Howdy y'all,
One major point I forgot about when traveling is that from time to time you will end up on top of a cathedral, clinging to the inside support wall overlooking the city trying not to shake the entire 800 year old structure with your wobbly legs. But alas, there I was on top of Cologne's most prized possession, The Cathedral. (Obviously its official name). This all occurred when my group took a day trip to Cologne a few days ago for A&M's official first day of classes. Cologne was beautiful and every tour guide I have had thus far on the trip has been jovial, full of humor, and a bit too straight forward on morbid details. I devour the information anyway. We visited a museum that day too which was a former Gestapo prison where they tortured and executed people that did not fit the Nazi's idea of fit citizens and people. Really light stuff for a Tuesday afternoon. It was quite informative though and from my previous travels I knew a lot more information and history than I realized. Maybe I should have been a history major :)
On another note, my German has not improved much. I know a few more words but I get so shy (crazy I know) when I get up to counters and around people. We had our first German class this week and I felt so bad for the teacher because when I had to practice my conversational German in front of everyone, all I could do was laugh the whole time out of nervousness and I sounded like an idiot. My host family said my German accent is really good though so at least I know I'm saying Danke correctly! The other day I was ordering some Döner and I chickened out so bad that the guy in front of me turned around and asked if I was an American and what I was ordering and then proceeded to order for me. At least I got a "good luck" from him and a secret extra goody from the guy behind the counter for my embarrassment. At another time I was in a bakery by myself and a German man said he could hear my accent in my voice and that he LOVED it. Quite a boost because I always imagined a Texan accent in German is a bit intense. At least thats what I heard practiced in my German class when we all sounded like Texan parodies of the language.
People in Germany keep asking my group why we are here, fulling turning around while crossing the street to do so, because technically it's still a pandemic and we aren't in a major city like Berlin or Munich. The other night we all met a couple of people while out and I met a nice British girl who have me her details. While I was out that night I also realized I had no game whatsoever so one of our program coordinators told us "you all shouldn't really be going and meeting too many people right now, except you Avery, you should go out to work on your game." It was a real humbling experience in front of everybody. Then again this whole experience is humbling.
-Avery Nennmann
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