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	Letters from students abroad Henriette W. << zurück Michigan 1999 "Live your life in Germany while you are in Germany and live your life in America while you are in America!" That was the only advice my friend who had been to Canada gave to me for my exchange year. So I did. I lived my life in Germany not thinking about America and the next year until it hit me like crazy four days before I was to leave. I don't remember anything about those four days except that I was crying constantly and was about to cancel my flights and stay at home. I couldn't imagine leaving everything at home. But somehow I went to the airport and caught my flight. Half way to America I stopped crying and started writing a letter to my best friend in Germany. I didn't want to think about what I was going to do. Today all that seems pretty ridiculous, but back then I was terrified. I stayed terrified for almost 5 months. I had left my whole self-confidence at home. It wasn't that I was homesick or cried all night. But I was extremely shy, admired everybody else and was surprised about everybody who talked to me. I became a completely different person than the one I thought I was before. And although that was extremely hard for me to understand I think those five months were the most important ones of the whole year. The language really wasn't a problem. The first week I didn't understand anything, the next two weeks I understood everything but nobody understood what I was saying, and then my English started getting better and better. There still were embarrassing moments when I didn't know words like "horny" or "Dildo", but the Americans loved that and, of course, my "cute accent". The real problem was that I didn't feel worth of anybody I liked. So, I never made the first step and never recognized others making the first step. I spent my time with my family who lived in a log house near Lake Michigan and was the complete opposite of what I thought of as "American": Their TV only had one local channel, so they never actually watched TV, they hardly ate any fast food and they discussed current issues all the time. I didn't have any siblings living at home so I did get lonely sometimes. But I was in a band which kept me busy at first. The other people in the band were very nice to me but I never thought they could possibly be interested in being my friends. Everything changed when my youngest host brother came home from the Air Force for Christmas break. He had just graduated and still had a lot of friends at High School. He had been pretty popular. Whenever I told anybody I was living at his family's house I was told how nice he was and everything. We got along perfectly from the first moment we met. He could drive, so we went out everyday and hung out with his friends or mine. The fact that he liked me so much gave me a lot of self-confidence. I realized that a lot of people had been trying to be my friends before and I hadn't noticed. So now I went to people's houses and had the guts to call people etc. When he left I was sad, but I had a lot of new friends. From now on I had a lot of fun. We did a lot of crazy things together. There was nothing to do in the town we lived in, so we had to have fun doing nothing. And somehow we did. Having grown up in Berlin this was new to me. I lived about 20 km away from that town, so I always had to get a ride by someone. This brought a lot of conflicts with my family. As much as I liked them in the beginning, when I had nothing to do, now I didn't feel happy with them anymore. They weren't very outgoing and in that year I stayed at their house they went out maybe twice. And they weren't very happy about me asking for rides all the time. The thing that made me mad was that they gave me rides whenever I asked them to, but complained afterwards that I was expecting too much of them. But I stayed at their house till the end. In spring I didn't play in the band anymore so I decided to play soccer. This was a lot of fun, although I was the most horrible player. The friendships I built in those months were somehow very different from the friendships I have here. Probably just because I was different there. But I think, because we all knew that I was going to leave pretty soon, the friendships were somewhat deeper, we wanted to get to know each other as much as possible in the short period of time. It is just not true that all Americans are superficial. Maybe I was lucky, but I would say that I made two or three really close friends which I will stay friends with my whole life, although we might not see each other again. I lived in a very poor area and none of my friends will probably ever be able to afford a trip to Berlin. But that's okay, there is internet etc. It's hard to really tell other people about the exchange year, because they can hardly relate to it at all. And this story probably doesn't express all the feelings or thoughts I have about that year, but the most important thing is that, although I wouldn't say I liked America as a country that much, I don't regret my exchange year at all. Henriette W.