remember, remember the fifth of november.

The title of this blog post has nothing to do with its contents. I just wasn’t able to go around saying this repeatedly during school today like I normally do on Guy Fawkes Day, so I’m taking every opportunity to type it. I’m actually going to write about my late-orientation camp and whatever else strikes my fancy.

Here is an excerpt from my journal last Friday, when I was sitting on a train that I was pretty sure (but not positive) was taking me to Bad Honnef. “It looks like Bad Honnef looks in my head…” Spoiler alert: It was the right train. Upon my arrival, I was immediately met by two returnees from Chile, and two fellow exchange students, Eli from Costa Rica and Beatriz from Bolivia. I was pleased to discover that I still understand Spanish (I almost feel like I understand Spanish better now), but rather less pleased to find that I am almost entirely incapable of stringing a complete sentence together. I don’t remember exactly what I said, but it was along the lines of “Yo puedo entender, pero mi español es…jetzt viel schlechter als mein Deutsch!” My spoken Spanish is pretty embarrassingly bad at the moment.

Anyway, during the actual camp, they kept us pretty busy. We had several “Spiels” each day, and although Spiel meant “game” last time I checked, they were more like workshops or discussion groups (group therapy sessions? haha) where we talked about various aspects of life as an exchange student. Though there was a lot of overlap in the topics and it got to be a bit repetitious at points, I actually really enjoyed a lot of the conversations that we had. It was reassuring to find that other people were having similar experiences, and fascinating to talk about the differences between Germany and our home countries with people from all over the world!

I’d only met five of the people at camp before, and didn’t know any of them well, so I was surprised to find that literally everybody else knew a decent number of people already. However, the people at camp were awesome. They were friendly and open, and we had a great time together. I didn’t take many pictures, so I’m going to steal some from Facebook.

good times hanging out in room 114 of the youth hostel with girls from four different continents.

One of the activities that we did during camp was called “Stadt Rallye,” or “City Rally.” We had six questions to answer, plus we needed to photograph five things that we considered “typisch Deutsch” and get a picture of our group with a resident of Bad Honnef. It was a pretty interesting adventure…we asked about half of the town where the supermarket was, because we needed to find out the price of six eggs, and ended up just outside the town limits. We took a different route back, and ended up passing at least two supermarkets that were closer. We still managed to get all the answers, and won the challenge. Along with everyone else. The questions were easy enough that every single group apparently got them all right. It was great, though; Bad Honnef is beautiful in the fall. The scenery actually looks a little bit like New York, but the homes are adorable and unmistakably German.

Gruppe Apfel (Alex aus Russland, Merve aus der Turkei, ich, und Heidi aus Australien) mit eine echte Bad Honnef Bürgerin!

Yeah. It was fun. I miss AFS-camp. My only major complaint (aside from lack of sleep) is that the only one of my languages that possibly improved was Spanish. We spoke English pretty much the entire weekend, but if anything, my English got worse, haha. If I don’t think about it, I tend to pick up weird grammar quirks if I spend a lot of time speaking English with people who aren’t native speakers. I also keep saying German things in English. (That makes no sense, so, example: “I want to take a picture” in German is “Ich will ein Foto machen,” so I said “I will make a photo” and was laughed at by American/Australian people.) Also, when Gaby came at the end, she told me to speak German and then I kept accidentally speaking German to people who didn’t really understand it. My head gets so confused…

I’m taking both English and Spanish in school, by the way. I am doing quite well in Spanish, which isn’t that impressive because I’ve been taking Spanish for about five years longer than my classmates. However, while I haven’t learned much Spanish, it is helping with my German vocabulary, and, I mean, I am in Germany.

I find English class pretty entertaining. Yesterday, I got shown up by a German classmate who interpreted a stanza in the poem we were reading better than I did. Ouch. My teacher also frequently asks my opinion on grammar/usage questions, and then says things like “But is that really important in the U.S.?” Yes, contrary to popular belief, grammar rules do apply in the States, too.

in other news, I applied to college! I sent in all of my applications on Monday evening. (full disclosure: I still need to submit one that’s not on the Common App, but no big deal.) It was a super-awesome, but also terrifying feeling. I’ve been working towards this (with varying levels of awareness) since I was about four and someone taught me that “Girls go to college to get more knowledge” rhyme, and now it’s out of my hands. I’m a bit anxious and would like to hear where I did and didn’t get in already, but it’s not worth it to spend the next five months of my exchange stressing about it. So I shan’t. It’s quite a relief, auf jeden fall.

That’s all (for now), folks. Thanks for the comments and let me know if there’s anything that you want to hear more about! (: