School (and some other stuff)

So. After settling in and having my first two weeks of school, I’m pretty much almost used to life in Germany. Here is what my schedule is during a school day:

6:25 Wake up
7:00 Breakfast (I eat Toppas every morning, the German version of Mini Wheats)
7:25ish Leave for school. Chiara and I go with two of the neighbors. First, we walk a couple minutes down the street to catch the bus. The bus takes us to the train, which takes us to the train station. Then we walk to school from there.
8:00 Arrive at school and start class.
School ends sometime in the afternoon. It’s not the same everyday because some days we have fewer classes. Before I left for Germany, I was told that if the teacher doesn’t show up, you don’t have class. This is true but what I didn’t realize is that it happens like at least once a week. There’s a TV screen at school that shows what classes won’t have teachers the next day. We have to check it everyday. That’s how often it happens.

These are all of my classes: Religion, Chemistry, Geography, History, English, German, Math, Politics, Physics, Art, Gym, Biology, and Theater.
So basically what I do is follow Chiara around everywhere and copy down whatever she writes. The teachers and everyone talk so fast so I can’t really ever understand anything. When she has Spanish, I go to the cafeteria and bring my laptop to work on the AFS activity thing. Between each class (which are usually 90 minutes long), we have a Pause, where we go outside in the courtyard and have a break. Everyone has Pause Brot, which is a little sandwich that your mom makes for you in the morning. These breaks are 15 or 30 minutes long. On some days when we have fewer classes, we eat lunch at school. The food is real food on real plates with real silverware. The food is delicious because it comes from a restaurant at the city hall. No microwaved pizza dippers here.

A lot of other things have happened. Learned how to play Rummy, went to Herbstfest (a fall fest), had my first German beer, and watched a bunch of American movies in German.

My room

The view from my window (our Garten)

Vito!

The city hall. We went all the way up to the tower.

Mama & I at the top of the tower

Maschsee, which we had to run around for gym class. It's like four miles or something.

Chiara, Vito and I (:

The Beginning

I can’t believe that the countdown is over and I’m already here in Germany. So much has happened in the past four days, it feels like a month ago that I was leaving Milwaukee. This past Thursday I flew to Washington D.C. from Milwaukee with Elisa, who I met at one of the first orientations earlier this year. I’m very grateful I had someone to travel with, because I would have been lost without her!
In Washington, we had our gateway orientation at a hotel with all of the AFSers going to Germany (there are 91 of us). It was fun meeting everyone and talking about where we’re going to live and stuff. The orientation itself was alright, all we did pretty much was listen to some people talk to us about how Germany is different and I don’t really remember anything else…
On Friday, the orientation continued until about 1:30 when we left for the airport. We were probably pretty amusing to anyone who saw us – we were a huge group of kids in blue tshirts who had to count off by shouting our numbers (1-91) anytime we went to a different section of the airport. Three hours later, we boarded the plane. I forgot to mention that I didn’t have a seat originally, along with three other people, so we got ours right before we boarded. We were seated in a different section of the plane than everyone else, so we tried to switch with people but that didn’t work. Then we realized we had economy plus seats, so we stayed and everything was good. Except for the fact that I had this caffeinated drink from Starbucks before we took off, so I barely slept on the plane. The flight wasn’t bad otherwise, and didn’t seem too long.
We arrived in Frankfurt at six or seven in the morning (Frankfurt time). After we got our baggage and went through customs, we were greeted by AFS-Germany volunteers. We were then sent to this huge room where we were stuck for the next five hours because none of the other AFSers from other countries came until a couple hours later. So we stayed in there and basically died of thirst and lack of sleep. The AFS people brought us water and food after a while, but guess what the water was sparkling water so nobody could drink it. I managed to drink a whole bottle by the time I left (many hours later). Also during this time, a few host families arrived to take their people home. It was really fun to watch them all meet each other, and made everyone else jealous that we had to wait so long. I brought a huge bag of string for friendship bracelets, which came in handy when we found out that we could teach Germans how to make them because they don’t have them here. A lot of the AFS volunteers were really close to our age (and spoke English) so we were able to make friends.
Finally, 1:20 came around and the group of about 20 going to Hannover left to take the train. Thankfully, I was in this group. Everyone else had to wait longer. We were pumped to finally leave, but what we didn’t know was that we would be dragging our luggage all around the subway and train station for a half hour. I pretty much only knew one person in this group, Noah, so we stayed together for the train ride and stuff, which happened to be another five hours of waiting. We were so overtired by this point. I couldn’t sleep on the train because I kept remembering that I would soon be meeting my host family. I got more and more excited/nervous as time went on. After more bracelet making, listening to music, and nonsense conversations with Noah (you don’t understand how tired we were), we arrived in Hannover! My mom, Chiara, Luca, and Vito (dog) were there waiting for me and greeted me with hugs. It was so happy and exciting and good and stuff.
We drove to the house, just a couple minutes away. This house is so modern and cool on the inside, and has a really nice garten (backyard). I have my own room, which is really nice too. After they showed me around, we had dinner, my first German meal! It was exactly what everyone says it usually is: bread with whatever you want on it – butter, salami, salmon, ham, or some kind of spread. The bread here is so good. I had Käsebrot, which is cheese bread, with butter and salami. Later, Chiara and I met her friend to take the dogs for a walk. Then we came home and watched TV with my mom and Luca. My dad came home from a work dinner later and so I met him too.
I now realize how bad my German really is. It’s so hard for me to follow conversations and to respond to questions. Oh well.
Today, we got up early to go to church because Luca was graduating from Sunday school or something like that, I don’t really know. Other than today, the family doesn’t go to church often. After church, we came home to get the boat and then drove to the lake, where we met a couple of the family’s friends. Unfortunately, it was cold and rainy once we got there so I didn’t wakeboard or water ski. It was still fun though.
Since today is Sunday, most of the restaurants were closed. Of course McDonald’s was open, so we went there. This is one of the most interesting things in Germany so far. So when you go to a McDonald’s, you sit down at a table right away, instead of ordering first. You take a paper menu and rip off the sections that you want to order, and then someone goes up to the register to hand them the pieces and pay. Another thing that’s really different is that everything comes as a meal. I ordered a McChicken and automatically got a 6 piece chicken nugget and a large soda with it. It was way too much food. Also, instead of ranch or barbeque, we had sweet and sour sauce for the chicken nuggets.
This post has gotten really long, so I apologize. It will end soon. The rest of today we spent at home, and I got my stuff ready for school tomorrow. We didn’t have dinner which is good because I’m still full from lunch.
I still can’t believe I’m here in Germany. For six more months. Wow.