Our Last Full Week in Germany

Our Last Full Week in Germany!

Well this week is our last full week in Germany, what an amazing experience we have had. I have learnt so much about the culture and the language. I am able to understand and speak with people it’s such an amazing feeling being able to understand a language other than English. I couldn’t have asked for a better host family they have been amazing and I have seen so much and learnt a lot.

 Frankfurt Main Tower view

 Rosenheim Christkindl Markt

 A massive christmas shop in Munich (sorry I forgot what it was called)

Christmas is close and Germany is getting ready.  There are lights that fill the streets with color and when you drive through the towns it is so magical. I just wish there was snow as that would make it even more beautiful.

On Friday I went to the primary school in Rott Am Inn and visited my host brother's classes. I gave the class a presentation about Bright and Australia, we also made lamingtons to take to the kids. It was very different to our primary schools. 

Martina took me to a Christmas market in the forest, it was amazing.  The stalls were all made of wood and they had Christmas lights all over them and they just looked so beautiful.

Frankfurt:

Over the weekend Andrea and I travelled to Frankfurt with Andrea’s Judo class because they had a tournament on the Sunday. We got up bright and early Saturday morning, hopped in the bus and then travelled about 6 hours to Frankfurt, I have to admit the Autobahn is great. We stayed in a town about 10km away from Frankfurt called “Maintal.” On Saturday afternoon after arriving we took the train to Frankfurt where we looked around and shopped. We went to the tallest tower in Frankfurt, the “Main Tower”. It is also the first weekend of the Christkindl Markt, and Frankfurt was packed. There were so many people at the Christmas Market so it was quite difficult to look around, especially as the market was so big. Frankfurt is such a beautiful city and being there at Christmas makes it very special as they have the most amazing fairy light display.

Germany has been the most amazing experience. I am so grateful that our school can offer this program Thank you so much for the best time of my life.

Germany 29.11.2016

Matilda Manning

An Exciting weekend

With just over 2 weeks to go it feels like we have only just arrived. The time has flown past so quickly, I have had heaps of fun and learnt so much about the different culture, language and the way of life. I am not finished yet but so far it has been a wonderful learning experience that I have really enjoyed.

Over the weekend Tilly and I went with parts of our families to an ice hockey game in Rosenheim. It was really cool to watch and although they said it was not very big there were a lot of people there cheering for their teams. One of the teams that played was Rosenheim and there was a lot of support for the home team.

At the start of the game the home team had their mascot as a big blow up arch that they all skated through. It was like before the start of a concert where a celebrity comes out. There was smoke, the lights all turned off with a spotlight on the entrance then they were each called out respectively.

It was a little bit sad, in the last 3^rd the opposing team scored 3 goals to Rosenheim’s 0 and the home crowded wasn’t happy with the result. It was a bit funny to go to the game and see a whole different crowd of people. They were a bit more rowdy than the people I have seen.

One of the things I am loving about Germany is the school times. School starts at 7:55am and finishes at 12:50pm. Thing only thing that I don’t like so much is that we have to travel an hour to school every morning meaning waking up at 6. But what makes it all worth it is that we finish at 12:50. In Australia we eat lunch at 12:45 and then have all afternoon at school. Here they get up a little earlier, have not as long a break at school but they get to go home for lunch and do whatever in the afternoon. They still do about the same amount of school they just have time for other things.

Today after school, Andrea, Till, Niklas and I caught the train to Andrea’s house where we ate lunch and then went to Munich for the afternoon. We went to Therme Erding which is a big centre with lots of pools and water slides. It had lots of inside and outside pools and water slides, “rivers”, wave pools and lots of relaxation (google it). We spent 5 and a half hours there before heading home.

  We went on a walk through a forest with a painting of Marilyn Munroe 

 The mascot of Rosenheim Starbulls

The start of the game

Teagan

German Exchange 2016

German Exchange 2016

Hi everyone, hope you're all well back in Australia. I am having an amazing time in Germany. I’m sorry we haven’t written a blog in a while but Teagan and I haven’t been very well and then we had our holidays so we had limited internet. But I will tell you everything that I have been up to over the past few weeks.

Language Experience:

After the short-termers left it was a bit weird to be honest, I got to school the next day and it felt very empty because we were used to seeing our Australian school friends in the morning and it was different not seeing them and speaking English. As a consequence, my German has gotten so much better! I’m able to understand some conversations now and I am sometimes even able to talk back. It’s amazing how you can be in a country for so long and just adjust to the different language. I think we have been here now for about one and a half months and it's incredible how much my German has improved as well as Teagan’s. It was very difficult at the beginning and it was hard to understand what they were saying because sometimes they speak High German and sometimes they speak Bavarian which is different to what we learn at school. I didn’t really know how to join into conversations and it was challenging and to have a conversation with somebody I didn't know very well. However, I would really encourage anyone that wants to study German to come over to Germany and immerse themselves in the language for three months. It has been the best experience of my life and I still have about 5 or 6 weeks to go.

