Adventures in Germany

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June 8^th / 9^th

It is day one of my trip. Starting today I embark on a 5 week trip to Munich, Germany. I didn’t get much sleep last night due to severe storms all through the night. My dad came in and woke me up at 6:18, even though I had an alarm set for 6:30. My mom, sister, and I leave at 7. It’s roughly a 2 ½ drive down to Louisville. My sister is coming along because she’s staying at her friend, Holly’s, house. It’s a rainy start to the day. Ashlie’s driving. I almost fall asleep in the car on the way down. It’s way too early to be awake right now. I, being me, do not know exactly where my group is meeting. Nor do I know whether we actually get our tickets when we get there or not.

“Maybe you’ll go to Germany today, but I highly doubt it. This seems really unorganized.” Says Ashlie snootily.

Finally I just give in to their nagging and post on the Facebook group page. We’re meeting at the Delta entrance area. We park the car in the garage and head inside. I’m towing my large red suitcase (that looks ratchet thanks to my drum corps days last summer), my backpack (also ratchet) and my rainbow unicorn pillow pet. We find the group and they leave to take Ashlie to meet up with Holly and her mom.



We sit around for about 90 minutes before everyone shows up. It’s kind of awkward because nobody really knows each other. Finally we start heading back to security. This is an adventure all in itself. If you think security normally is time consuming, try going with a group of around 9 people. I accidentally didn’t put my computer in a tray with the rest of my stuff (oops). You aren’t supposed to do that. The TSA guard takes my bin and scans my computer with some wand type thing. As we’re waiting at our gate, I get to know one of the other guys going on the trip. He’s from Tennessee and seems pretty cool. The lady sitting next to us starts talking to us. She moved to the U.S. from Berlin like 15 years ago. She gives us a list of things to do in Berlin for a weekend (hint hint she said to look at the bars and clubs). Finally it’s time to board the plane. This is quite a small plane, but it’s only going from Louisville to Atlanta. I get the window seat, luckily. It’s pretty cool. It’s been a few years since I’ve been on a plane. Pretty soon it turns into everyone just putting in their headphones and trying to get a quick nap in. Finally we’re touching down in Atlanta. We got there like a whole 45 minutes prior to when we were supposed to. We have roughly 3 ½ hours to kill before our flight for Munich starts boarding. We quickly learn that the Atlanta airport is HUGE. We have to get on a mini train to get from our gate to the next gate we need to be at. Once we get close to the correct area, we go to get some food. We’re all starving. Quite a few of us head on over to McDonalds for a last hope at having a sweet tea before we leave the country. Just our luck, the ATLANTA McDonalds doesn’t have sweet tea. (I mean really people, it’s in the South. That’s just wrong.) Anywho we met up with another girl going on the trip in Hotlanta (she wasn’t doing the group flight, but she ended up on the same flight as us). We all hung out for a while before finally heading to our waiting area. Finally 4:00 came and they started boarding. We were in zone 2 again so we were pretty much the last people to board. I was in seat 44D, while one of my friends was in 44F and another one in G. I figured that I would be between people from the group. Boy was I wrong. I was in between these two older guys (later 30s) and felt really awkward. After about 10 minutes of sitting awkwardly in my seat and receiving looks of pity from Noah and the guy next to him, one of the flight attendants told me to move back a row. I had the entire 3 seater row to myself for the entire flight. I started out the flight lookin through movies, then television shows, back to movies. I then listened to some songs on spotify because I couldn’t decide what movie I wanted to watch. I was on a 5 minute debate between Cinderella and Seventh Son. I hadn’t seen either of them. I finally just watched the trailer for both of them. The Cinderella one got boring about halfway through so I decided to go with Seventh Son, which had action, magic, death, witches, and a wonderful plot. It was as good as I imagined it to be. After the movie ended I decided to get some shut eye. Since there was nobody next to me I got to use all three pillows. I put my pillow pet on top of them and my Cadets hoodie on top of that. I pulled out my Harry Potter blanket (because to be honest I’m a bit of a nerd) and laid down to go to bed. I (of course) had my earbuds in my ear, while listening to my sleeping playlist. Naturlich, once I was almost asleep, the guy in front of me turned the light on :/. I was not a happy camper. I got over it quickly, however sleep kept getting interrupted by dings and turbulence. That really sucked. Once in the middle of the night, the turbulence got so bad that we had to buckle up and sit up. I got an hour of sleep like that before the seatbelt light turned off. Then I went right back to my nice chair bed and went back to sleep. Finally I woke up with about three hours left of the plane ride and looked around. Almost everyone was awake, but I didn’t care. I went right back to sleeping. I got another hour of sleep before they started serving breakfast. I sat up and started jamming out to some music. I quickly got bored so I looked to the movies. By then everything was too long for me to be able to finish, so I just stuck with Frozen. Finally we began our descent. Once we touched down, Noah and I looked at each other with pure looks of excitement. We finally made it. We worked our way off the plane. Once we got in we got to the area where you have to wait in a really long line for them to stamp your passport. Well that area just so happened to be at the bottom of an escalator, and the line was so crowded that there was no room at the end of the escalator so we were awkwardly trying to walk backwards while other people kept coming down. We made it through. We had some downtime at the airport so Amanda and I went to go get some money. Once we got back, we left with the group to the SBahn. Now for our group we made the joke that it was the StruggleBahn because of all of our suitcases taking up the aisle. We had to switch from S2 over to S3 to get to Olching. Once we got to Olching we walked about a block to an Italian place called Picos. They have amazing Pizza. After we all ate, we went for a walk (mainly because we were all falling asleep at the table.) We found this cute little bookstore. The group of us walked in and were greeted by the lady working. We all said hello back at the exact same time (it was funny) it sounded rehearsed. She started talking to us in German, and since we were all brain fried from a lack of sleep, we all just kind of gave her a blank look. We were waiting for someone in the group to answer. Finally she asked if we were a school group and she received a group of yesses. After the book store, we walked back to Picos to wait on our host families. We had about an hour to kill, so Amanda and I ordered a glass of wine each. That, of course, made us all the more tired. Finally (really close to the end of the waiting period) my host mom arrived. We went back to her place. A quaint 3 story home with a really cool kind of spiral staircase. It’s almost like a townhouse. It has a gorgeous garden on the 2^nd floor balcony which is connected to my room, and Christel’s (my host mom) room. I got a tour of the house, in which I found out that I get my own bathroom, which is on the third floor. I have yet to fine a washer and dryer. I also learned that when you buy one of the outlet converters from Walmart, it comes with a surge protector built in, so if you plug a surge protector into the converter, it blows the socket (that only happened like 2 times). After the second time I tried plugging my phone in the USB port and that work, so I cautiously attempted to plug my mac cord into the main pluggy area. It worked pretty well, considering my computers charging. I think I’ve done a pretty good job at staying awake. My host mom took me on the trip from the house, to the UBahn Station to the SBahn Station From there we went to Maisach and found the school where I’ll be having classes. Then we got Italian ice cream and came home. Well wish me luck.

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