Year 10 2022 German Exchange – Sofie Andersen

On Thursday 3 November 2022 I bade farewell to my family, boarded a plane and set (metaphorical) sail for Germany. I was to spend 3 months living and learning in Hannover, Germany on cultural exchange. This experience was intensely amazing and difficult – a tangle of highs, lows, steep learning curves, and ordinary days.

I almost didn’t make it. My departure date had been delayed by a fortnight because my initial host family failed the safety screening process! However, somewhat miraculously, I was assigned a new host family and departure date, and finally made it on the plane.

Upon arriving in Hamburg, my jetlagged self was giddy with excitement about everything, taking blurry photos of a pretzel stand, the sign for the long-distance train I was catching, awkward selfies, and the beautiful view out the train window. Finally, at 6pm local time, I met my host family who helped stuff my bags into their (electric) car and drove us to the village of Garbsen, where I was to live.

First impressions

The first days in my new country were quite crazy! I was in many ways amazed at the similarities between our countries, excited whenever I noticed German things, and just so excited to learn more and experience EVERYTHING I could. All at once! On my first full day, we went to a university open day near our house, during which I learnt (in German) to build a da Vinci self-supporting bridge and froze a banana with liquid nitrogen. We went for a walk in a beautiful forest. I auditioned for a choir. I started to settle in.

School

My first days of school didn’t feel like as much of a ‘culture shock’ as I’d anticipated. I was somehow expecting to be blown over by a somehow unrecognisable school, but I found everything somewhat underwhelmingly… normal.

I had a normal morning scramble to get ready and remember everything. My host sister and I walked to school at around 7:40am, at which time it was still dark outside, but so many people rode bikes – the bike racks in front of the school were at least twice as big as the entire area of the office. School went from 8am-1:10pm.

The school was split across 2 buildings, one of which was a primary school on the middle floor. While some classrooms had smartboards, in most classrooms teachers used blackboards, which seemed so vintage and foreign to me, and projectors. We would have a “Vertretungsstunde” or missed period when the teacher was away, in which class was cancelled (there were no substitute teachers) and we either started 1.5 hours late or finished 1.5 hours early.

I learnt Politics, German, English, Chemistry, Spanish (which my peers had learnt for 5 years and I cannot speak and so this was a class in which I drew mandalas in my book), Biology, Music, Maths, Sport and something called ‘Werte und Normen’ which translates to values and norms and was a combination of ethics and study of religion, art, and history – 13 subjects!

Homesickness

My experience of homesickness was different from how I’d imagined, manifesting often in smaller ways. On the evening I first arrived I felt keenly homesick, feeling utterly out of place and just wanting to be back home. After that first night, I was in a ‘honeymoon’ phase when everything was amazing and new and exciting, and I didn’t really miss home – it just felt like an amazing holiday.

Then I started really missing the foods of home, the fruits and my own familiar food and cooking with my mum. As an almost-vegan, I didn’t eat any of the meat or dairy products that Germany is renowned for, but I was exposed to lots and lots of bread. Don’t get me wrong, I like bread, but just not with every meal of the day!! I did get used to the German foods, and my host mum was a great cook, but I still really missed my familiar tastes of home.

Language learning

Obviously a key goal of my going to Germany was to improve my German, which I can say did happen! It was hard at first to speak German with my host family – I didn’t know all the words and felt my pronunciation of those I did know was terrible – but I eventually worked up the courage to start and incessantly asked questions, and it became second nature. Now sometimes I accidently go in ‘German mode,’ and accidentally start saying things in German! By no means is my German perfect, and I still find grammar and articles a pain, but it’s certainly much better than it was before.

Berlin

My trip to Berlin was probably the biggest highlight of my entire exchange; it’s what I talk about first whenever anybody asks me about my exchange. Just before the New Year, I went with my host-sister and father and a close family friend of theirs for a packed one-night trip to Berlin.

After a two hour drive, we visited landmarks like the Siegessäule (victory column), Brandenburg gate, and the Reichstag building. Then we went to the Ampelmann (traffic light man) store which has paraphernalia with icons of the unique East Berlin traffic lights that remain today, an entertaining mark of the city’s previous division between east and west. I’ve truly never paid more attention to traffic lights.

After visiting a memorial and a museum about the Berlin Wall (my history nerd was awestruck to be actually. in. the. place. where the history happened), we stopped at a cafe for some tea and a vegan apple pie – Berlin is a vegan’s haven. It fell dark as we walked the streets of Berlin, which are so charged and chaotic, with loud music playing from a marching crowd, a fire twirler person just on the footpath, and a street lit with fairy lights along rows of trees. We stopped at a tiny little restaurant which made burgers and middle eastern food—I got a falafel bowl that came with about 3 dips and so many toppings that I had the rest for lunch the next day.

The evening held an improvisational theatre performance in German at a cool Berlin theatre, including scenes of Greek tragedy, someone responding to a pre-recorded zoom meeting, a re-enactment of the first date of couple from the audience, a 5 minute improvised song with piano accompaniment based on a slip written by an audience member of something they’d said that day, and more. I couldn’t stop laughing!

The next day we had a beautiful Frühstück (breakfast) from our hosts and drove back to Berlin for a tour in escape tunnels underneath the Berlin Wall. It was utterly fascinating to learn about while actually BEING in the place where the history happened. We also visited the East Side Gallery, a 1.3 kilometre gallery of artwork on the longest surviving section of the Berlin Wall, and had lunch in Holzmarkt, a trendy alternative Berlin street with a hipster cafe and mish-mash vintage chairs before driving the two hours back to Hannover.

Berlin was amazing.

Main events

In an attempt to spare you from the detailed description I could write, here is list of other events that I found in some way noteworthy from my time in Germany:

Doing yoga with my host aunt
Joining a band with my host sister.
Going to a German lantern festival – you hold lanterns and walk and sing.
An exquisitely beautiful forest walk after the first snow.
Going to a ‘Weihnachtsmarkt’ (Christmas market) in Hannover and eating a Kartoffelpuffer (crispy potato pancake with applesauce – a German specialty).
Going ice skating.
Making 7 different types of Christmas cookies with my host family.
Performing in a concert with a choir I joined in the beautiful acoustic of the ‘Gartenkirche’.
Doing ‘Kegeln’ (like bowling but with food from a restaurant) with my extended host-family.
Going cross-country skiing for the first time in my life.
A 5-day music camp with my school.
Eating potato soup at a neighbourhood Christmas party.
Christmas celebrated on 24 December.
Going into the city with my host sister and sightseeing for a day.
Baking ‘Apfeltaschen’ (apple pockets/pies) with my host sister.
Going to see an opera called ‘Zwerg Nase’ (dwarf nose; a German fairytale).
A farewell party with family and friends I’d made along the way.

Overall impression

My exchange experience isn’t easy to summarise briefly, but it was an incredible experience for my language learning. It was really, really hard at times, but exciting as well, and too many other things to list. Living in another part of the world was quite different from here, and it took a while to adjust in both directions. I am so glad that I went, and I hope to stay in contact with my host family and friends, and continue improving my German.