Background information on Operation: Exchange to Germany and its agent

Welcome to my blog!  I’ll be keeping this up while I’m on my exchange trip to Germany for the school year of 2011-2012.

   For those of you who have no idea who I am, I’ll tell you a bit about myself.  My name is Lydia Weiss, and I like to read, drive my car around (a 1999 Chrysler 300M), write (as you’ll find out very soon), and spend time with all the people who are near and dear to me.  While I went to high school, I was part of the varsity cross-country and track teams.  I discovered during my sophomore year that I love to run, and ever since, I’ve managed to keep running and racing fun.  If I were going to high school this year, I would be a senior.  As it is, I’ll be gone to Germany instead.

   My immediate family consists of five people, including me.  My parents are Roger and Joanmarie, and both my sister, Margie, and brother, Scott, are older than I am.  We live on a family-owned farm about three miles (5K) out of town.  We milk about 60 cows.  (Well, I guess I shouldn’t say WE milk them anymore.  Earlier this spring we put in a robotic milker, so we actually just have to feed them and watch that they don’t get sick.  For more info on that, I’ll put a link to my mom’s blog about the farm up.)  Besides the cows, we have two dogs and about 10 barn cats, and Margie has two horses.

   I grew up in a little town in Michigan called Frankenmuth.  If you’re at all familiar with this charming place, then you will hardly be surprised to hear that my exchange trip is (in case you couldn’t tell by now) going to be with a school in Germany.  If you’ve never heard of this little town, I’ll be glad to give you some background information on my hometown.  We are, as my siblings and I call it, a bonafide  “tourist trap”.

   There hasn’t been a single student who has gone through Frankenmuth High School (FHS) and not at some time wondered, “Why would anyone want to come to Frankenmuth?”  There is really not much to do there once you’ve been in town for two days.  Some people claim the reason is our generous hospitality (“Welcome to Frankenmuth!  Here, have a piece of chicken and a tourist brochure.”); others say that it is our location, that we are a nice town that is not too far away (close to Saginaw and Flint—even Detroit and Lansing if you’re willing to drive a ways); and still other people say it is our German heritage.  (I’ll put up a link for the Frankenmuth City website so you can read more about our German history if you want.)

   I bet you’re getting a bit sick and tired of hearing me go on and on about this irrelevant stuff, so I’ll cut to the chase and tell you about this exchange trip.  I first heard about the Youth For Understanding (YFU) exchange in January.  I guess I’d actually heard of it earlier, but I never had thought about it seriously until then.  One of the exchange students at FHS was in my Spanish class, and I found myself fascinated by what she told me about her home country and her observations about the American lifestyle.  Last summer I was part of an exchange trip with my high school through GAPP, another program.  For three weeks I lived in a family and went to school with the daughter.  By the end, I felt at home there and I wished I had more time to stay there.  So when I heard of YFU’s exchange for a year, I began to imagine myself in Germany for a year; it hardly seemed a stretch of my imagination, to be honest.

   So, a basic outline of this trip…. I leave home next Tuesday, the 19th.  Then I will fly to Washington, D.C. because I was awarded a scholarship to fund the trip through the American and German governments.  I guess that they want to talk to me beforehand about how I am supposed to conduct myself so that I present a good image of the U.S.  Then I will fly with other participants to Munich on the 21st.  At first, I will spend four weeks in a town about an hour outside of Munich.  There’s a language orientation there, which, as I see it, is for the exchange participants who don’t speak the German language so that they can learn some basics.  I’ve taken German in high school, so I actually am pretty comfortable about that.  After these first four weeks, I’ll go up to Lehrte, a town by Hannover, for the rest of the year.  Next July I’ll return back home, and then I’ll be off to college!

   You might wonder about how I’m going to go to college when I get back instead of having to make up a year of high school…. Well, I talked with my high school principal and guidance counselor, and we worked it out so that I could take the required classes online.  The only class I need yet is a fourth year of math, and that I will take while I’m in Germany.

   I’m really excited about this trip, and I’m excited to have you vicariously living the experience along with me!!!