Just as many Europeans come to the United States, many American students also go to Europe as exchange students! That’s what WAHS student Lauren Kearns did, last year, by spending a whole year in Berlin, Germany. “I couldn’t speak any German, but I had always been fascinated by Germany,” she said. “The exchange program was very competitive, so I applied with pretty low expectations. The day I found out I had been chosen was one of the best days of my life.”

It sounds crazy to spend an entire year in a different country without your parents, especially without even knowing the language. “I was going to the German public school everyday, but I could hardly understand anything that anyone was saying,” Lauren said, “The main difficulty was definitely the language, but fortunately a lot of people spoke very good English, so they could always help me when I needed it. And I ended up learning German pretty quickly.”

Beyond the language, there is the culture – a lot of little differences which do not seem like a big deal but can be very hard to get used to. “At school there, all of the windows were always kept open, even during the winter,” said Lauren, “So in math class, for example, I would have to have my parka on – I was always freezing!”

But this is the best part of being an exchange student; we think that we are only going to learn a new language, but we actually end up learning an entirely new life.

Another question we all wonder: what about the food? “My host family made some stuff like spaghetti, which wasn’t different from what my real family would make, but for the breakfast I was used to variety in the morning with pancakes, oatmeal, eggs, or cereal…In Germany it was always just bread!”

For Lauren, it is not a stereotype that people are very different when you go across the Atlantic Ocean. “Germans have the stereotype to be cold, direct, and sometimes kind of rude. And that’s not totally wrong! I mean, when you walk in the street, people don’t smile or make eye contact with each other, which was different from what I was used to. But I also found that there were so many nice people – I just had to get to know them first.”

Now Lauren is back to Western (where she is an editor at the Western Hemisphere), but she will never forget her year in Germany. She feels like she learned more than a language during this year far away from her normal life. “I feel a lot more independent and responsible now that I have lived so far from my family. I mean, of course I had my host family, but there were a lot of things I had to figure out for myself.” said Lauren, and then she added, “For example, on my second day of school I accidentally got on the wrong bus, and it took me to the other side of the city, I didn’t have my phone or anything to contact my family. I didn’t know where to go or what to do…I ended up getting to school four hours late! But that night, I remember going to bed and thinking, ‘I did it. I survived another day.’”

Now, when she thinks of it, Lauren laughs. And when she talks about her year, she always has a lot to say and can’t help smiling. No matter the difficulties, if she had the opportunity to do it again, she wouldn’t hesitate at all.