end of the trip where we sort of they wanted us to go out and talk to the locals so we picked a simple topic like sports, happy fishing so I went to all the lakes and all the rivers and talked to all the fishermen and got pictures with them so that was my project the food there it was not like American Chinese food at all this is jiaozi this is my favorite food they had cicadas on today they really love watermelon I love watermelon and there's a lot of rules when you're eating you can't put your chopsticks in your rice both standing straight out I mean it's like death I was really like there's rules that the orientation in the weekend or the come and dance in Washington, D.C. wherever you put your chopsticks when you're not eating with them and stuff like that it was really good it took a little bit of time to get used to those things like dusky but by the end I was trying everything and I loved it we had music classes we got some travel traditional instruments and the kids there were actually these musical students were traveling to Germany to play in Germany and sort of travel around but Watertown is one of the bigger ones and people actually live there this is a trash boat and it's kind of like a truck that comes around and picks up everybody's trash and goes along the river and picks up trash it's known for their cloth dyeing they'll dye all these really long cloths and then just hang them up and that was really really cool to see and then this picture up in the right hand corner was a guy so in all these birds we'll just go and sit on their boats with them they're not even scared of humans really cool and then I spent a couple weekends in Pingru with my host family that's where they were actually from originally they lived in Joshing where they had an apartment in Pingru and that's where my host brother's grandfather lived and that was sort of a small town in Joshing and they have at night everything is lit up a ghetto right there and they actually have a water down festival in Pingru and so all the street lamps are shaped like water nodes so that was pretty cool and we got to go on some of the old buildings and some of that stuff so this is a picture of my host family right here my younger brother who was 14 and then that's my host mom and my dad they they had an apartment in Joshing and I spent the weekends making food with them I made them mashed potatoes and steak one night I made me like that American steak and then you have to wear these little sniffer things when you go to the house you have to take off your shoes and put these on and that was pretty cool there are beds I slept on my first brother's bed and he slept on the floor even though they had couch because the beds are really hard there I was pretty much just like a wooden box with a strong mat on top to keep you cool and I asked him because they have a nice couch and I asked him why are you sitting on the floor and on the couch and he said because it's not comfortable I like the hard floor so that was pretty cool and I'm still in contact with them I love talking to them it was such a great experience to be able to stay there and see how they look what they thought of America and the rest of the world it really opened my eyes and we do get some look at things from a different point of view much better if you go to another country and get to stay with people there so now I'm going to talk about the timeline for the allocation October 30th is when the online applications do save a lot of time for that November 19th is when the teacher recognition is due so you should start talking to them if you're interested you don't have to November 20th is when you have to have all your signed materials from school turned in and then the interviews start in December and they go to early February and then they'll let you know by April 30th and just go to slyy4u.org if you need any more information but it is a great program and I do suggest that you apply at least for the summer I'm applying for the year all of our participants for coming and especially our special guests Lily and Aaron for coming to NCSSN and sharing with us on lead with the spearheading this effort I also want to thank you to the Department of Humanities for encouraging their students to come and I sniff extra credit in the air and because we want to celebrate the potential broadening of your horizons and we hope that many of you will apply