Köln!

I’ve been writing letters to the Bundestag (German parliament), and I’ve had my host mom look over them... I realized I make fewer mistakes when I write in German than I do when I write in English. Whenever I make a blog post, I always have a bunch of mistakes that Microsoft Word finds, but only two or so when I write to the German Parliament... yay!

21.01.10

No school today. The only thing I really have to do is get on a train to Cologne. I met up with Tara, a friend who has the same scholarship as I do, and we got on the train together. The best part of this train ride, is that we bought reservations for some seats (since in Germany, having a train ticket doesn’t mean you have a seat, you need to pay extra if you want to be 100% sure you don’t have to stand the whole time), and then someone was sitting in them! To make it even better, the guy had the exact same reservations that we did, so we couldn’t make him leave, and had to go look for seats somewhere else... but at least we met up with some other CBYX kids on the way. We also met this really interesting man who had lived in East Germany. He writes philosophical books, but according to him, he writes what his heart says.

When we finally got to Cologne, we got to choose our rooms. After we got our stuff into our rooms, we had dinner, then a seminar, and it was basically just us all saying hi to each other again, and sharing funny experiences from Germany. After that, the other kids all decided to walk to the Cologne Cathedral. We totally didn’t make it all the way, because we needed to be back at the youth hostel by 10:30 pm. But at least we made it to the Rhein. We could see the cathedral from there.



I was really tired when we finally got back and went to bed... but my roommates weren’t. They talked until midnight.

22.01.10



Three alarms went off this morning. One was mine. One was from the person sleeping above me. The other one was a watch.

We went to Bonn today, but to get there we needed to catch a train at the Cologne Central Station, and I saw something in a window that I just had never really seen in a window before...



After we got to Bonn we had three hours of free time. I went with Nida, Garrett, and Tara to the Beethoven-Haus, where the composer Beethoven was born, but I didn’t actually go into the part that people had to pay for. Instead I went to this little Chinese shop right around the corner. It was really nice in there, and everything was cheap, and I think it was all really from China... it had a really nice air to it, because it was just a little family business. When the shopkeeper needed change for the money I gave him, he took it out of his own wallet. I also found a book in there in Chinese, and the people were speaking to each other in Chinese... the lady shopkeeper overheard my group and I talking to each other in English, and she told us we spoke English very well xD (she spoke in German).

Then we did some shopping. I believe this is when I bought this amazing jacket that I now have. It was on sale for €7,95 (in Germany, a comma is used instead of a period as a decimal place), and it’s amazing, and beautiful. After that we went to this Döner shop to get food. We were arguing the whole time though abut which one to go into, because there were two right next to each other... then I got ditched right in the middle of ordering, because my friends realized there were flies before I did. That döner was the worst tasting döner I’ve ever eaten. It didn’t taste bad, it just tasted disappointing.

I just realized something... during my time in Cologne I had been taking notes to remind myself of what I did, and I wrote „really nice dress“. I have no idea what I was talking about, but when I got home from Cologne I had asked me host brother if he liked my new dress, so I think I had forgotten for three days that a jacket is not a dress...

Anyways! Afterwards we all met up again, and went to the Haus der Geschichte, the house of history. It was a museum about the history of West Germany during the Cold War, and it was extremely fascinating. The Germans really had NOTHING back then... there was a collection of things people had made right after the war out of the strangest things, just because they really had NOTHING. One of the objects was a dress made out of a parachute. In another area there was also a car where its door was the window shield... the window shield popped up and people got in and out through that. I also bought a book about the DDR (it’s really cute and is a collection of facts and such), and then we found ICE CREAM!

Here's a random picture of a pretty building.



At dinner, Nida wasn’t paying attention. Garrett put all of his fish onto her plate. She didn’t notice we told her.

The seminar we had after dinner was spent by us dividing into the groups we had been in at language class (class wise), and talking about the good and bad experiences we had. It was interesting... I was able to see both similarities and contrasts between my experience in Germany and the experience of the others.

Of course, afterwards I did the only logical thing possible. I went running through the streets of Cologne at night with Hannah and some other people looking for ice cream. We didn’t find any.

To end the night, I played Egyptian Rat Slap/Screw. AND OMG! I was watching Pan’s Labyrinth and writing this, and the first creepy thing started to appear, the one with the hooves. Anyways, the people I was playing Egyptian Rat Slap/Screw with either called it Egyptian Rat Slap or Egyptian Rat Screw, so I guess that last part is optional? Personally, I like the slappy option more. Because that’s what you do. You basically look for combinations in the cards that are being put into a pile in the center, and slap the pile, but then everyone is trying to slap it, so you end up slapping/being slapped.

23.01.10

I woke up to someone saying „oh my gosh, there’s only 15 minutes left“. So, we ended up being technically five minutes late to breakfast. After which, we all walked to the Cologne Cathedral as a group, and had half a day of free time. The first thing my group did was climb to the top of the Cologne Cathedral. I started to feel EXTREMELY sick... I’m deathly afraid of heights. I was about to give up when a really nice German lady stuck me between her daughter and I, and made me go to the top xD. She told me to just ignore my fears and keep walking. And I made it to the top. It was amazingly beautiful. I have a bunch of picture of the cathedral, but that thing was just so big it was impossible to get it all into one picture...





I decided to be a tourist after this, and got the coolest scarf in the world. A scarf with the German colors and the national emblem on it :D. We spent the last of our free time going to the El-De Haus... it was an Gestapo jail. It was under an apartment complex so that no one on the street could hear the people’s screams, but the people in the apartment could... the jail’s water sources and such were also cut off from the city’s, so that no one knew that it existed. The main things being shown there were carvings the prisoners had made into the walls. It was very touching. Most of the writings had to do with love and loved ones, in a variety of languages... many people wrote about missing what it was like to kiss their boyfriend or girlfriend. It was very touching, and so meaningful. But all of these people knew they were going to die. The worst part was the torture room. It was hard to even go there because of the feeling of foreboding...

