First day of school as an exchange student!

Today was what I've been bracing myself for the past couple of days...the first day of school  Yesterday,I was terrified about starting school and meeting people as I was afraid that I was going to be completely confused and that I was going to struggle to meet people with the language barrier.  However, it's much to my pleasure to say that that was NOT the case!

First day of school at Annette von Droste Huelshoff Gymnasium!

I had one of my best, most memorable first days of school.I biked to school with a neighborhood girl (whom I already met) and her friends and as soon as we walked into school, they began introducing me to all of their friends.  I probably said "Hallo!  Ich bin Kirsten...Ja, ich bin die Austauschschuelerin aus Amerika" about 30 times. It was a very warm welcoming to the school!

My first class of the day was German, one of the classes that I was the most worried about.  However, there were two girls in that class who I met walking into the school who helped me with understanding the teacher and our homework.  Fortunately, the class is reading Greek literature at the moment and I've become familiar with mythology over the years. But it will still probably be one of my most rigorous classes... Our first novella will be "Iphigenie auf Tauris"and there will be some Kafka pieces coming later this semester. The girls I met in this class were eager for me to meet their other friends, so during our break time I did that again and compared schedules with them to see if we had any classes together. Fortunately there were others in my other classes later today so they all walked with me to my classes and invited me to sit with them.

Mein Stundenplan

The other classes I had today were religion, biology and sport.   I spoke with all of my teachers and told them my situation and they were all very supportive and I had people I knew in all of my classes for the rest of the day! Although understanding the teacher in class is a bit difficult, I think that it will come along with time.  I've already found out that taking notes helps me to better understand the lectures.

 Most of my conversations today were in German and everybody was so helpful and patient when I spoke to them.  It seemed like it  shocked a lot of students that there was an American exchange student at their school who actually could understand and speak a sufficient amount of German.  I'm hoping that I am able to continue to meet new people and start to develop friendships with the people I met today in the days ahead!
Tomorrow I have more new classes... Hopefully they go even better than today! :)