My experience abroad this summer was amazing and difficult to sum up in few words but I’ll try.
When I first arrived in Germany it was kinda intimidating. I had no idea where I was, my phone didn’t work and the professors kept shuttling us onto busses and I had no idea where we were going. What was amazing was how quickly I adapted and came to enjoy our German experience. The joy of successfully navigating a short conversation in German (we quickly realized how little German we actually knew but it was just enough to get by if we needed to). The struggle of trying to appear like a local and not an American tourist. Namely trying to ride busses with only a small group of friends and get the student price at the Mensa (Cafeteria) which was significantly cheaper. Then I had so much fun traveling around. We got to see so many cool cities and some sobering memorials I would never have imagined I would see in person. Seeing the Sachsenhausen concentration camp, Bremen, Heidelberg, and Köln was very influential and I learned a great deal from what we saw there. I also really enjoyed our last week of travel and seeing the beautiful Swiss mountains, the Black Forest and Amsterdam. We tried Black forest cake in the Black forest and Belgian waffles in Belgium. But one of the best experiences was arriving back to Berlin and truly feeling at home in a European city I felt so lost in my first day. So all together there was so much I got to do this summer it was amazing and I have learned so much about life in Europe from being there for six weeks that I will look at life back here in America very different.