The Traveler, Part 1

I was attempting to make my way through the basement with a machete this afternoon when I came across a box of beloved books. In that box I also found a porceline "post card" from a woman who befriended me when I was young and far from home.

Oh, sob-sob.

Back in the dark ages at the end of my high school career, I applied for a summer exchange program through AFS. I wanted to go to Germany since, after barely passing three years of high school German, it was the one language, other than English, I could imagine attempting to converse in.

And what could be better than to spend my summer days frolicking in the Schwarzwald.

I was sent to Germany. Upon arrival in Frankfurt, my host family retrieved me and we drove many hours to the small university town of Marburg. Imagine my delight. Cobbled streets too narrow for cars. A castle on the hill. Wow! A $2.00 glass of bottled orange juice. Outrageous. It wasn't possible to get fresh OJ in third world country of Germany. And 300 years ago, $2.00 was a lot for a glass of OJ. (Did I mention I'm immortal? 300 years ago was barely a drop in the bucket to me.)

We left Marburg and made our way to our final destination. Hamburg. Or, more accurately, a suburb of Hamburg. Having grown up in a suburb of New York, this was much like home. Almost everyone spoke English. I couldn't imagine a place I'd less like to be.

Where was the damn forest?

I was living with a family of four in an apartment that was actually two apartments with the wall in the middle broken down. There was a cage full of canaries in my bedroom. Noisy, stinky canaries. Well, to be fair, I'm not sure which was stinkier... the canaries or the hard boiled egg they were fed. But they were noisy.

Where was the damn forest? And the house made of gingerbread?

And what was the German equivalent of M&M's?

So many things to adjust to. Such a wrong time in my life to go. I'd just graduated high school and left all of my friends and all of those "summer-before-college" parties for eight weeks in the suburbs of Hamburg.

What the hell was I thinking?

WAS I thinking?