My name Simon and I’m 16 years old. I live with my parents and my older brother in Flensburg, a really small village in Northern Germany.

My brother Jan and I go to the same school in Denmark, so we usually go there together by train in the morning. I think its a really good high school, my class is awesome, most of the teachers are relaxed and nice, so I usually have a good time and relationship with nearly everyone there. I never had any problems at school, so I just do the homework in the morning in train, at least if I’m not busy talking with some friends, who enter the train some stations later. I love learning new languages, but since I’m German I sadly needed to choose German as my second foreign language at my school, else I can’t study on a German university later. I started to learn Indonesian at home though, so I can say the most important things like „yang mana paling enak“, which is so important since I really love food.

My favorite subjects after learning new languages are math, sport and science, I’m in the math class of my school. I don’t like art and music lessons, which probably is because I’m so bad at these things.

After school I often do sport with friends, I joined a handball club about 8 years ago, as you can see in the pictures. We do other activities than biking, running and sport though. We sometimes go to cinema, to restaurants or get lost in discussions.

If I have time on my own at home, I often listen to music or read books, but this mostly just happens at night, because my mom needs help at daytime or because she thinks I should clean my room because its messy, which absolutely isn’t true. That doesn’t mean that the relationship to my parents is bad. Of course we argue sometimes, but I can talk to them whenever I have a problem. And most of the time we spend together is fun. Its just kinda sad that we cant do many activities at weekends because they are so busy with working all the time.. But since it’s like that I often do things with my brother and my friends at weekend.

I really like the nature as well. I started to collect cactus some years ago and I have about 300 now, which I often trade with other guys from southern Germany, to get some new that are hard to get and which I can cross with mine, to create new species. We also have 5 cats, they can be annoying at times, but I really love them as well.

I wanted to do an exchange year for a very long time, but the first time I thought about doing an exchange year in Indonesia was about a week after I ate a sweet and kinda sour fruit that I never saw before. It was called rambutan. It made me so curios, that I such a thing that, that I searched it in internet, and got the most shocking surprise in my life.. It was from Indonesia. and that was just the beginning, Google told me that there are other things as well.. Like durian or sate. And again i never heard of it before, which just was unbelievable for me as an food-lover.

That made me so curios, that i began to use a lot of time to search information about Indonesia, and found out, that i would like to learn about the culture as well, since i don’t know much of it. Also the nature is so different from the one in Germany, so i pretty soon was sure, that I wanted to make an exchange year there.