Visitor

A couple of weekends ago, I had the pleasure of having my first visitor. A friend of mine that I had made back in August during our language camp traveled after school on Friday across Germany to stay at my place for the weekend. With the extra bed that I have in my room, my host parents were more than happy to have him stay for a couple of nights and see what life was like where I lived.

Over the course of the weekend, we found out a lot about each others' exchange years so far and our experiences have been quite different. In terms of placement, my friend is living in a city of 60,000 people in the East German province of Thuringia, whereas I'm living in rural Northwest Germany. This meant that he had easy access to restaurants, public transportation, and all the other city things while I was left to navigate a ways to get access to those things.

Apart from sharing our experiences, we also did a fun daytrip on Saturday. Our first stop was Bremen, a large city north of where I live. With the typical delays of the German train system as well as a missed transfer, we finally made it to Bremen around 10:00. The Christmas markets were in full swing at this time, so that's where we spent most of our time.

After walking around and buying a couple of Christmas gifts for our host families, we decided to spontaneously take a train even further north to the port city of Bremerhaven on the shore of the North Sea. Bremen was pretty cold as it was, but Bremerhaven was on another level. We stepped out of the train into what looked to be a completely different country. Instead of everything being wet like Bremen, every building, sidewalk, and tree were frozen and white. Bremerhaven of course had Christmas markets of its own, but the main attraction was to touch the North Sea before it got dark. Since it was the weekend of the winter solstice in a northern German port city, the sun went down at 4:00 so we had to hurry. Through the cold, wind, and fog, we finally were able to stand on the coast of the North Sea and even touch the water itself just for the accomplishment.

The next day before my friend had to head back to Thuringia, I showed him around my area with bikes and eventually walked him to his train Platform back in Osnabrück. Having a visitor was tons of fun and I hope to visit his host family some day to see what life is like where he lives.