I Mailed Something

So this week was pretty chill. School is starting to feel less fun and more like an actual education, waking up at 6:30 is no longer working out well for me, and most of my classmates think I'm from Canada, (it’s still a mystery as to why). I ate the world’s largest sandwich, took like 20 naps, and had my first experience with the German postal system. I also found someone to bike to school with, which is awesome and all thanks to my friend who walked around school for 3 days asking people where they lived before she found someone close enough. All in all a pretty successful second week.

School, as I said, was pretty normal. This week I had a lot of free periods, so I have had a lot of time to walk around and explore Ahaus. One of the things I was not expecting about exchange was how much time I spend alone. Part of it might just be my situation, but none of the other students have free periods when I do because they all take more classes than me, so I have no one to hang out with then, and then I come home at either around 1 or around 3:30, and my host parents don’t normally get home until close to 7 or 8. Nevertheless it has given me a lot of time to explore, and I have found some pretty great spots. I’m gonna have to find some sort of hobby or something to do with all my time though. Who knows maybe I’ll learn how to make candles or spin my own cloth something. 

Some of my favorite spots

A Bench Across from the Schloss

On Wednesday, I think I made a friend at the post office, which was nice.  I had to mail a package, so I go in to the post office, and of course I’m freaking out a little because I have to deal with mailing a package in German and that’s kind of scary, so I go to buy the box and I’m struggling with my German, and the woman is getting really frustrated and finally she realizes I’m American and just gives up and starts speaking English to me. While she’s ringing up my stuff I drop all of the change in my purse on to the ground and she just looks at me and decides to not notice and just continues checking me out. Then, I have to come back to actually mail the package, but the box I bought was too small, so its taped shut and bursting, and the poor post office lady looks so done with me and it was so hilarious. And after I did it I felt so awesome about myself because I just mailed a box in German, but looking back on it, it was kind of a disaster, but a funny disaster so it’s all good.

On Friday, I went to my first professional soccer game with my host Dad. He’s a huge Dortmund fan, so I’m glad I got to go to a game with him.  It was Dortmund vs. Frieburg, and I had an awesome time. Dortmund's stadium is the biggest in Germany, and there were SO MANY people there! It was just a regular game, and there were around 80,000 people in the stadium. The atmosphere was so cool. There was so much more team spirit than any sports game I've ever been too. They have like a million songs they sing, and all of these different chants. They even sang Black and Yellow, which I thought was hilarious and my host dad did not understand why.

The Dortmund Stadium

Dortmund won, and after the game all of the players sat down on the field and just watch the "Gelb Wand" (Gold Wall, which is the standing room only seats on one side of the stadium) cheer and cheer. I think they do it after every game, but it was still a really cool thing to see.

Saturday started out with some yard work, and I've never had a yard so it was actually kind of fun. I got to weed things and play in the dirt! After that we went on a whole adventure that involved like 4 hours of driving, a little bit of summer sledding, and waffles (which were delicious). First, we drove like an hour and a half to this Alpine resort place, where they had a ropes course and indoor skiing and something called Sommerrodelnbahn, which translates into summer sledding but is more like a roller coaster with no mechanical stuff. It was very fun, and something I would not have gotten to do at home. It was my host parents and I surrounded by all of these groups of either children or twenty somethings just chilling at the indoor ski lodge thing. The place is in this super industrial part of Germany, and it’s on a big hill, so you have a great view of all of the coal mines and the electricity plants and it was just so funny and such a random thing to do but turned out very fun.

 

After our alpine adventure, we drove to Munster to get waffles, which is apparently something my host family does a lot, which I can totally get behind. And these waffles aren’t just regular waffles. They are giant delicious waffles that the kind people put Nutella and Strawberries and chocolate sprinkles on, and they are, according to the sign, made using the recipe from the best mom in the world.

Post-waffle, we walked around Munster for a little bit, and I am a bit in city-love. There are all these old buildings, and a giant cathedral, and the way the streets are set up there are a bunch of side streets and stuff. And Munster is a college town so everyone is young and all the stores are hip and cute and they have a Lush which I’m very excited to visit. There is also a natural history museum that, according to the advertisements, has a temporary deep sea exhibit. I got to share a few of my lovely fish facts with my host fam, and I think they appreciated them almost as much as my parents do (or they had no idea what I was saying because my German is so bad) After that we went shopping for groceries, and I found Sour Cream and Onion Pringles, which I am very pumped about.

 

Today I went for another run, and when I got home I found out that we were going to a corn maze with the family of another exchange student. The corn maze was HUGE and had all of these games and things in at, and they gave you a card when you first entered that you could get stamped at four different places around the maze and it spells out a message. Sadly, we only made it to two so I will never know what the corn maze wanted to tell me. After the corn maze we all when out and got ice cream, and I went to see a movie with my friends. We saw Nerve, which came out like 2 months ago in the US but apparently just made it to Germany. It was pretty cool because the whole thing was dubbed in German, but I could understand almost all of it. TV and Movies are easier to understand I've found because characters tend to speak better German than real people.

 

So now I'm back home, and once I've finished this post I'm gonna do a little bit of homework and then go to bed. Tomorrow I have my first German lesson with a woman who lives down the street from my host family. She works with exchange students from a different organization, but I get to have language lessons with other exchange students, which I'm really excited about. Tomorrow is also the first day of volleyball, which is good because all of this German food is making me feel very out of shape!

I didn't get a chance to post this yesterday, Sorry!