Sarah's Travel Blog: Arriving in Oberhausen-Rheinhausen

So, Host Family!

The Journey finally begins! Even though I felt like I learned a lot at language camp, I have to be honest and say that my German speaking skills really didn’t improve too much simply because I was still speaking English all the time. So I’m excited to finally be able to listen to German all the time and also try to speak some German with my host family. Most of you know that I will be with my welcoming host family for the first 10 days of my stay in Oberhausen-Rheinhausen because my permanent host family is on vocation.

So on Saturday, August 16^th, I started my journey on a train from Bad Laasphe to Marburg, then rode the IC from Marburg to Frankfurt and then the ICE from Frankfurt to Mannheim, where my host family was going to pick me up. I was lucky cause there were 3 other people going to same way as me, three of us ended in Mannheim (including me) so I wasn’t alone. The train stations at Frankfurt and Mannheim were a little intimidating since they were so huge, but luckily I didn’t get lost and found my host family fairly quickly J

I’ve been at my welcoming host family for 6 days now, and everything has been wonderful! I’ll be sad to leave them next week, but I know I’ll see them again since Julitta(my welcoming host mom) is going to be my local coordinator, so I’ll at least have one meeting with her per month and because I’m only moving 5 minutes away… I’m also super excited to meet my permanent host family, I’ve been told that their English aren’t as good, so I’ll have to practice my German even more there (everyone in my welcoming host family can speak very good English) which is good because a lot of times I have to be forced into learning(since I’m lazy)

Fun things- I got to visit Speyer, which has a beautiful Cathedral, and the 2^nd largest in German (I’ve been told), I got to go up the tower, so I have some awesome pictures. I also had some icecream there, and I have to say that it was very good, even though it wasn’t as sweet as the icecream in the U.S.. I also got to go to my first German Cinema! So the Germans have this very interesting thing call “sneak preview” which you buy a ticket a day beforehand but you don’t know what movie you’re watching until you get there. So I did this with my host siblings and 2 of their friends. The movie ended up being “Guardians of the Galaxy” in German, so I really didn’t understand what was being said but I kinda got the gist of the story by body language, the language was very good though. So this was basically my first week at the Host family’s house. It really has been an interesting experience, especially with eating so much bread (lol, I eat a ton of rice at home) and being able to visit places by bike!