Berlin, Academic Year

Hi,

I'm just writing to share some of my experiences and pictures, and check in and tell you all how I'm doing, and how wonderful everything is. Right now I'm in the wonderful city of Berlin, Germany for a year, and I love it!! I've been having a blast ever since I hopped off the plane, and discovered that even being a passenger in a car is an adventure in Germany! They're so quick with the gas (and thankfully even faster with the brakes) that it's like a rollercoaster ride every time you go to the market.

During my first weekend in Germany, we went to a vacation house on a lake that my host grandparents own, and I learned and experienced first hand lots of important things pretty fast! I learned how to say (and experienced) "poison ivy" in German the first day, "mosquitoes" the second day, and "blisters" the third day. Thankfully, I was fully recovered by the time school started up a week later!

The first day of school was by far the hardest; I had never heard German slang before, and my host family had always been nice enough to talk slow to me. School was a different story completely! The students were talking up a storm with each other, and then would forget to talk slow to me, and blabber on at an amazing pace until seeing the lost look on my face. My math teacher talked so quickly I couldn't understand a word, and one of the elderly male teachers muttered in such a low pitch I could catch maybe only half of what he was saying. I was also so nervous at first I was shaking, and when you're that hyped up, it's really hard to understand a different language. Thankfully the other kids helped me a ton for the first couple weeks, until I could get the hang of things, and now everything is going great! I can even participate in the class discussions, and do almost all of the homework without requiring any help!

My third week of school, the whole 10th grade class did a three week long Job Shadow. I ended up going to work with my host dad, and had an absolutely wonderful time!! He never got annoyed when I asked constantly what everything meant and was called. My host dad repairs enormous drying and folding machines for dry cleaners all over Germany, and is somewhat of a specialist, so we had to travel a lot too. Most of the time we travelled an hour or an hour and a half away at the most, but we were on the Baltic Coast for a week too, and I really enjoyed seeing some other parts of Germany. All in all it was a great experience, and I now appreciate school a LOT more than I used to, and am not looking forward so much to the working world.

Since then I've been studying a lot for school, and trying desperately to find a sport club that I like. I also go out with friends almost every weekend, and am having the time of my life! Homesickness comes and goes, but it's never too bad because I'm almost always busy with something, whether it's going to the Grandmother's house to go hiking, going to concerts with friends, doing homework, or checking out sport clubs all over Berlin. Whenever we have vacation, the whole family travels too, and last week we went to Dresden! It was awesome, and is an amazingly beautiful city.

I hope everything is going as great in the U.S. as it is here! Tschüß!

Sincerely,
Nathan Hanson