The First Few Days...

...have been interesting to say the least. My flight was extremely tiring, but not horrible. I went from Sea/Tac to Detroit Metro, and I only had a 2 hour layover there. When I got to DTM, I kept a wary eye out for dorky navy blue jackets, just like the one I was wearing. At gate 24A, I found some! Most of the other Rotary Exchange students were girls from the Midwest, Minesota and Michigan. There was one boy from Oklahoma, and he's a tennis player. Also there was kindof a hippie chic from San Fran named Ruby.

The flight from Detroit to Frankfurt took absoluetely forever. It left at 5:40 Central Time and arrived at 8:00 AM German Time. Everybody has been on a long flight before, so I wont go into the specifics of the sub-par "food" and rip-roaring movie choices of either "Sleepless in Seattle" or "Amadeus".

The plane gets into Frankfurt am Main airport without a hitch, we are actually 7 mintues before schedule. I got my passport stamped and grabbed my luggage. By this time I have my "zombie-I-haven't-slept-in-24-hours" face on but I try to perk up a bit. In Germany, it is legal for non-ticket holders to come into the baggage claim. So I see this tiny blond woman holding a sign that says "Nathan" and I felt compelled to speak to her.

Anke is a very nice woman and an excellent driver. We loaded up the luggage into her new Volvo and we were off. As we took the hour long drive on the autobahn back to Neustadt, she pointed out the sights for me, the Rhine, the Palantine (it's a forest), and the cities we passed through. She told me the most important thing for exchange students to do when they get to Germany is to NOT SLEEP. Anke turns up the radio and the speakers are blaring Red Hot Chili Peppers and Dave Matthews Band. It was a huge suprise to me, but most of the stations in Deutchland are German, but they play American songs.

Neustadt is a very old-feeling town with touches of moderness. It is set into the foothills of the end of the Palantine and is in an extremely beautiful place. There are homes with red terracotta tile for roofs and also homes with solar generation boards for roofs. Adobe to shingles. The main thing that people do around here is grow wine grapes. Vineyards cover every inch of usable space. The town park and meeting place; in the middle of a vineyard. They grow light, green grapes for a sweet white wine that the area is known for. The most famous that they have is their vino verde, (wine that has only been fermented for a very short time).
Anke took me on a walk after I unpacked all my stuff at the house (4 stories, double yard, and a garden). She showed me the school I will be going to, the vineyards, and the town in general. Please keep in mind that I haven't slept yet.

When we return home I ask where the rest of the family is, and she tells me that Mathias is at the hospital (he's a heart surgeon), that Freddy (Frederike, 17) is interning in the ICU at the hospital, and Moritz (19) is at his job.

They are all very cool people. Freddy is very sweet and is in love with foreign languages and wants to become a doctor like her dad, Moritz is kindof geeky, looks and sounds like Joey Pearson, but is extremely funny, Mathias is a loving father and is devoted to his (7 day a week) job. Everyone comes home from their respective places at around 4:30. Mathias and Freddy are very proficient with English, while Anke and Moritz don't have the experience.

Dinner Time!

I'm expecting some extremely heavy meal, wursts, breads, saurkraut, pitchers of brew fit for Hagrid, Liderhosen required food attire. Anke had dissappeared into the kitchen some time earlier and comes out beaming. "You like spag-hetti ja?" (gh and th sounds are hard for Germans to say, so in turn I am Nat-han). The spaghetti tasted great, some real food in my belly finally after a long flight. I know Grandpa will be reading this, it was nowhere near as good as yours! For dessert, thinly sliced gurke (cucumber), soaked in lemon juice and sugar.

I finally get to sleep after dinner. I didn't get up till noon.

That next day while everyone was at work, Anke and I dealt with most of the paperwork having to do with my exchange. The registration, money stuff, my Bahncard (train discount thing), and some other stuff. Pretty run of the mill. One notable thing was that I didn't have any jetlag at all, probably attributed to my sleep-fast the day(s) before. In the day we usualy only eat breakfast and dinner, and maybe some fruit for lunch. Dinner is the big meal in Germany though. For food that night? Can you guess? Pizza and leftover spag-hetti.

Friday: In the morning Mathias informs me that tonight is the "dinner party" and doesn't elaborate much. Everyone was out of the house Friday except me, at their jobs. I took that time to burn through a Bourdain book and watch British CNN as Heathrow was still being torn apart. At about 6:45 everybody started rushing around getting dressed and things, Freddy comes up to me and tells me in her French-accented English, "It's time for the party! Get dressed!" So, I double time it into my classy threads and we are out the door into their tiny VW. All four of us crammed in (Moritz didn't come).

If you didn't already know, Europeans all drive like they are racing and they are 10 seconds behind. Another factor that adds to the excitement is the narrowness of the roads, and how cars have to part half on the sidewalk and half on the street so there is about 8 feet to drive in. FOR TWO LANES! Mathias pushed the VW up the hill (Neustadt is on a big mountain remember) riding the gas, with barely any shift shock (they laugh at automatic cars) as he grinded the gears in the accumulating rain.

The house that we pull up to is very, for the lack of a better adjective, shwanky. The car man (autosehrver) opened our doors for us, and went and parked the car in the garage. The butler then busted out of the front door with two umbrellas in his hands as we made the walk down the path to the mansion.

The party is fabulous. We are in the home of the Host Rotary Club President, Friderick, and his wife Petra (the RYE officer and counsellor). Representatives from my second and third host families are there. A French woman who is sending her daughter to Pennsyl-wania (v and w sounds are switched in German) in exchange for me, Sonya (the girl going to Penn), Tobias (her son). From my third family, only one man, because his son is in Texas and his wife in Brasil. I didn't catch his name, but I figured out that he was the town Priest (Lutheran). After about an hour of chit-chatting, deciding that my nic-name should be Chef (they all had read my information packet), and asking me how their English was, we sat down to dinner. First came a fresh, crisp, spring salad. Italian mother's dressing, radish, cuke, tomato, green onions. For the entree...I'll give you one hint...there is a pattern...LASAGNE!! I don't know what it is with all this Italian food in Germany. It was a very fun night, discussion of where I came from, how it was like in America, and just a lot about how this year was going to be very interesting. All the kids (Freddy, Tobias, Sonya, and myself) had this very different non-alcoholic Bavarian beer that Friderick swore by as the best beer he had ever had. The adults had vino verde... alot of vino verde. I asked them, why you would drink a sweet white with a heavy Italian meal. Their response was "Because it is from Neustadt!" We got home at about 1 o clock in the morning, not before watching the priest attempt to dive his scooter home. He started it, warmed it up, and promptly ran it straight into the bushes. One of the butlers had to drive the scooter as he rode on the back. Seeing a man in a tux, his slacks hiked up to his knees, pulling a scooter out of the bushes then proceeding to drive a half drunk German priest home in the pouring rain is quite a sight.