Pen pal

In seventh grade, everyone in my class was assigned a foreign pen pal. Mine was from Bulgaria, and his name was Bojidar. We exchanged letters once a month, and at the end of the year we wrote reports about each other’s countries based on what we had learned. Here is his report:

Life in the USA

By Bojidar

Of all the boys in the United States, Simon is the most popular. Simon is especially very popular with the girls at his school. I am very lucky that I was assigned the pen pal Simon, because it turns out that he is a very important American!

To the American girls, Simon is like a matador. They carry around in their pockets pictures of his face, and they trade the pictures to each other like they are currency. Rebecca, the most beautiful girl in America, wants to be his girlfriend but she does not say anything to him about it because she is afraid he will say no. The girls are impressed with Simon because (i) he does very well at all the videogames, and (2) he knows all the facts about the planets in outer space.

The cool things to wear in America are sweatpants, hand-me-down T-shirts, and big braces on your mouth and head. Another cool thing is to wear Velcro shoes. Here is a photograph of my pen pal. The average height for a thirteen-year-old boy in the United States is four feet five inches tall. So although he is small by the Bulgarian standard, in the United States, Simon is a boy of average size.

In the United States, a normal thing for boys is to go to a speech doctor every day after school to learn how to make the l, s, r, and t sounds. This is not something that is weird in the United States. In the United States, a cool thing is to listen to songs from the Disney movies, such as Aladdin, Small Mermaid, and Beauty and the Beast. Here is an example about that: One time my pen pal was listening to a tape of Disney songs on a Walkman machine, and Trevor, the leader of the lacrosse team, opened the machine and saw that the tape inside was Small Mermaid. There were a lot of girls from the school standing near them also. When Trevor looked at the tape, he said something like “That is a normal thing for a boy to be listening to, you are a cool guy.” Then Trevor and the girls came over to Simon’s house and they all listened to the Disney songs together and became friends. That is how things work in America.