Sunday, June 20 2010

I have arrived in Germany! The time here is 6am, but back home in the US it is still midnight. Most of my friends are still awake at home, but my parents are sleeping. I did not sleep well on the plane, although it was the smoothest plane ride I think I have ever experienced. Our Lufthansa plane was HUGE. The plane had seats arranged in a 2seat-4seats-3seat layout, which was very overwhelming for me because I had only been on much smaller planes. The airline food was surprisingly edible, the seat room very minimal, and the bathrooms (all 5 of them!) were located on the second floor of the plane. To reach them, I had to walk down a flight of stairs!

After retrieving my luggage, my travel group and I proceeded to navigate the Frankfurt Airport for bathrooms and a bakery. At the bakery, everyone was nervous to order the yummy products, because we were dealing with a new currency and language. Needless to say, I somewhat successfully ordered myself a piping hot cup of coffee while the others bought pastries, Austrian made energy drinks and German soda-pop.

One thing that I had to become accustomed to were the amount of escalators. With my one bag and backpack, these were easy for me to navigate, but others in the group struggled a bit. At one point, after stepping on to the escalator, my friend somehow fell back onto the person behind her and stayed with her back on her bags the whole ride up to the top. It could have been a ‘YouTube’ hit or a HHS blogging story.

After escalatering to the U-Bahnhof Gleis nummer 7 (train station, platform # 7), we saw the famous ICE ‘bullet train’ in action, and soon after our own train arrived. We traveled to Meins, where we carried/stumbled down and up flights of stairs until we arrived at our next Gleis (platform) destined for Neustadt. We had reached the point of exhaustion where you begin to laugh at every thing. You begin to say ridiculous things, you laugh, others laugh, then you just start feeling a bit sorry for yourself about how you are behaving. Behavior aside, the countryside was beautiful. Out both windows, there were endless vineyards. Not all trees were large quite yet; many were younger trees but were planted in very straight rows with support fences near their trunks. Poppy’s occasionally popped up in the windows in clusters, beautiful German architecture was present in every house and tiny cars and many bikers traveled on the streets. The colors were astounding.

When we arrived in Neustadt, the weather was wollkige und kalt (overcast and a cold). We met up with our host families and then traveled to their Gymnasium (school), where we were served waffles, Mineral wasser and Mineral wasser mit Apfel soft (mineral water with apple juice). We then traveled home with our host families. A dinner was scheduled for 16:00h (4pm) at one of the host families home. The parents own a wine making business, so the house was beautiful and the food was very interesting. We had sausage and sauerkraut among other vegetables and pastas. It was great, except that everyone of us who had been traveling were sehr moody (very tired!). It was difficult for us to even keep our eyes open sometimes, but we tried our best to be polite.