Four Questions

Since I have been back and slowly readjusting myself to the world I am constantly being asked four things,

1.    How was your trip?

      2.  Are you happy to be back?

      3.   Can you speak German/do you get to test out of lots of college classes?

      4.   Were you homesick?

Let me shed some light on all of these questions

      1.  Which trip? One of my visits to Italy or German? Euro tour? Croatia? My year in Austria was NOT a trip. I went to school, lived with a family, and experienced everything you would in an entire year of life and overall it was INCREDIBLE and I feel so incredibly blessed to have been given the opportunity to go to Austria and live out a year of my life!

      2.   I feel conflicted at best. After a year away I have a whole group of people who are important to me that I did not have a year ago. I miss them A LOT! My friends and the people who acted as my family, both my host family and the other exchange students, are people who I feel missing in my everyday life.

      3.   Ja…. And nope. I worked on forming a functional use of the German language and maybe skipped some of the grammatical subtleties to study German at a higher level and filled in my gaps with dialect. I could go on all day about how our system of learning a language in American is fundamentally flawed, but that is a topic for another day.

      4.  The simple answer is no. See number 3. The group of support people I had in Austria was beyond incredible and I was often so busy I did not have time to be homesick.

Now that you have all of those answers I would LOVE to talk to you about how the culture differs from our own, how the food was, what my daily life was like etc… Excuse my sassiness, but I just needed to put that out into the universe. I hope you don’t all hate me now…