My beloved family from all over the world

"The world is a book and those who do not travel read only one page"
                                                                                                                    - St. Augustine








"Love makes a family"
                                                                                                                    - Gigi Kaeser






"in truth a family is what you make it. it is made strong not by the number of heads counted
  at the dinner table, but by the rituals you help family members create, by the memories you
  share, by the commitment of time, caring, and love you show to one another, and by the hopes
  for the future you have as individuals and as a unit"


                                                                                                                    - Marge Kennedy








  As the end of my exchange year draws near (I´ve got exactly 4 weeks and 4 days left) you start to look back on your exchange in a very judging matter. Questions like "Did you learn enough? Did you see enough? experience enough? Could you have made more friends? Was it worth it? Should I have done something different in order to make my exchange year even better? What if I would have done this..instead of that?"
All these questions I can effortlessly answer. For me "if" doesn´t exist. I made some major life altering choices during my year and I´m privileged to say that the majority of them turned out excellent. Others...well.

"If" doesn´t exist. Would I still be here in Germany if I had made that one phone call? Would Jordan still be here if he hadn´t shown the security guard his papers? Would Jonathan still be here if his home town hadn´t been Oberstdorf? We´ll never know because "if" doesn´t exist.
But now as I sit here reminiscing on my year as a whole I can proudly say that no regrets linger in my mind.
Did I make mistakes? Of course. Why don´t I have regret? You learn from your mistakes and by understanding the nature of the mistake and realizing that a mistake has been made can grant you knowledge that you can use to your advantage in times to come. And I have made my peace with these mistakes.



One and perhaps the only question about my year that I fail to answer is "How am I going to be able to carry on without my "family from all over the world?" I know I have talked about this before but now the matter is surfacing stronger than before.
The bond that immediately forms between two exchange students is really mind blowing. This bond forms without mutual language or morals or values. It´s like two new students from different cities changing to the same school in the middle of the semester but more extreme. Something like this, I believe, can only be experienced with Rotary. Imagine, 30 people from all over the globe melting together into one unity, a group or a team, if you will, ready to take on and conquer the challenges that lay ahead. The moments I´ve spent with these people are absolutely unsurpassed. Their company has taught me to see the world with more open eyes and for it really is. They taught me to understand other cultures and see the diversity and wealth in them. There are few things more precious than sitting at the riverbank at  sunset with these people, listening to Latino music and dancing, without a care in the world. The sheer energy of the Latinos is quite overwhelming and the cheerfulness shines a warming light upon your heart. Around you hear Spanish, Portuguese, German, English and French.
The exchange students automatically form a network of support, knowledge and creative ideas as the exchange commences. Ultimately, it´s not your host family or friends in the new school who are going to be there to help you up if you fall or whenever the world tries to bring you down...it´s the exchange students. We share ideas, dreams, feelings and problems. The international family of love and back up is always reachable 24/7. And what happens in the family stays in the family, that´s a definite.



This family is the thing I will most miss about my exchange. This very group, this all accepting family is free of all prejudice and discrimination. Never before have I encountered anything in this fashion and it has had a colossal impact on my life. I can state, with easy that the opportunity to be an affiliate of this family is one of the best things that have ever taken place in my life.
Each rendezvous with the family contains heaps of unforgettable moments and loud echoes of delight. Every member of the family functions as a conduit of joy and the more there are of us the bigger the flood of gladness is. Each moment spent apart from the family is stuffed with a slight feel on incompleteness and I sometimes see myself as a drug addict constantly searching for this "high". I fear I will be lost for a while when I return up north, still searching for this feeling, drawn forward like a moth to a distant moon. But will be oceans apart by then...by life goes on, doesn´t it?


I´d like to take the time now as the first exchange students who arrived last fall are leaving next week(my love goes out to all the oldies who arrived in January 2011 too), and thank my family from all over the world for the best three weeks of my life on D-tour and every single moment we spent together. I can´t even begin to fathom how my exchange would have been without you and how many great friendships I would never have formed if I hadn´t met all of you.
My most fond thanks to you all. I know we´ll meet again...eines tages.
I wish you all the best in your lives and I hope I can be a part of them in some way, shape or form in the future. Take care, stay healthy and live well. Mi casa es tu casa <3 and I mean it.

<3

love you guys

zum Schluss noch ein Bild vom Omar, wenn er Scheisse baut XD

The Greatest of Surrerings

"It is deeply shocking and incomprehensible to me that despite volumes of documentation and living witnesses who can attest to the horrors of the Holocaust, there are still those who would deny it."
                             
                                                                                                                                 -Mark Udall

"The Holocaust was the most evil crime ever committed"

                               

                                                                                                                          -Stephen Ambrose

"The most disgusting, nauseating, terrible, horrifying thing that has ever taken place on this earth....seriously fucked up shit"

                                                                                                                                  -Max Heino

I think you  all see where this is going. We visited Dachau..the former Nazi concentration camp just outside of Munich. This visit took place last Saturday. But before I tell you about this most uncomfortable visit I´d like to quickly address something nicer that happened the evening before and got me so intoxicated...if you will that I was still a little bit  drunk the next day. That too was a first time experience.

