Vacation!

As much as I love school, we´ve just made it to the fall break. To kick off the break I met up with some other exchange students in Düsseldorf, where we hung out by the Rhein River. This morning I managed to wake up, check the time then panic as it was already half past nine making me late for school. This panic was quickly replaced with the sweet sweet vaction relaxation, as well as coffee and really good sweet bread. Later I went to the park to hang out with what started with 10 other kids, but quickly turned into about 50. I met a bunch of new kids and hang out with some of the ones I´ve already met.

Tomorrow we are driving to The Nederlands, where we will get onto a 120x20ft sail boat and sail up and down the coast of Holland. I am super excited to be able to do this with my host brother Mark and his Kayaking Club, and I am even more excited after seeing these pictures!

We return from the sailing trip Friday night I believe, then spend saturday at home, but on Sunday we will drive for about 7 hours or so down to Bavaria where we will see Harry´s family and the famous Neuschwanstein Castle. I´m pretty excited for that as well :).

Language School!

So since the begining of my stay I've been going to a night class three times a week in Düsseldorf. As fun as this already sounds after a day of school one of the last things that I want to do is attend three more hours of a class. To make it even more fun my classmates were all older people instead of going to a class with other exchange students.

My Classmates

Everyone in my class was really nice, although a few lacked basic classroom etiquette. For example if student A is asked a question should student B shout out the answer over and over? No, probably not.

Although it had a lot of ups and downs, the class helped me to connect some dots between the german that I'd been hearing and the grammar behind it. 

School
Obviously this is the funnest part of my exchange, going to school, but it´s not all bad. I have to wake up in the morning at about 6:45 and eat and get ready by about 7:30 which is no problem. After that Mark and I usaslly bike to school which only takes 15 mins or so. IT a weird thing to see hundreds of kids biking at the same time but its also alot of fun. Since the senior year ends in April instead of June I've been placed into what here they call Q1 or the eleventh grade. All of the classes are taught in german, so with knowing very little german my class participation at always perfect as you can imagine. English class on the other hand may just be the best class ever.

The outside of my school is actually pretty ugly

Gym class is super different from in the US, instead of being organized by just grade level students choose a sport. The choices are badmitton, volleyball, basketball, handball, soccer and dance. There may also be others that I'm just forgetting.

For my first soccer class we mostly just scrimmaged and played futsal but this week when I went to class they told us we would have to take part of a fitness test. In the US this means running half a mile or doing some situps but much to my pleasure we were all forced to run a 5k. Despite the fact that I really dislike running I some how managed to finish in 22mins and first in my group.

Other than that the only difference between german highschool and those in the US are that german ones are more like college. You go if you have a class, nobody checks up on you when you don't and if a teacher is sick or so you don't go to their class. Keeping that in mind the first week of school I had about one class a day, because of their so called chaos week were most the teachers go on trips (which I have no arguments against).

The DC Pre-Departure Orientation

For our orientation camp we stayed in Washington DC for about a week. here we got to meet other CBYXers and AFSers going to Germany as well as Alumni of the program. Although all of the kids going on this program are great and I would have loved to spend a month with them  -like the other CBYX programs did in a language camp- the week consisted of more sitting in a room listening to someone talk rather than getting to hang out with other students and see some of DC after meeting with our reps. Hopefully the other orientations at the end of the year or so are a little more fun.

Most of the week consisted of sitting in this room listening to people talk. 

 Chilling in the Airport

After this orientation we flew to Germany where all of the AFSers from across the globe got to hang out together in the airport, this was a lot of fun and we got to meet so many kids from around the worlds. The only problem is that we were there for about six hours, which was far to long as most of us just wanted to meet our host families!

This picture is probably the most accurate description of what was going on, on the right is the group from Chile who had just got done with over 20 hours of traveling, lucky them! And then on the left we had some American, Norwegian and Icelandic students hanging out.


Host Family
Finally we took a train from the airport in Frankfurt to Cologne, NRW where we were met by our families at the train station. Of course being a silly American with no prior knowledge of public transport I had no idea that there were bathrooms on the train. So shortly after we arrived in Cologne we found a close by Rail and Fresh, for those of you who don't know they are the pay bathrooms in German train stations.

The best part is in my post travel haze I forgot to check the gender sign, and I ended up paying a Euro to walk into the woman's side then immediately out confused, then i had to pay another Euro to get back into the men's, a great way to start off the year...
Eventually though we made it back to the house which is in the oldest part of Langenfeld the whole town is a perfect size where you can bike around but there is still stuff to do.

This is the street I'm on and my house, don't be fooled by the blue sky though its usually beautiful gray German skies...

This is the family room where most of the time is spent after dinner and my lovely host family, Daniel and Mark my host brothers and my host parents.

This is my room it's got a nice view of the backyard and a porch.

What I'm doing.

For those of you who don't know my name is James and I'm from a little town in upstate New York. This year would have been my senior year, instead I decided to go abroad. My family has hosted exchange students ever since I was little and they have always been a blast to have. Last summer I got to visit a friend in Hessen, Germany and this only made me want to travel abroad even more!

Since going abroad can be so expensive I applied for scholarship called CBYX or the Congress-Bundestag Youth Exchange, This program is a full scholarship to Germany and sends 250 students from the US to Germany every year as well as sending students from Germany to the US. This program was created to strengthen US-German relations after World War 2.

I was accepted to the program back in April, and I have just recently received my host family. I'll be staying in Langenfeld, a city of 60,000 people, a little different from my town of 5,000. This city is only 30 minuets from two huge cities Dusseldorf which has a population of 600,000 people and Cologne with a population of over a million! I'll be spending my year with a very sporty family and two host brothers. Although my family doesn't play soccer, I hope that I will be able to continue to play while in Germany maybe even for one of the local club teams.

While there I will be attending a type of German school called a gymnasium... unfortunately this is not a type of school which only focuses on gym class :(, but instead the highest level of German high school. My school focuses mainly on science and language. I will have to take a biology, chemistry, physics class and two foreign languages while there. Hopefully my years of science classes in the US will have prepared me for what I will have to take. All of the classes will be taught in German :o, but at least I will pass English class... I hope.


I think that this is the very first time I have ever wanted summer to end. In September all of the kids from the program will meet up in Washington D.C. for a couple of days and then we will all fly over to Germany ready to begin our new experience. It goes without saying that I am beyond excited and I absolutely can't wait to meet all the other kids and head of to Germany.