Made it to Germany -1 Suitcase

One of the last times I saw my suitcase :(

Well, the start of my adventure in Germany was kind of rough. After getting off the 9.5 hour plane ride, which I was luckily able to mostly sleep through, I discovered the larger of my 2 suitcases had not made it to Germany with me. After spending 30 minutes talking to a Lufthansa employee and 4 days of waiting I'm losing any hope of it being found. On the bright side however, this means I get refunded by the airline and get to go on a shopping spree. Besides this one pretty big downer, my time in Germany so far has been pretty amazing.

The first day after landing we took a bus from the Frankfurt airport to Bonn where we met our host families. My host family is pretty great. My host mom is German and makes amazing German meals, while my host dad is from Honduras and made me homemade tortillas and tacos (turns out there is some good "Mexican" food in Germany after all). They have an 11 year old daughter who is super cute and reading Harry Potter for the first time and watches the movies with me (in German of course) and the cutest and fatest cat I've ever seen.




On our second day we visited a vineyard in the Ahr wine region. On the way we saw lots of snow which was pretty exciting for all of us from Texas, but the other group with us from Pennsylvania didn't seem as amused.











At the vineyard we went on a tour of the wine cellar and had a wine tasting.  Because none of us had been to a wine tasting before we didn't know there was an empty vase you could dump your glass into if you didn't like it. So most of us ended up chugging ones we didn't like so we could try the next one. We were all feeling pretty good by the end of it.





One thing I've discovered while here is that only about 50% of strangers I encounter can effectively speak English. So we have all been trying to learn as much German as we can. The most useful phrase to know is "Sprechen sie english?" which means "Do you speak english?" Although be prepared for a somewhat aggressive "Nein!" if they don't. This has also led to lots of playing charades and thinking of creative ways to communicate. The hardest thing is always ordering food when the whole menu is in German. We generally look for one word we recognize and hope its good or point out food we see other people eating in the restaurant and ask for that. We had our first German lesson today though, so hopefully we all improve and can eventually actually order what we want.