Einführungstage

Orientation! It began when some lady with a sign met us in the Cologne Hauptbahnhof and led the 160 of us gathered there to three buses. We put our luggage in a trailer, and climbed aboard. I sat next to John, a fellow Grinnellian, because a familiar face was very nice to see. Plus, we could gossip. The three giant charter buses rumbled through very narrow German village streets and I tried not to actually look out the window and see how close we were to hitting things. Anyway. The bus was raucous as you might expect from 140 Americans, 16 Brits, and a couple Aussies and Kiwis. It was so loud.

John told me that he thought orientation was at a castle. We were both unsure how unlikely or likely that could be. I mean, it's Germany. Why shouldn't it be at a castle? We pulled up to a small complex of buildings, got our luggage out of the trailers and walked to the main building, accompanied by the beautiful music of hundreds of rolling suitcases on cobblestone. Walking up, we saw rising before not a castle, no, but a giant cathedral. Awesome.

We laid down our luggage, carried the heavier stuff down to a basement room and were crammed into a hall for our welcome speech. We were given packets, schedules, keys and roommates and told to shove off until dinner. Turns out, my roommate, Barbara, studied abroad in Dortmund with Lissy, one of Steph's friends from Ames. SMALL WORLD.

For dinner, there were exactly as many seats as there were people, forcing us to meet new people. It was a lot of fun. Not a lot of food, but I think everyone went back to get seconds from the nice German kitchen ladies.

During our intro speech, we were told that because this is a church, we were not allowed alcohol. However, as a program, we were allowed to make an exception and would do so, every night. So one of our classrooms was turned into a bar every night, staffed by former Fulbrighters.

The next morning, we split into our Ländergruppe, or our groups by land or state in Germany (there are 14 of us in Schleswig-Holstein), and went over the school system and our role in the schools. Later, we split into Arbeitsgruppen, work groups, and learned more about the teaching systems. We were told to prepare a lesson for the next day, each of our groups being split again into smaller groups, one group for the Oberstufe (11-13 graders), one for 9-10 graders, one for 7-8th, and one for 5-6th. My group was 11-13 graders and we created a lesson about immigration, especially illegal immigration.

Another night at the classroom bar, and we were told there was going to be a talent show.

In class, we all taught our lessons to our classmates, pretending to be German kids. It was quite fun, except we were quite bad at pretending not to know English. I did get to be Big Ben in a skit about British stereotypes, with two British people in our group, so our accents were great.

The talent show later was awesome. I got roped into playing in the jug band, accompanying John on his banjo. So Lauren and I tuned our water bottles so that we each had one high and one low. I also ended up with a set of spoons to play. Other acts included real talent, like piano playing and slam poetry, and one girl from New Zealand taught us "Head, Shoulders, Knees and Toes" in Maori (Upoko, Pakaiwi, Turi, Waewae), and one girl downed an entire beer and then let out a great belch (Keep in mind the recruiting for the talent show was done at the bar), and a girl did the worm really well and then it was our turn.

We went up and sat down. John took off his shoes and socks and rolled his jeans up to his knees, because "You can't play banjo with shoes on." Lauren and I started the jug band while he proceeded to tell the Cheerio joke. If you don't know it, I won't ruin it for you. But this five minute long joke, accompanied by a jug band and banjo, had everyone laughing. Including me. Then, after the joke, we all stopped, and John played a piece for banjo that he actually wrote, which was cool. After the show, the bar was open again for our last night.

At 6 am Thursday morning, we woke up, stripped our beds, packed, turned in our keys and went to our final breakfast. All in the rain. We walked out to the buses in the rain. We waited for our luggage to be loaded up. In the rain. The entire drive to Cologne it rained. In Cologne, we went our separate ways. Mostly.

Epic train rides, next post.