So me and 15 latinos and latinas took the train to Wasserburg. I was basically minority and couldn't understand everything they say but I like it with the latinos. It´s like being in another country all together. They seem to like me as well because I´m kind of the only "outsider" they have fully accepted into their circle. So we went to this Frühlingsfest (Spring party) in Wasserburg. It´s basically a small Oktoberfest with a Beer tent in the middle and an amusement park around the tent. I took a couple of rides with the girls, if you know what I mean, we ate something and got amazing places in the beer tent. Right in the middle! 

I decided not to drink...then I thought...what the hell YOLO (YOU ONLY LIVE ONCE). I´m sorry...this YOLO thing is some new internet meme/thingy thangy encouraging young ppl or people in general to do stupid and irresponsible things XD. I was like: Hell imma drink! I´m in germany with a bunch of latinos, I need something to help me stand them XD So me and Omar and Luthero and Cesar invited a couple of German girls to our table and ordered our beers, you know the 1 liter things. I knew one of them before as she is a "soon to be" exchange student.

Her friends were creamy and one of them was sooo good looking. Like Leona Lewis with a better face. Man and she was eyeballing me the whole night and we threw a couple flirt lines back and forth and she wanted to take a picture with me every two minutes. So I was getting my hopes up aaand then me and Omar decided to do the drinking pose where you put your arm around the other persons arm and drink. Now...we both had like 75 % left of the beer and I don´t know why but we just kept on going and going. He looked over at me and saw that I was still drinking and I looked over at him and noticed he was still going on. I was like "f*ck if I´m quitting". So then suddenly we had emptied our beers....and it really hits you like a baseball bat. The effect came as sun as you but the beer glass down. "OH NOW I`M DRUNK"

Omar looked at me like "What have you done to me??!!" Then we continued socializing with the German gals and then miss Leona Lewis was like.."I have a boyfriend"...I was like..."you have wha..?? ANOTHER BEEEEER PLEASE!!"

Beijo para Brasileiro viado

elegant  and drunk latinos

Now I didn´t say it out loud but I thought to myself...WHAT THE FUCK? Like now advice for all my beloved girls out there (Besos <3..that´s kisses in Spanish in case you´re not in the know) if you have a boyfriend..don´t look at me like you want my...... love (XD)...and stare at me for 2 hours straight. Because

you will come across like an attention seeking little skeezer...and my respect for you will decrease a ton...

I was like "hola, hola, hola, hola....girl...you can forget the flirt now...I kinda try to respect those kinda things..maybe"

Frühlingsfest in Wasserburg, + Yuri´s afro 

Friends and alcohol. Keep on reading to find out what happened to the dude´s face who´s wearing glasses

I drank a second one, a third one and I was done. We left the Frühlingsfest and we got into a fight...like a big one. Well, me and the latinos and latinas, like 16 ppl in total started walking home in the night like 2 or 3 am. We take a small road through the fields and out there in the open we encountered some Germans.
...well let´s just say a fight broke out...one of us got hit in the face real good and his eye was as big as a peach the next day. It was the nastiest sucker punch I´ve ever seen...what a loser that German guy who punched him is. Being all heroic and stuff I got the situation to calm down after a while and we eventually got home.

The next morning I woke up and noticed that I was still intoxicated...never experienced that before.
So we ate something and traveled to Dachau where we met the other exchange students. It was a pleasant reunion in a most unpleasant place. After we were done exchanging howdoyoudos and so forth we stepped through the gate with a well known passage on top "Arbeit macht frei".

It was an open, dry sand field and the sun was gazing upon it. There were only two barracks standing in the middle but you could see the remains of tens of other. The two barracks standing weren´t the original ones. They had been reconstructed just for museum/ memorial purposes. The Nazis had blown up all barracks when they realized that the Allied victory was inevitable to destroy all evidence of the camps existence. At the other end of the field there was a relatively big building that was used as an industrial facility where the Jews (and handicapped, homosexuals etc) worked basically as slaves making armament and ammunition to keep the war engine of the Third Reich running. Today the building works as a museum.
The whole place made me sick. It didn´t help that I was still a bit tipsy from last night. We made a tour through the museum and we watched a short film with real footage taken after the Allied forces took over the camp. Heaps of bodies...torture..bad hygiene...sickness.  One sick thing too was that the handicapped people who couldn´t walk were housed furthest away from the factory building. So every morning the handicapped had to get to the building...imagine..the people who couldn´t WALK had to WALK the longest distance.
After the film I sat down and cried. Lots of people did that and you´d be heartless if it wouldn´t awaken any feeling in you.
In front of the building there was a sculpture like this:

very describing

never forget

And at the other end of the field there were churches and temples for all main religions where you could sit down to pray. So we did.

field of suffering

up in smoke

After the visit we went to Greek restaurant and we had a great day together.


Apologize for the somewhat serious post.