Pre-Euro Tour Rambles

  Tomorrow I will be heading off on the grand adventure known as EuroTour with around 90 fellow exchange students.  I will do my best to have a blog post but I can guarantee that pictures will posted on my Shutterfly site: Journeys Across the Globe (see link in side bar).  Because of Easter holiday and EuroTour I don't have school for a month - yikes!  I'm a bit worried about going back because I will have missed 2.5 weeks.  At the end of March Laura headed back to Finland, her exchange over (she was with a different program) and we had a wonderful going away party for her, it's going to be sad going back to school without her.  My German has improved by leaps and bounds.  Frequently people will be speaking and it takes me a while to realize that, though I understand them, they are not in fact speaking English but German.  My English has also deteriorated and I often struggle to remember basic words.  And I dread when the English teacher asks me to define a word because now I just sort of nod and say "it's sort of like... you know..." because I forgot how to define it.  But all in all my exchange has been going peachy and I am not looking forward to July 25th because that means the end of the best year of my life.

Neuruppin & Greifswald! - Rotary District 1940 Inbound Orientations

(16.9.11 - 18.9.11 & 2.3.12 - 4.3.12)
   Being a Rotary Exchange Student comes with responsibility.  The responsibility to meet the other exchange students during a few Inbound Orientations.  The first took place in September in Neuruppin.  There 60 some of us at a hostel.  Lets just say not very much German was spoken because most people didn't have a good grasp on the language yet, myself included.  We went over the basic information, the 4 D's - No Driving, No Dating, No Drugs & No Drinking, the Travel Permission form and a little bit about EuroTour.  We also had a lovely city tour.  And then later we had to present our countries.  There are 16 Americans in my District and our presentation was mainly improv and was far from the best.

   In March we were privilege to go to Greifswald for another orientation, this time with another District.  We got to tour an old, never used, Unit at the Greifswald Nuclear Power Plant.  It was super cool walking around and seeing the interior of a nuclear power plant.  Then we had a short orientation for the "newbies," exchange students from New Zealand, Australia and Argentina who come for a year but in January instead of August.  Then once again we had to present our countries but this time we requested to speak about our Easter/Spring traditions.  And once again the U.S. did not prepare anything... lets just say it was the worst presentation but there were over 20 of us (2 Districts combined) and we couldn't all speak.  Afterwards it turned into a dance party.  The next day we had another city tour which was fun and then we said good bye to the other District and took our various trains back to our cities.

Hardhats...

List of Countries represented:
Argentina
Australia
Bolivia
Brazil
Canada
Chile
Ecuador
Finland
France
India
Indonesia
Japan
Mexico
New Zealand
South Korea
Taiwan
Thailand
U.S.A
Venezuela