I met my liaison and we ate doners in the town. We talked and it was very nice. Here comes the oh so tragic but now that I look at it kind of funny. As you may know I am a phoneless, germanless, american living in Germany. I get on my bus, correct bus too. I'm sitting on the bus and realize that I have missed my bus stop and have no clue what to do. So as I was heading home now I was heading right back to where I came from. So I try explaining to the bus driver what had happen and he clearly didn't understand my German and started getting very nasty with me. So I got off the bus furious waited in the cold for the next bus to come knowing it would be him and got back on. I showed him my ticket even though I was ready to pay for a new one and he let me on. Lesson learned.
That Saturday I went on vacation about an 3 hour drive away but I don't know how to spell it. It was a big camp where a bunch of people from the Deutsch Rotes Kruez (German Red Cross) and their children go. It was for families with special need children, the vacation was from Saturday to Saturday but I had to leave Wednesday night because I had a meeting with my school on Thursday.
During that week we did various things like going out in the city, we went to Kassel for one day, went to an aquarium and went out on a boat ride (which was freezing I might add) but it was a very nice weekend and I got to meet a bunch of wonderful people. Wednesday my family took me to Kassel and put me on the ICE the fast trains that go from city to city and sent me off to Braunschweig, its the city my host sister lives in and she picked me up from the train station. The train ride was only an hour long, much quicker than driving. That night we watched fashion hero, my favorite show here in Germany. The next morning we took a bus to Wolfenbuttel to meet with a person from the school. I selected my classes and was given a tour and my schedule where I would start school on Monday. After that Laura went to work and I stayed and watched Twilight, in German. I found it very funny because It wasn't Bella and Edward's voice and I wasn't used to it, and I didn't understand much. The next day, Laura and I rode a train to Uelzen, for my late-arrival orientation camp (LOC). I as an exchange student, and Laura as a volunteer. We got there and I met many other exchange students from my area and surrounding areas. There where may of us and it was a pretty fun weekend but we had lots of workshops we had to do. We stayed at a youth hostel, and depending on who is reading this I don't know if you have ever seen the movie Hostel but it pretty much freaks me out. The doors to the hostel locked at 9pm and all the workers leave. We (AFSers) where the only one staying at the hostel... that night. The lobby and doors where all glass and at about 11:00 there where three men trying to get into the building which freaked me out. So I told the AFS volunteers and they told them they couldn't get in and they were circling the building. Outside of my room window was a lake, perfect set up for the perfect horror story. The next day we had workshops and then we went into the town where the volunteers gave us a list of things to do, they gave us an apple where we had to exchange it with someone for something better. Take a group picture with a bird. That includes all of us, take a picture with someone in a red jacket, someone riding a bike, and a group photo with two random people jumping in the air.
This game people in the town are not warned about or anything so we split up into groups. The tricky thing about taking pictures with people is they don't want to have their photos taken because they don't know where they may end up. So my group was me, an Italian girl, Czech Republic boy and a girl from Japan. We saw a boy about 14 on a bike just hanging out so we went over to him explained what we where doing and asked if we could have a photo with him, he seemed very skeptical and then I said in German :) "you can say no if you want" and the next thing he said was "Niiiii" so we moved on next we found a lady in a red jacked with a friend we explained what we were doing and she agreed to a group photo with us and her friend to the photo, we got our apple changed into a big piece of Ginger. Got a group photo with two very nice ladies while we were all jumping. We were the first ones done and then they volunteers told us everyone had to be in the picture with the bird, so we found a bird and asked a lady to take a picture of us with it. She agreed as we walked over to the bird it was like oh wait a little more because the dumb pigeon kept moving over finally the lady got a picture of all of us with the bird. That one was funny because we had to go half way across the city center just to get a picture with a bird and the lady walked too, such a nice woman. After all, we ended up winning lollipops :)
I'm not going to post any pictures because I want to respect the privacy of the people who where so kind to let us get a picture with them.
That night we had more orientation and as we were walking up the steps I was turned around walking up the steps and I was talking to Rosa and turned around and one of the men from the night before was standing right infront of my face low and behold I screamed from being so startled my heart has never beat so fast. I laughed so hard after that my stomach started to hurt. Lets just say my Youth Hostel experience wasn't the greatest.
Here are some pictures from my LOC:
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| All of us :) |
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