After lunch we had a seminar about what we had expected from Germany, and tips we could give to the exchange students who would be coming next year. Then we took a language test. I didn’t do completely wonderful on it, I got a 50%, which by German standards isn’t really bad (they have a funky grading system).

At the second seminar of the day, someone asked to be treated older, because he felt like the rules were too little-kid-designed. Then we learned a lot about the program. Because there’s so little interest in the program from the American side, they had to make age exceptions. Originally, only 15-16 year olds could get the scholarship, but now 15-18 year olds are allowed, but only on the American side. The Germans also send 300 kids to America every year, but only 250 Americans go to Germany every year. Six million euros are paid out every year for the 550 students that get to take part in this program, and Germany pays 65% of that. And they wont be any change to our rules.

I ended up talking a LOT to someone else in my program that I never really talked to that much before... I found out she’s rather interesting and really nice ^^.

24.01.10



In case you're wondering, yes, it is perfectly normal to have a car with wings on top of buildings.

The last full day we had in Cologne. I met up with David, the German kid who was at my school in America last year and had introduced me to the CBYX program. We sat around for a while at the youth hostel, and then his parents drove us into the city and we walked around a bit... he showed me some old buildings in Cologne, some market places, and clubs. Just about every other building was a bar. But there were also a lot of Carnival related things... including a shop with a bunch of costumes. He also bought me a piece of cake, a cookie, and he gave me a book, a Kinder (brand of candy) egg, and a box of chocolates :D.

Then we had more seminars and stuff, but we really didn’t do anything... a group of kids decided to go to the movies, because we had some extra free time that night, but I just stayed at the youth hostel with a friend and watched movies on her laptop... I was feeling kind of sick too. I didn’t get to bed until 4 am. But, Micky gave Ann a HUGE thing of Doctor Pepper. He brought a case of it all the way from Potsdam to Cologne for her. I got two cans. And I got to sleep in my friend’s room. Yay.

25.01.10



We went home. No one was sitting in our reserved seats this time. I visited the neighbor’s house with my host mom, because she was going to be gone this weekend to visit her mom in southern Germany, and she wanted me to know the neighbors in case I had a problem or something. They’re really nice. Looking back on my sentence, it looks like someone can interpret it as „my host mom took me door-to-door o get to know all of the neighbors“, but I just met one family. And then I went to sleep.

26.01.10

I turned 16. My host mom baked me a cake with apples in it, and put a big candle in the middle. She also gave me a sweater, a thing of chocolates, a postcard-calendar, and a bucket of flowers.



Instead of school, today my class had Wandertag, where we basically just go on a field trip. My class went to the Museum of Movies and Television. The guided tour was interesting, but we ended up getting to leave early. At first the teacher wanted to us all to meet up again an hour later, but within 10 minutes everyone from my class but one person was in the lobby and wanted to leave... so we got to go early ^^. Then I saw a movie with two other girls. We saw the Surrogates, and it was pretty good, but I didn’t understand these two important conversations, so I was sort of left clueless at one part, and my friends had to explain it to me a little... we also did a little shopping, and then I met up with Tara for ice cream. I also got rid of all of my pocket change by feeding all of my coins to the stamp machine. There’s a limit of how many coins you can put in the machine though, and so I had to try at least four times... and the maximum is 15. I guess I just had a lot of coins.

27.01.10

I only went to school two days this week. This was one of those two.

28.01.10

Gesundheitstag (health day)! I went to Potsdam (a city right outside of Berlin) today on a small school organized trip to a health and fitness center. With a sauna and a water gymnastics area. We were supposed to try out different things, like the sauna, a spinning bicycle, and aerobics. I only got to try the sauna a little and the group massage at the end. The massage part was really nice; we teamed up with a partner and took these spiky balls and rubbed them on our partner’s back. Then we relaxed. I almost fell asleep.

My host mom left for the south of Germany today to visit her mom for her mom’s birthday. I had dinner at the neighbor’s house, and they were really nice. They invited me over for lunch for the next day.

29.01.10

The last day of school before the week of winter break. I only had two periods of classes today, and in the third period my class teacher gave us all our grades. My exchange program asked my school to grade me with A’s, B’s, C’s, and D’s, and my teacher made me a special printout with my Americanized grades on it. I got 6 A’s, 3 B’s, 2 C’s, and 1 D. I was worried about the D at first, since my program wrote in the hand book that we’re not allowed to have D’s, but I talked to my host mom about it, and she had hosted CBYX kids before, and her other host daughter had gotten D’s too. So it wasn’t that bad. Then my class got to get out of school before the period was over.

I found out that the little library where I live now has Brokeback Mountain. And that you can check it out with a minimum age of 12. Yes, mom, I did watch it. It was actually really interesting. The settings involved a heavy suppression of gay people, and even though it is a gay love story, gay-ness was shown in a more negative light, mainly because of the background where the story took place, and through the characters’ own dislike of it.

I went over to the neighbor’s house for dinner, and stayed for a really long time.

30.01.10

I went over my boyfriend’s mother’s apartment and we went to Kentucky Fried Chicken together ^^. Then I talked to my family and my boyfriend through Skype back at the apartment. And she gave me candy, a t-shirt, and a little pillow for my birthday.

31.01.10

The neighbor’s daughter is leaving for her university studies, and I stopped by for a little to say bye. Then I wrote this blog.