Home of Slightly Cracked Dreams

As you may have read, we’ve had two exchange students visiting over the last few weeks. They’ve stayed here for just over a week and a half, and tomorrow we’re taking them to the airport to fly home. There are so many benefits to hosting students I’ve had to struggle to narrow it down to five, but here they are:

1. Make Friends - there’s nothing like living with people to quickly bond and become firm friends. I’m sure I had the two most delightful students possible (they have the address of my blog so I have to be nice ), but sharing meals, bathrooms and those late nights and early mornings are when friendships are formed, not out in the world as people go about their daily tasks.
2. Learn about different cultures - this is so obvious it kind of goes without saying, but I’ve included it because it’s kind of the fundamental point. For them to learn about you, and you to learn about them. We were pretty lucky to have the Olympics on while the girls were here, so another cultural activity to bond over. We learnt about festivals in Germany, and the girls learned about exploding Tim Tams (personally I was shocked they got here after 4 weeks in the country and no one had showed them Tim Tams).
3. Entertaining the children - ok, if you don’t have children this won’t help you much, but my kids were fascinated and thoroughly entertained by two new friends who hadn’t seen their toys, dances, songs thousands of times before.
4. Extra Income - Our exchange students came through the Lions club, but if you take on students from a local English college they quite often pay board, which, if you have a spare room can be a great way to bring in a little extra cash.
5. Cleaning out the spare room - If you’re like me, you have a spare room that could be usable, but for the piles of crap stuff that you can’t get rid of and don’t have time to sort through. Having guests is motivation to clean up that spare room and get some use out of it.