From the Dells to Deutschland

This was my first time across the pond!
For some reason, I always make things more scary and harder in my mind. I thought it would be a huge monumental thing and difficult to get here. I’ll admit I was a little underwhelmed by how seemingly easy it was, just because I imagined things to be much harder in my mind. I suppose many others think the same way.
On the way, I kept forgetting that I was in Europe, especially when I was in the airports. Once you’ve been to a few airports in America, you pretty much get the gist of how things work in European airports, too. It sure makes traveling a lot less intimidating. I was sitting in the Paris airport and looking at the nice green hills. When the plane took off from Paris to Berlin I saw some nice towns and farm fields and churches, when it hit me that these were French towns and fields and churches! I was in Europe now!
The tricky part came when I landed in Berlin and had to find my host family since they could not come and pick me up. The train system was very intimidating, and I was operating off one hour of sleep, but I somehow I was able to get on the right train and made it to their house. My living situation is very nice, since I want to practice my German and I am living in my host family’s basement with a Polish lady who can only speak German and Polish, so I am getting lots of German practice!

I also am seeing many cool sights, which was one of my personal goals. (The German word for tourist attraction literally means, “place worthy of seeing”) I had a few free days before orientation started to I went and saw the Brandenburg Gate and the Reichstag, I also walked the entirety of Park Sanssouci the next day! For reference, that’s about the size of Central Park in NYC. I apologize, I am not the best at taking pictures but I also want to get better at that while I am abroad!

Something I that truly surprised me was the amount of time spent on trains. In the small community of the Wisconsin Dells area, there isn’t much in the way of public transportation. Now I spend around two hours a day on trains! After being here for a week and a half, trains aren’t so scary anymore, and I would rather sit on a train for an hour than drive an hour to go to school everyday.

Here are some photos of the places I saw, there should be more coming!