Ein Jahr in Deutschland

Hallo! I’m now ending my Herbst Ferien (fall break), but I’ve still got some free time, so I’m going to try to get completely caught up with all my posts. I’ve got quite a few to write, but hopefully I can get it done. My last post left off at the beginning of my second weekend in Köln, so I‘ll pick up there.    After an exhausting first week of school, trying to make friends, and attempting to speak in broken German, the weekend had finally come. I was so happy I could finally relax a bit from the busy school life. Friday afternoon we didn’t have anything planned, so my host sister had a friend over and I wrote some postcards.  The next day started relatively early, as we had some guests coming over. They were all friends of my host mom, most were friends from college. Once all our guests had arrived, around 2:00, we had a short Kaffee und Küchen in our back garden, thanks to the wonderfully sunny day. Afterwards we all walked to the enormous park near my h...

Hallo und Willkommen! I think I’m a bit more on top of things now, and my blog posts should become more regular now. School is calming down a bit, and I’ve really fallen into the rhythm of German life. This post picks up on September 3, the day I left Hedersleben and began the real exchange.    After all the fun on Friday, we went to bed late and woke up very early. I packed the rest of my things, and headed out to go talk to everyone a bit, before everything got a bit crazy. We had breakfast, but it was a bit smaller and much earlier than usual. We took all our bags and luggage down to the fawyer, and prepared to leave. The cooks at the monastery had prepared us small sack lunches for our trips, so we all grabbed one before heading out the door. It was sad, leaving the monastery, after we had all made so many good memories there. We said some goodbyes right then and there, because people who were placed relatively close to Hedersleben were being picked up by th...

Welcome back! Here's the second half I promised in the last post. I was going to make the two into one post, but I soon realized that wasn't the best idea. So hopefully splitting into two shorter posts works better, and makes it a bit easier to enjoy. Anyways, this picks up on our 3rd week of language camp, on August 22. The second week had been a pretty normal week, with pretty much just class as usual. Fortunately, on the third week we had our next excursion, on August 24, to the beautiful city of Quedlinburg. Our language camp was held in Hedersleben, a tiny town 40 minutes from Magdeburg. Quedlinburg was the nearest “large” town, with a little over 20,000 people populating its streets. Since it was so close, we didn’t need to rent busses like we had for previous trips. We just hopped on the local bus line, which eventually took us to Quedlinburg. We arrived a bit on the outskirts, and walked into the town to their high school, in this case a “Realschule” (Germa...