The trip across the Atlantic
was awesome. I’ve never been in such a big plane, or such a cool one. Each seat
had its own screen and you could watch really good movies. I ended up watching
“The Avengers” and “Hunger Games,” which I found really exciting because those
aren’t even on DVD yet. I think. The airline provided a pillow and a blanket
(how kind..) but sleeping was a no-go. I tried, but it didn’t work. We (YFU
students in a group) left DC at 3:00pm and about 7 hours later we arrived in Frankfurt , Germany Frankfurt
airport to get to the bus that would take us to the language camp in
Hedersleben, I started to feel the jetlag… We had to wait for the AFS students
to arrive, so we spent about 7 hours wandering around the airport. It was
highly amusing trying to speak German to the workers (who knew English
anyways…) to buy breakfast. During those 7 hours, I took a 2 hour nap, which
helped me get through the day. Once the AFS kids arrived, we left, but ended up
stopping about an hour into our trip because 2 girls had been left at the
airport and their taxi needed to catch up with us. Oops. When I wasn’t nodding
off, I really enjoyed the countryside. It was a little reminiscent of Kansas
Hedersleben
Hedersleben is definitely among those adorable towns. I
think I heard that there are about 1,000 inhabitants, and its history can date
back to the 900s (I’m fairly sure…) At least the foundations of the monastery
we are staying at (Kloster St. Gertrudis) date back to 939-ish. There is a lot
of cobblestone, and some of the much (obviously) older buildings are brick, but
generally all the houses are “stereotypical” German houses, with red roofs and
light colored walls and flowers in the windows. I can’t get over how cute it
all is. Our typical day is breakfast 8-9am, 3 hours of German study, lunch, an
hour devoted to doing our “homework” or reading/studying/practicing German,
then an hour of free time (when we are allowed to go into town), at 3pm we have
3 more hours of German class, dinner, at 7 we watch a short news segment called
“Heute” (most of which goes over my head… they talk so fast!), a teacher reads
to us a bit of Mark Twain’s The Awful German Language for laughs, and
bedtime is 10:30. Because I have taken 4 years of German, I am in the highest
level class, (with kids who have studied 4-6 years) and our teachers (Gerd und
Traudel) expect us to only speak German and they only speak German to us unless
we ask what they said. It is very hard, but I will definitely improve faster
this way… If they annunciate well, I typically understand them, though my
problem is I am not very comfortable speaking German. Ha, I’ll get over that
soon enough, I suppose. In short, I’ve really enjoyed things these first few
days in Germany
