An exchange year is not just an amazing experience – it’s like a ride on a roller coaster. Sometimes everything happens too fast to realize what’s passing by and then it seems endless. From one second to the other it goes up and down, to the right, to the left. You’re scared before it starts, you try to escape at the last moment, but you can’t. You get squeezed into your seat, it takes turns that you didn’t expect or appreciate, it makes your heart beat out of control. Adrenalin and excitement pump through your veins nonstop. But at the end, you are happy that you were brave enough to take the risk and do something others are afraid of.
I know I shouldn’t begin negatively, but my first days in Delphi were probably the worst in a few years – I had the first jet lag of my life, was very confused by all the new tastes and words, and was nervous about talking to people that I had never seen before, but who were going to be my family for a whole year. I tortured myself with horrible scenarios – like falling over my baggage on the way to the waiting host family, falling asleep while they are explaining something important to me or having huge difficulties with the language, but eventually everything worked out great.
School started after two weeks and was probably the most confusing experience of all: While I was supposed to eat lunch, I sat 20 minutes in the wrong class, until the books were handed to me and I realized that I never chose Psychology. Everything seemed very dark, because compared to German school there is almost no daylight in the classrooms.
For a few days I felt like the main character of the movie Mean Girls – every embarrassing thing that you can imagine happened to me. The fact that I couldn’t open my locker chased me through my dreams and I was horrified by the mountain of homework I had to manage besides the daily soccer practices.
But the quote “If nothing goes right – go left!” helped me through the worst – and after I finally found my first friends, it got a lot better. I also have to say thanks to my host family, who always supported me and helped me to stay strong facing the challenges of my “new life” in America.
From this point, every day seemed to bring a little improvement and I started to realize how much I experienced every single week: I learned how to drink water out of an ice-filled cup without spilling it all over my clothes, how to do my homework on a bus with about 30 yelling and screaming children around me, how to play football (well, let’s say, I started understanding why a group of boys were jumping around and throwing each other to the ground, just to get a ball), how to feed chickens without getting caught in the barn (while nobody is at home), to wait a second before bending over the water fountain (you never know how high it reaches! And yes, I got a little water in my face!) and how to order a usual chicken salad without ending up with a sandwich full of mayonnaise and tiny stripes of chicken and half a salad leaf on the top.
Yes, the first weeks were funny – for anyone watching the little foreign exchange girl trying to survive in the world of big trucks, driving teenagers (in Germany you drive in the age of 18) and a school that creates a new T-Shirt for every event – even if it only lasts for a day! Unexpectedly, I also got to know my own home country and language better. I never thought about it, but the crosswalk is called “zebra stripes”in German!
It is impossible to explain all the different moods I’ve been through during my first months, but when I look back, I’m more than happy and amazed that I made it. I am thankful for all the girls and boys that are trying to understand my weird sentences and help me every day to live in a country, that seems quite similar at first, but is so different when you take a closer look. And it’s not over yet! There are still a lot of misunderstandings and surprises waiting for me. The roller coaster “exchange” is rolling on unpredictably and fascinatingly.