On August 24th I went on a 3-day roadtrip all the way through France to get to Spain. It was a lot of fun, we took turns driving and did some sight-seeing in a few big towns (Strasbourg, Lyon, Montpellier). At night we stayed at camping-places with a tent.
Down in Spain, or rather Catalunya the other two stayed in a hotel in a tourist town, but I went to Mataro, which is a suburb of Barcelona to stay with Anna (AFS-exchange student, she was in Westbrook) I had an awesome week with her, we went to Barcelona twice to do some sight-seeing, I met some of her friends and I even went to bb-practise with her twice. Her family is great, I stayed in her brother's room and they even handled my being so picky with food.. *g* I wanna go there again..
Well, on September 2nd I flew back to Germany (the flight was only 56�..) and took a bus to get to Frankfurt International Airport.
There we had Arrival-Weekend (I dunno what it's really called): 520 AFS-exchange-students from all over the world arrived at the airport within 3 days. That was a lot of fun, too. I got to meet a lot of ppl. On saturday I was chaperoning 20 exchange-students on a train, together with one other volunteer. It was kinda difficult getting 40 suitcases in the train within 2 minutes and trying to still leave some room for other passengers to get through.. We got everyone out at the right train stations, but another chaperone left one of his students in our train, so we had to throw her out and have her take a taxi to the last train station all by herself.. but it worked out, she made her train at the very last second,but she did get it.
After that I had one week (or rather 5 days) of real vacation before I left to go to the MK 2005. The MK (=Mitarbeiterkonferenz) is the annual meeting of AFS-volunteers in Germany. This year we were in a small town near Paderborn. (Last year it was in Berlin). There we have workshops and classes to be trained as a volunteers, and PARTY!!I took a class called "communication and dialog", where we learned how to communicate right to avoid conflicts etc. And I had another workshop where we learned a lot of silly games ("Energizer"). We use them a lot in German AFS, there a lot of fun!! This year there was 650 volunteers plus some international guests (15 volunteers from China, 10 from the US, 2 from Turkey, 4 from Japan, one from Switzerland and Austria, the head of AFS Egypt, the German AFS-bosses... AND the president of AFS international.Francisco "Tachi" Cazal
That man is great!! To collect money for a hosting-scholarship we did a American auction. Everytime we hit another fifty � Tachi danced. (tango, Salsa, ballet! and HipHop) It was so much fun!! I also got to talk to him, turns out he was in Luverne, MN in 1980. The funny thing is, he's the only one I met on the MK who was in our AFS- area.. On the first train to get back I sat opposite of him, so I talked to him again.
The rest of the train ride back is another story. On the way up it took me 10 hours to get there (2 busses and 9 trains)
On the way back the 3rd train was late by 20 min, so we missed the next one and ended up being 2 hours!! late. My mom would have had to pick me up at the train station at 1:35 in the morning. Since she had to be at work by 7 that was to late and I had to stay at a friend's house in Nuremberg, but his family was really nice to. I finally got home at noon, today. This time I didn't get a cold like last year, but my voice is really low and scratchy..
August 13th school starts again.. lol
But end of June I'll finally be DONE
(about time after 14 years (+3 years at Kindergarten))