Hello Everyone! This blog will be a collection of my experiences studying abroad in Hildesheim, Germany for the next year. As I collect my memories and thoughts here, I hope to gain new insights into my experience here and share this with my friends and family.
My first couple days here have been quite full. I arrived on the 1st of September at Hannover Airport with little knowledge of German and maybe a little underprepared. From there we took a train to Hildesheim. As I looked out the train window and watched the buildings and then the farmland pass by, the enormity of where I was and what I was doing set in for me. Here I am in Germany and what do I do with this time? There are many possibilities for this year and what I can accomplish, many opportunities that I can take and not take. It made me feel like I was in a Choose Your Own Adventure book or something!
However, all of this started to melt away once I was blown away by the beauty of everything that I was seeing through the window of the train. For the rest of the trip I developed a stiff neck and dizzy head from trying to take in all that I saw outside of the train window. When we arrive at the station in Hildesheim we were met by some "tutors," students that were sent to help us with our adjustment. A student sent to help me get to my apartment walked with me there. As we did this, I had a chance to take in Germany at a slower pace.
My first impressions of Hildesheim were that it was larger than I expected. Coming from a small town and going to college in a town of 15,000 is very different from Hildesheim, a town of 100,000. Cars are everywhere, driving very fast. Pedestrians are everywhere, walking equally fast. Somehow, all these zippy little european cars stop perfectly for all these pedestrians and share the road graciously with every bicyclist. The town is a well oiled machine where everything works, and at least for now, I totally don't understand how it does work!
I have also been taking photos as another record of my trip, you can find them here:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/53571798@N06/
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