School Holidays:

We have also just recently had a one week school holiday and my amazing host family took me to ... Italy!  We travelled with the caravan down to Rome, we stopped in Venice to stay two nights and it was the most amazing weather, it’s such a beautiful city or town I don’t really know. We travelled on a ferry that took us from the caravan park that we were staying at to where the main part of Venice is on the water. I saw gondolas and the little tiny water canals that have tiny bridges over them. We then headed down to stay a night in Siena and we looked around the town.  It just also happened to be Halloween, so we saw lots of little kids all dressed up in their pirate and fairy costumes.  It was very cute. They were trick or treating around Siena and there were lots of people in the town as well. Soon we arrived in Rome. Andrea and I were a little bit tired so we didn’t do much on our first night. The next day we met with some of Martina and Robert's (my host parents) friends who flew down from Munich to show us around Rome.  The first place we visited was the Colosseum. It was amazing.  We also visited the Vatican and went to the top of the dome where I could see all of Rome.  It was so beautiful, we were lucky to have such good weather. There are lots of amazing churches in Italy and we went to four in one day because of the Holy Doors legend.  They say that if you go to these four doors in these four churches including the Vatican, then God would forgive you for everything bad that you have done.

On our last day before we travelled back to Rosenheim we stayed the night in a place that is the sister city of Rosenheim. While my host family and I were having dinner at this restaurant a lady comes up behind Andrea and asks her if she is from Bad Aibling and is this your exchange student and that family turned out to be Clyde English’s host family from last year - Alina and her family!! We sat and we talked for about another hour and a half.  It was very exciting (Clyde if you’re reading this Alina says “Hi".) Hope everyone is all well back at home and see everyone soon.

                                      - Venice

 - Rome Trevi Fountain

 Colosseum

 Siena Cathedral

 Colosseum

 The Vatican is was absolutely amazing!!!!!

Germany 2016

Matilda Manning 

2 Aussies in Germany

Well living in Germany is very different after your safety net leaves! The first 4 weeks were great with all the 'short-termers' here. At school you could always find someone you knew and you had lots of people to talk to but once that was gone and just Tilly and I are here things change. You have to talk to people! It also seems that more people talk to you once you’re not in a group.

After one week with no safety net we had holidays! It was nice to have a bit of time with my host family and see a bit more of Germany. For our holidays we spent the first few days at home then went to Hamburg. It was a really long drive. Over 8 hours and almost 900kms in a car is hard!

Hamburg was beautiful. We saw the Port and the masses of ships and shipping containers, we went for a walk through Hamburg and saw a few churches, shops and the Miniature World.

One of my favourite part of going to Hamburg was our trip to the North Sea. We drove up to the North Sea on Friday and spent the day there. It was really cold but really fun. Walking out to the beach I was thinking it was really cold (about 3 degrees) only to get out into the beach and find people kite surfing in the water!

After getting back from Hamburg we spent a day at home. It was nice to relax. Sitting in my room doing some homework (hard to believe) I looked out the window to see it SNOWING!!!! I love snow. There wasn’t enough to stay here but the next day we went for a drive and spent some time playing in the snow. It was lots of fun and I can’t wait until the snow settles here.

Some pictures from Hamburg. The first is of the Port the first night we got there and the second is in Hamburg, photo credit Ingo!!

A photo from when we went to the North Sea -it was really cold!!

In the snow!

Berlin

Servus!
Last week was Berlin and it was amazing. Every step I took I was intrigued by the landmarks and sites and culture in general.
Day 1: We had a six hour train ride to Berlin on the ICE 'fast train'.  At times we were travelling at the speed of 200km/h. We arrived at the main train station, der Hauptbahnhof and it was massive. There were different levels and escalators with people rushing everywhere and massive signs. Wow! We then got taken to the hotel by a guy with a "Bright P-12 College" sign. Once we arrived, we went to our rooms and prepared for dinner. The walk to the restaurant was interesting.  Dinner was scrumptious! For entree, we had tomato soup. Main was smoked pork ribs and dessert was vanilla ice-cream. After dinner we caught the bus to the Reichstag (Parliament house). Once we arrived they had pretty heavy security, which is a good thing. We had to show our passports and have our bags scanned.  The building was massive and the architecture was again, flawless! We got taken up in a big elevator to the top of the building where we had an amazing view of the city at night! The Berlin light show was on too so it was even more beautiful!

