Hello everyone,

only one more month and my big adventure begins. I’m already pretty excited and today I will tell you about the preparation weekend in Cologne. 06/22/2019 and 06/23/2019 were the days that I spend in Cologne. We arrived at about 10:30 am and checked in at the hostel. The organization reserved a big room for presentations and activities inside. That was the room where I first had to stay and already met new people that have the same dream to go abroad. It was very exciting and interesting to hear about other students’ experiences and reasons for their exchange year. Then it was finally 11 am and the day started with a presentation about the program of the two days. We split into four groups and started with the workshops. The first workshop was about cultural differences between Germany and the USA. We talked about stereotypes of Germany and  the USA, played role plays and talked about how to handle cultural differences without loosing your own values. I think it was pretty interesting and helped me a lot to understand the difficulties behind the exchange year and how to deal with them. After lunch we continued with the second workshop of the day in which we talked about school in the USA. In the end we were able to ask a returnee some questions and receive answers from people who already had those problems in the past. In the evening, we went for a walk with the whole group and had some free time afterwards. In the morning we had breakfast and time to clean our rooms. After that our parents arrived and we heard another presentation about more general topics like insurances, rules for the program, how parents should deal with the situation and much more.

After those two days, I would say that it was very helpful to receive more information about living in another country for one year and also to get to know new people that plan the same trip and to exchange about what their experiences have been so far.

Stay tuned for the next posts.

Jánek Florack