Well, the trip to Germany is quickly approaching. Only two more days after today in Almena, then two days in Salina, and I board the plane on Friday! As to be expected, I am excited and nervous all at the same time. I am excited to go and meet our coordinators in Germany, see IFYE people at the orientation prior to leaving the States, and really excited to meet my host families! Since my last post I have learned many new details about my upcoming trip and host families.
Over Memorial Day weekend, my family hosted a Benefit Garage Sale in Salina. As with any garage sales, they take a lot of work, and so I went back early to help set up. The garage sale was a huge success with help from many donations from Willing Workers and friends. For the Garage Sale I created a poster with information about IFYE and my trip for people who were interested in learning more.
About a week later, on June 1st, I woke up to find and email from Bettina saying that my first host family is confirmed and gave me an information sheet from my host family. The information sheet was in German, and I had a lot of fun trying to decipher the information that I could between my limited knowledge of German, my phrasebook, and the a translation site. Anyway my first host family will be the Hollenbach Family from Southwest Germany not to far from Stuttgard. It is a family of five, with one boy and two girls. Very similar to the size of family I grew up with. My host brother/sisters are in their teens, and the boy is close to my younger sister's age.
At this point, I thought to myself, I need to write a blog to update everyone on what is going on, but I thought to wait a few more days to see if I learned about my second host family.-that was a good bet. My second host family the Heineman Family is near Bremen. It is a family of four, with a 4 year old daughter and 1 year old son.
As different as these two families may seem, I am very excited to experience to different lifestyles between the families, as well as experience the cultural difference between North and South Germany. As far as gifts for my host families go, I am still working on getting a few things, but I have my photo books ready, recipes, working on a couple other things, and of course I have my big gifts for them already (but I'm not saying what they are).
There are only a few days left and I am quickly working to get everything ready in time. It has been crazy busy, but I am also making time to hang out with friends, talk to people, or just to read a book for an hour. Please keep me and others traveling this summer for safe travels, good health, and good experiences. Look for my next post in about a week! (it will probably be from Germany by then!)
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