We also got a little ear piece that told us information about the surrounding buildings. It was really interesting. After a while we decided to head off back to the hotel and go to bed.

Day 2: Berlin is alive on Monday. We were in the heart of the city and made our way to Checkpoint Charlie. This was a major border crossing between East and West Berlin, back when there was the wall dividing the city. There were a couple of scammers around but most of us avoided them ;)

The Checkpoint Charlie museum was a big building on a big wide street.

Once we got inside I was super keen to read all about the past, about life in divided Berlin, about escape attempts... there was a lot of reading. Unfortunately, I didn't get around to reading all of it but I got a pretty firm grasp of what had happened.
We then started to make our way to the Brandenburg gate. We took public transport to get there e.g. trains (underground!) Shoutout to Matilda Manning for her map reading skills and getting us to the right places.
There were so many people at the Brandenburg gate. The Gate was tall and has a statue on top. (As you can see in the picture:)

Afterwards we walked back to the Reichstag to look at it at daytime.

We made our way to the Jewish memorial. The memorial was grey blocks or "Art". I thought it was really interesting seeing this form of art. The memorial took up a whole block and was like a maze. I thought that the grey blocks symbolized gravestones of the ones lost during the holocaust. Of course, there were many more people murdered than there were blocks, but it was a real place of reflection.

Afterwards, we decided to go to Potsdamer Platz and the "Mall of Berlin". When we walked in we got a bit of a surprise...

There was a red carpet and posters of "Inferno" everywhere (This film has Tom Hanks in it). We started to work out that Tom Hanks was going to be there in 3 hours. Unfortunately, we didn't have the time to stay but how cool would that be?

Dinner that night was delicious. Entree was soup again (but still good), Main was chicken schnitzel and dessert was jam in a jar. It was a bit too sweet for my liking though.


Day 3: So much fun! We started off with an all you can eat buffet provided by the hotel but the day got even better. We went ICE SKATING! I love ice skating and I was super keen to go.

Thanks for reading.
Tessa Williams

Berlin

We spent 3 full days in Berlin.

We went to an Ice skating rink which was really exciting and fun. 

Also on that same day we went to a Jewish memorial museum about life for Jewish people during WW2.  There were some really sad and gruesome stories about how Jewish people were treated during the Holcaust, how they were gassed and/or shot and buried in mass graves; head to toe and a child would be placed in the gaps and then covered in earth. 

We also went to the Cathedral, called the Dom. It was a beautiful building. You cloud climb up and look outside at some of Berlin it was a really nice view of the city and inside there were some nice statues, paintings and models of the building, which they used to help build the real thing. We had a great time in Berlin and I hope to come back some time.

Nathaniel West

Zilletal stausee

The feeling of pure WOW was what I got the chance to experience on Saturday when I went to see a glacier in Austria.

Doreen, her family and I drove three hours in the morning after having a typical German breakfast with lots of breads and meats. We drove to the Zilleltal Staundamm which is a huge glacier in the Austrian alps on the border of Austria and Italy. We woke up early in the morning to spend the whole day there since it was a long trip.

While driving up through the valley to get there I just stared in amazement out of the window. It was a wonderful experience seeing the towering walls of steep rock, the spacious green grass, the assortment of pine trees and the snow up all of the mountains around us then. Then instead of taking the time to drive around all the mountains like we do in Australia, we just drove straight through them in a rock tunnel.

Eventually we arrived and got out of the car.  The first thing that struck me was how blue and clean the water looked, it was mesmerising.  The water was in a huge lake surrounded by mountains in a small valley with a huge dam wall blocking the water off from tumbling into the valley below. On the dam wall someone had built a rock climbing wall onto it. So as we walked along it you could see people scaling the dam wall.

I found out that just at the lake itself we were already 1800m above sea level and the mountains around us were 2500m - 3500m high, that is roughly 1500m taller than the tallest mountain in Australia!

We walked out along the dam wall until we could go no further and then we started the walk around the lake. It took about __ hours to get there and back. When we finished the walk around the lake we went into a Hütte (a small house/cafe on a mountain) and had lunch. I got a mezzo mix (German drink that is a mix of cola and Fanta) and Wurst (sausage.)

In the morning it had been cloudy over the tops of the mountains but after lunch the clouds had cleared and it was blue skies and sun shine for the rest of the day. Because of this I could now clearly see the peaks of the mountains and how much snow there was. It looked like there was about 2m-3m of snow and winter hasn't even started yet! This is double what we get at peak season!

At the end of the day I was so exhausted but loved every minute of it, can't wait to see more.

Nicola Smith