Being 3506 miles (5643 km) away from home, makes me appreciate more where I live. My house is nothing special.   I live in the lowest floor of an apartment complex– four blocks of apartments put together with a fountain in the center and a park on the side. But still, it’s my house, where I have lived all my life (except for this year) and made most of my memories.

Since I live in the lowest floor, I just have to cross an entry hall to get to my door. As soon as I open the door, there is a wardrobe where we usually put medicines with a huge mirror on the door. I love that mirror because I can check how I look every time I go out or I come in. There is a pretty big rug on the floor that is not my favorite, but my parents bought it and liked it. If you turn left two steps and then turn right for five steps, there is a swinging door which is the kitchen door. The kitchen is where I reunite with my family every night to have dinner and tell how our day went. There’s always a moment when after dinner my sister and I sit on my mom’s lap and play on my dad’s back while we are waiting for my brother to finish his dinner, just like little kids. It’s one of those little things that you always do and don’t want to change, because it means a lot and makes your family special.

There’s a glass door in the kitchen that takes you to the courtyard. I love the garden, it’s nothing like Galway’s backyards with trampolines and pools–it’s a little square with some grass and a bench with a long hallway on the side, but I love it. I love how we sit under the awning when it’s hot enough outside and we eat lunch there. My mom usually goes out there while she’s having toast for breakfast just to watch flowers grow and my sister and I usually sunbathe there in the summer. There’s another door in the kitchen that takes you to a little pantry where we usually keep the food, the cleaning products and the recycling garbage cans and where the washing machine and dryer are located.

Next to the kitchen door, there’s the living room. We redecorated some parts of my house a couple years ago and one of them was the living room. Everything started when the big old TV broke; we bought a new one and since it was wider, there wasn’t room for it, so we bought a new piece of furniture for it. The new piece of furniture didn’t match the rest of the room so we started changing most of it. We changed the location of the computer table, bought a new couch, painted the walls, changed the doors… It looks so much better now. The living room is where my family and I spend most time together. It’s where we watch soccer games, eat chicken wings, where we hang out with our friends when they come over, where we spend the long Sunday afternoons in winter eating sunflower seeds or popcorn and watching a movie, and where I would spend my Saturdays watching TV when I was a kid. I would wake up early in the morning to watch my favorite TV shows.  Then my dad would call me for breakfast and after I was done he wouldn’t let me watch TV again until I made my bed and did my homework. After watching TV for a couple more hours, my mom would come back from work for lunch and she would yell at us for being in front of “the machine” all morning.  “How many hours have you been there?” she would ask. After lunch, I would come back to the living room and watch more TV while my parents had a nap in the couch next to me. Then I would change to the computer until my dad prepared an afternoon snack for me (always with something I didn’t like–chorizo doesn’t belong on bread). At night we all gathered around and watched our favorite TV shows or a movie together.

If you go back a little to the hall, there is my sister’s and my room door. We share room and even if it’s not very big or fancy, I think it’s kind of cute. We share our bedroom (which is sometimes annoying) so we have a trundle bed (it’s a bed with another bed underneath that you pull and take out). We have a long desk with two chairs, so we have our own space for studying. In the middle of the desk we have some drawers each of them assigned to one of us. We have long thin wardrobes (that we also share) in one side of the room where we keep all our clothes. We have a long Times Square picture in one of the walls, as well as some shelves and a caricature of my sister my brother and I from when we went to Amsterdam in the Netherlands. My room is where I struggle to choose an outfit everyday, where I study and do my homework every night, and where I had most of the fights with my sister.

The next room is my brother’s bedroom. Although he’s the youngest one, he has his own room, all for himself. The structure of the room is similar to my room, except for the desk. His desk is connected to his bed and is smaller than my sister’s and mine.  It also has a glass door that takes you to the hallway of the garden. He’s a real fan of soccer, so he has a bean bag chair with a shape of a soccer ball and the handles of his wardrobe have the shape of soccer uniforms. He also has a big box with wheels that contains all his toys (most of them soccer balls). That room used to be my sister’s and mine, but when my brother was born we moved to our current room.

