Host Family and Stay

Hello everyone!!

I have not posted in a while, mainly because I have had a little to post. But after months of agonizing patience, hitting the "refresh" button on my Gmail inbox, and hours spent on the internet finding skin-hued gloves to hide my obviously nerve-bitten fingernails, I have finally found out where my adventure to Germany will take me! That's right, I now know the details concerning my host family, or Gastfamilie, in German.

I will be staying in Bad Essen, Germany, which is a tiny town consisting of 16,000 people in northwestern Germany. Bad Essen can be seen on this map that was obviously drawn by a four-year-old. It is about an hour away from the Netherlander border and about halfway between Hamburg and Cologne. Bad Essen is beautiful town surrounded by foothills and permeated by the Mittellandkanal, a small river tributary. A minute mountain range runs along the southern third of this small village, and citizens are encompassed by the beauty of the area. When I originally applied for this program, I hoped to be placed in a large city such as Munich. However, this placement has given me a change of heart, being in a smaller town, I will most likely be receive a much more personal and a very German experience. Many international cities in Germany, such as Frankfurt, Munich, Berlin, show visible signs of American globalism and contain McDonald's, Subways, etc. Being in Bad Essen, a smaller town that probably won't have any five-euro-footlongs, will allow me to have more German experiences and let me more fully engage in a purely German life.

For security purposes, I am not going to release my host families' members' names, so from this point on, I will refer to my host brother as Johannes, my host father as Richard, and my host mother as Clara (and if you picked up, these are all coincidentally the first names of German composers). Richard and Clara both work in the health industry and enjoy hunting, traveling, and riding their two horses. Johannes, fifteen, is an excellent tennis player and will be going to the same high school I will be attending. I will be attending the local Gymnasium, which is the equivalent of an American college-preparatory high school. The school is only a ten-minute bike ride over a river away, which is exceptionally fantastic, compared to the current thirty-minute commute on the deathtrap the street signs call "Germantown Parkway." I do not know much about what I will be doing in my school, except that I am 100% certain that everything will be in German. Stone. Cold. German. Hopefully my host brother will hold my hand as I make my way through the German crowds. My school looks like a pretty interesting place, the only video of it that I could find on the internet contained five students running around in banana costumes giving bananas to the faculty....so it seems as if I will fit right in!

If you would like more information about Bad Essen or my stay, please leave a comment or message me, I will be glad to talk about the Fatherland!

Countdown to Frankfurt: 25 DAYS