Language Camp at the Start

I arrived in Frankfurt, Germany 5:00 am Sunday morning and immediately jumped on a bus and headed for my language camp at Schloss Wittgenstein! Since Germany is 6 hours ahead of where I was in the States, it's was 11:00 pm my time and extremely hard to make it through the day without sleeping (for the sake of no jet lag.) When the second flight of students arrived, we started with a walk to the local town nearby. Keep in mind that the Institut that my language camp is at is on top of a mountain. It was about a 15 minute walk down and it was really interesting to walk around and see the town (with our group of 50 students and 10 teamers and teachers) and hear German being spoken around us. It wasn't until we started walking back that we realized we had to walk almost entirely uphill! It took us almost twice as long to get back than it did to walk to the town. I now have a new hate for walking uphill!

On Monday, we took a test (if you had any previous knowledge of German) which took about 2 hours. After that we did a bunch of group activities, a 30 minute walk around the mountain, and enjoyed the first day we were actually awake in Germany! Later on that night, we found out which class we were going to be in and met with our new teachers for the next three weeks. I was placed in the Intermediate class, which is right in the middle of the five classes.

Yesterday, we started our language classes. We have classes from 9:00 - 12:30 Monday through Friday and a second class on Tuesdays and Thursdays from 2:00 - 3:30. It was a bit weird trying to unearth everything I had learned in the previous year with new German added on. I have to say that I'm learning more German faster than I thought I would. (But then again, that's what happens when you have 3 1/2 - 5 1/2 hours of German a day.) Afterwards, we had another group activity and some free time (which most of us used to figure out this complicated way of getting the newly fixed wifi on our laptops.)

Today, we started with our classes again and then had about three hours of free time until we need to be at the Schloss for dinner. Most of us signed out and walked down to the town with a few friends and went to the local grocery store and bought lots of chocolate and mezzo mix (which I think is actually really good. It's basically coke and fanta mixed together.) We then walked over to the local ice cream shop which is better than any ice cream I have ever found in Virginia Beach! And it was definitely cool to be able to buy my chocolate, mezzo mix, and ice cream entirely in German! It's not much yet, but it's just the beginning of what I'm going to learn at camp and throughout the school year!


-Rachel