In front of my brother’s bedroom is the bathroom door. It used to have a little picture hanging on it that was painted by my grandmother.  I loved that picture–I thought it was funny because you could see part of a little kid’s butt. The bathroom is not big at all– it has a bath, a sink, a toilet and a bidet. We have really cute cabinet in front of the toilet that has a shape of a house where we keep the towels and brushes. My bathroom is crazy in the mornings because my siblings and I go there to brush our teeth and freshen up. My brother always complains about me taking over the sink and stares up at the ceiling when I spit after brushing my teeth because he thinks it’s disgusting.

The last room of my house is my parents’ room. It has wardrobes in the front wall, a king size bed with two bedsides in each side and a bathroom on the left wall. My parents’ room is where my siblings and I would go every Saturday and Sunday morning to snuggle together and watch TV before we got too big to fit all of us in one bed, and where my sister and I steal my mom’s clothes all the time.

I love my house because it contains tons of memories of my childhood and pretty much my life. I wouldn’t like to move because it would be hard to leave the place where I lived my whole life and let some strangers live in it. It has its own little things that make it special.

The house I live now is totally different from my house in Spain. I live with the Snyder family in which, for me, is a typical American house. We live in a street where the neighbor houses are divided by trees and roads, and you need a car if you want to get anywhere.

As soon as you get to the asphalt driveway, there is a front yard with a couple trees. You have to turn left to get to the three steps that take you to the  white front door. As soon as you open, you get to a rectangular country style hall. Actually, pretty much the whole house is decorated country. On your left hand coming from the hall there’s the living room, where I had my first Thanksgiving dinner, where I opened Santa’s presents under the tree and where my host family and I get together to watch our favorite TV shows. The bathroom door is the only door in this floor; it’s also decorated country and it’s where I go with a huge laundry basket to put it in the washing machine and then the dryer. Then there’s the kitchen–the kitchen is where my host parents cook dinner, where I’ve cooked a few Spanish dishes,  where we eat dinner or lunch when we are lazy and where I have tons of memories of my time here. There is a glass door that takes you to the backyard. The backyard is what every exchange student wants to find when they come to America. It has a really nice wooden deck with a table to eat when it’s warm outside, a pool, and a trampoline. It’s really nice especially in summer but I love seeing how it gets covered by snow in winter and how that snow slowly melts in spring. Right around the corner after the kitchen there’s the dining room. That’s where I usually have dinner with my host family on less busy days and where I do most of my homework.

When you go upstairs, you will see that the walls that surround you are full of pictures. I love that fact because every time I’m going up the stairs I stop to see the pictures closely. I accredit that to my host mom, Sheila. She’s always taking pictures and making memories–immortalizing the moment. In front of the stairs is the bathroom, where I take long showers every morning. On the right, there are both of my host sister’s rooms. Felicia’s is pink and usually full of clothes on the floor, and Destiny’s is pink too and usually trashed with toys of all kinds. Every time we have a sleep over, we all sleep somehow in Felicia’s room.

On the left from the stairs, there is my room and my host parent’s room. My room is green and it has a small bed and a small closet. I also have a TV in top of some drawers, and in one of the walls I have a collage with pictures that I got for my sweet 16. My host parents’ room is the biggest one of the house–it has a really big dresser (which I love) and its own bathroom too. The bathroom has a really nice bath where I took some nice bubble baths.

Then there’s the basement, which is pretty much where everything they don’t use goes. It’s also where my little host sister plays when she has friends over, but I don’t like it down there because it’s cold and full of old stuff. We have a little dog named Comet that is hyperactive. And we also have a cat.  I hate cats but living with one has taught me not to be afraid of them and that whenever they annoy me, I can just take them and move them somewhere else.

My host family is awesome and I love them so much. I have become part of the family in a short time period and they were very open with me since the beginning. We have so much fun together and I am going to miss them tons when I leave.