London seems like so long ago

And honestly, it sort of was. I got back from London on April 19th, and it is now May 9th. That may have been the fastest 20 days ever. It also shows me just how far behind I am in writing my posts. I have a lot to cover in this one, so stick with me!

In the week after I returned from London I managed to completely fill every spare moment I had. On Tuesday I met with Michaela, the teacher at a school in Bad Säckingen, who I had talked to about doing the "Rent an American" program for. After the chaos of London I was hardly on my feet and had to start thinking about what I was going to talk about to a group of 7th and 12th grade Germans. I'll talk more about that when I get to Thursday.
Classes on Tuesday and Wednesday were also all kinds of messed up because people in the program were scattered around all of Europe so some classes were cancelled, other re-scheduled, some ran when they were supposed to. It was general disarray, which was really interesting. The IES center was real quiet for 2 days.

On Wednesday I met with Sarah, the organizer of the Rent an American program and had a crash course in how Rent an American works and basics about German culture. Usually before you can do the Rent an American thing you take their 5 hour course on German culture and do role playing etc. I got none of that, basically - I'm awesome. I also of course attended all of my classes and tried to get my head on straight before I missed class on Thursday for Rent an American.

On Thursday I got up early and hopped on the train to go to Bad Säckingen, a quaint, small town right on the Rhine river between Germany and Switzerland. It took me about an hour to get there and once I did I met Michaela again before walking to the Scheffel Gymnasium school.
I was initially given a bit of a tour of the school and met some of the other teachers at the school and talked about what I was doing in Germany and at their school. I then headed over to a 7th grade class, with kids who were about 12 or 13 and already spoke great English. I wish I could speak German half as well as they speak English... I talked with them about myself, where I'm from and showed them some pictures of me when I was 12, which they thought was pretty funny. I then talked with them about American pastimes and sports, which (aside from American Football and Baseball) are basically the same in Germany. We then did a bit of Q&A where the kids asked me all about myself: Who is your favorite actor? What is your favorite music? What TV shows do you watch? etc. etc. I even read a bit of my novel to them aloud in class - to which they stared open mouthed at me. I also found it rather funny (and disturbing) that the German kids knew all the terrible American TV shows like The Simpsons, Family Guy and most notably South Park. I tried to explain to them that South Park (the place) is in the state where I live - none of them seemed to get it.
After the class I relaxed for a few minutes and met a few more teachers before heading off to a 12th grade class. The 12th graders were all much older, between 17 and 19. The subject matter in their class was more complex, including 9/11, Terrorism, and immigration. The 12th graders were surprisingly timid and seemed afraid to talk to me, even though they speak English about as well as I do, albeit with a nice German accent. It was interesting to hear their points of view and discuss American Foreign policy with them. I got some very complex, direct questions about the American wars in Iraq and Afghanistan which I attempted to answer as diplomatically as possible, though I let my opinion slide in quite a bit. My favorite part of the presentation was talking about stereotypes of Americans and Germans. I asked them what they thought of when they thought of  Americans and immediately got back what I had assumed I would - Fat, Stupid, ignorant, petty etc. I then asked what they thought American think about Germans as, which they hit spot on - Lederhosen, Beer, Sausage, and sauerkraut, and of course, punctuality. It was interesting to talk about how those were hardly accurate and that it was unfair to assume those things about a culture.

After the presentations Michaela took me on a little tour of Bad Säckingen, which took about 30 minutes. It is a small town, but it is cute and nice, and the weather was beautiful. We ate lunch at a little cafe downtown and walked through the town. I also got to see the longest-covered-wooden-bridge in Europe, which goes from Germany to Switzerland over the Rhine. It was generally a nice relaxing afternoon.

On Friday we all went to class in the morning and then in the beautiful weather that afternoon put together a giant pick up soccer game. We had almost 2 full teams just of IES people and were able to play a really competitive, exciting game. It was a nice break from the stress of all of the classes and papers that we had coming up.
Luckily sometime during that week IES realized that they had made everything due all the same day and decided to give us extensions on a number of papers, making my life much easier.

On Sunday April 25 a group of us headed to Lichtenstein, the 4th smallest country in Europe to have a look around. Lichtenstein is a country that is about 60 square miles and is home to just 35,000 people, but it also houses 75,000 companies because of it's favorable corporate tax system. Lichtenstein has the highest GDP per capita in the world and it shows - I saw at least 2 Lamborghinis, dozens of Porches, and a couple Maseratis. Vaduz, Lichtenstein's capital, is home to 5000 people and can literally be seen in just under 2 hours. Given that we where there for almost 4 we got bored pretty fast. We walked the entire length of the city, saw the government offices and parliament (A table with 25 seats), and main Church in just a few minutes since they are all neighbors on the same street. We also climbed up to the Prince's castle. It was very modest (as castles go) for a guy worth $5.5 billion. We were happy at the end of the day to get back to Germany were pizzas weren't 10CHF and the people weren't quite so stuck up.

During the weekend I also had a chance to help my parents plan for their imminent trip to Europe in May. We finally nailed down the whole rail pass, transport, and itinerary situation. We're going to spend 2 weeks after the IES program is over seeing Germany, Amsterdam, Paris, and the area around Normandy in France before they fly home on the 30th. After that of course I head out on my own to see the rest of the continent and travel freely for the summer. I'm super excited about this as I have been looking forward to it since before I even knew I was coming to Europe!

The last week in April was pretty normal, which was nice as it was the last normal week we had in the program. I was also busy finishing up my final prep for my trip to Italy. We did make a few trips to the Biergarten (Beer garden) to enjoy the beautiful weather and drink as much fine German beer as possible before heading home.

It is hard to believe that as I sit here and write this post on May 9th we have just 9 days until the program is over and all the new friends I've made will be heading home. We'll certainly have to make the best of our remaining time here and make some memories that will last a lifetime.

I'm going to write about my Italy adventure in a separate post soon. I want to do it complete justice :-)

Thanks everyone!