November

    It’s definitely been a minute since I wrote a blog post. I’ve been holding out because I wanted to write about Thanksgiving!

    Thanksgiving was almost a week ago. To be honest, I almost forgot it was even a holiday because here, it was just a regular Thursday. I went to school, came home, did homework, and had my usual 5:30 cello lesson. Because of the time difference, my family in the States was sitting down to eat Thanksgiving dinner just as I was getting into bed.

    On Saturday, many Experiment e.V. exchange students met at multiple locations throughout Germany for the RAST! RAST stands for Regional Austausch Treffen, which translates to Regional Exchange Meeting. It’s a chance for Experiment e.V. exchange students and their host families to get together and talk about the trials and triumphs they’ve encountered in their daily lives since becoming a family. I got to see a few other CBYX students who I hadn’t seen since leaving Language Camp, and it was amazing to hear what they had been up to. I’ve gotten so wrapped up in my daily life here that I forgot what it feels like to be surrounded by the comfort of other exchange students- people who understand exactly your situation and are always there for you. Sometimes it’s good to have a little reminder of just how much people mean to you after you haven’t seen them for a while.

    After the RAST, I spent the night with my friend Lara, another CBYXer! She lives close to my host community, but we hadn’t managed to get together since Language Camp. She texted me a few weeks ago to ask if I’d be interested in coming over to cook a Thanksgiving dinner with her the weekend after Thanksgiving. Of course, I said yes. We had no clue what we were getting ourselves into. Armed with our favourite American recipes, we stumbled our way though multiple mistakes, some of which were easily remedied, some of which resulted in some lost causes. In the end, we made a delicious meal (albeit with some new German-American fusion), learned plenty of new skills, and a few important lessons (like the fact that translating the packaging of EVERYTHING, even if you think you’re certain what it is, saves a lot of trouble later on).

Tiernan