Well, some time has passed since my last report, so I sure hope that I can remember everything that has happened.

I do know that I did not get lost while changing trains in Zuric, and I met my second host family at the train station in Shaffhausen, and I was right on time. Albert, Doris, and their children Christa and Stefan Neidhart came to greet me at the station, and to help me lug my suitcase to the car.

Albert and Doris have a farm in a small town called Ramsen, and what is different about some farms in Switzerland is that often farms are in the middle of town!!! Albert is not able to put his cows out to pasture because there are houses all around the barn; only a small alleyway separates the barn from the neighbours, so Albert's 25 cows have to stay inside the barn year round.

Now my first impressions of Ramsen were much different than Leontica, for example, it is very flat around Ramsen, (for Switzerland - it's still pretty hilly for someone like me) so no special equipment is needed for working the land, and there is a large variety of crops in the fields. Albert grows lettuce, green beans, corn, wheat, barley, sugar beets, hay, and potatoes on his 50 hectares of land.

The first morning I awoke to the sound of the milker running, since the milkhouse was right outside my bedroom window, so I ventured outside to see what was going on in the barn. I arrived in time to see Doris getting ready to clean and refill the machine they have to sell milk. I guess the best way to explain this machine is to think of a vending machine for milk. There is a fridge with a milk can inside, and a special pump that will dispense the milk when money is put into the machine, and yes they are actually able to sell unpasturized milk so long as they have a sticker on the outside of the machine that says the milk should be cooked before it is consumed. That is certainly one thing that I expect I will never see back home.

It turned out I had arrived just in time to help with the potato harvest. This was something I have done before, but only the potatoes for our family -- not five hectares!

Picking the potatoes was made a bit easier with the special machine Albert had to harvest them with. It was a large machine that would sort most of the dirt and stone from the potatoes, and then 3 or 4 people would have to stand on the top and sort out the remaining stone, rotten, green, or oversized potatoes.

At first, it seemed like a pretty fun job, but by the end of the day all I could think of was rock rock green rock green green rock rock rock......... until a stone bent a metal piece inside the sorting machine, and it was time to take a break. Albert was trying to fix the part, but wasn't having much luck, that is until I noticed that there was an opening big enough for me to crawl into, so now I not only get to say that I picked 2000 kilos of potatoes in one day, but I also got to crawl inside the machine.

Albert said that I was the first exchange delegate ever to get to see the inside of the potato machine. Too bad I left my camera in the house that day.

Now spending a few minutes inside of a potato machine wasn't the only interesting thing about Ramsen. It is actually really close to the German border, and when you take the city bus to the city of Shaffhausen you actually go through Germany. One day Albert and Doris let me take a little bicycle ride to see the ruins of a castle that is in a nearby town in Germany, and I learned a valuable lesson that day: always have some Euros in your pocket because it may save a lot of cycling!

My time in Ramsen was a whirlwind of activity, and it seemed my time with the Neidhart family was way too short, but it's time to move on to my next host family in St. Gallen. I hope I have as much fun in St. Gallen as I did in Ramsen.