This is me

My name is John. I'm 13 years old. I live in Helsinki, but I'm originally from Dublin in Ireland. I'm here because in Ireland my parents couldn't get a job. My dad was offered a job here. That's why we had to move.

I speak English, French, Irish and German. I moved to Finland when I was 9 years old. When I moved here it was strange because the culture was very different. Finnish people didn't speak that much, and Irish people can't really stop talking. It was a big change for me.

I go to The European School, I mean S2, Secondary 2. My class is small, there are only about 12 people and three language sections: the English section, the French section, and the Finnish section. I'm in the English section.

The school's special because there are many different nationalities in the school. It's not only Finnish, only English, or only Irish. There are people from all around the world, and all around Europe.

John talks about his hobbies:

I play football two times a week. I have training and then I play a match on Saturday. On Sundays I also go swimming. I have a swimming lesson then. I like hanging out with my friends and just playing video games with them.

SAPA is a club in Helsinki and it's mostly only Finnish people, but there are a couple of people, like me and my friends, from outside Finland.

One of my friends is called Harm and he is from Holland, Stefan is from Romania and Álvaro from Spain. They are all in the same class as me and we’re good friends. We speak English and maybe some French sometimes.

John tells about his typical day:

I wake up at 7:30. I have a shower and get dressed. I eat my breakfast and then I either walk to school or take the tram. When I'm in school, I meet my friends, I talk with them for a while and then we go to lesson.

At lunchtime we all sit together and we eat the school food and then play football outside in the yard. When school's over, we might go to McDonald's or hang out for a while before I go home and do my homework. Then, after I've done my homework for about half an hour, I'll maybe play some Xbox, go to my friends again or just relax in the sitting room with my family. I normally go to sleep at 10:30, in the evening.

At 7:30, for my breakfast, I have cereal, a banana and maybe an egg with orange juice and water. Then for lunch, at 12 inside the school, we normally have rice with a risotto or some fish. My favourite meal is meatballs with spaghetti, in school.

After school, I'll get a burger or I might take a sandwich, I'll make a sandwich for myself. And then, for dinner, we eat steak or meat and salad, normally.

My favourite food is probably burger. A burger with french fries and maybe a little bit of salad and ketchup. I don't cook. I know how to make scrambled eggs and boil an egg, but that's as far as it goes.

Kiana, an American exchange student, talks about American school food:

School food was, depending on what you wanted from the school food, on average around maybe three dollars. Three dollars a day depending on what you got with your dollars, but regardless, the choices were usually the same. So you would have pizza, and sometimes they’d change every day: you would get a different flavor of pizza, but usually it would be pepperoni or cheese, or maybe, like we call it, taco pizza. It’s basically a taco on pizza, and that was sometimes an option but not every day.

So you had the pizza option or you had an alternative option and that would be daily. It would change every day. They would not be very good. There is this one option and it was like a taco but it wasn’t a taco. It wasn’t even taco at all. It looked like a taco, it had the shape of a taco. Inside was meat. And there’s this bread around it, it went all the way around it. That was an option.

There were hamburgers and everything that wasn’t fresh. It was in a plastic bag. So, hamburgers in a plastic bag or sometimes like PB&J (peanut butter and jelly sandwich).

So that would be your main dish and then next to that you could get salad or you could get apples and bananas. No, actually you couldn’t get salad and that, you had to choose. You could either get a pizza and some fruit or could get salad and some fruit. You couldn’t mix and match. But when I got the school food, I got salad. It was the safer option.