Trip to Germany learning experience for teen

Editor's Note: We inadvertently left the last two paragraphs off this story when it ran June 25, so we are rerunning it in its entirety.

Sure, I've traveled before. I even went to Canada once. But there was no way I could have anticipated my visit to Germany. I was excited to get my hands on some German chocolate, take lots of poorly lit photographs and use my meager, second-year German.

This trip seemed fairly luxurious. As a reward for winning The Spokesman-Review's Young Columbus essay contest, I traveled to Germany with about 100 other winners from across the United States -- expenses paid, of course. All I did was pack 10 days worth of clothes and beg spending money from my parents.

Ah, life in the literary fast lane.

The first shocker for me was how incredibly UN-luxurious a person can feel after seven hours on a red-eye flight, a nap in a hotel and nine more hours of nonstop, coach, cross-Atlantic discomfort. By the time we arrived in Frankfurt, I was ready to hit the showers and bed. Instead, we shuffled off to the first of many stops.

Throughout the trip, we visited several beautiful sites, but one of the most astounding things for me was the countryside. Not just how picturesque European forests and meadows were, but the fact that these picturesque European forests and meadows were everywhere. It's hard to believe how many we enountered. We were never more than a half-hour's walk from something breathtaking, even when we visited busy metropolitan areas. It may say something about modern German values that many of these forests weren't centuries old. They were replanted. But most were romantic old forests where it was easy to imagine a knight riding through on horseback.

This spirit of preservation also could be seen in cities, where houses built with red roofs and wood-trimmed plaster (what many people imagine when they think of classic German design) were everywhere. An amazing number of these buildings were old, but quite a few were new homes built to resemble those around them.

Not all cities were old-fashioned. Frankfurt, where we landed, and Munich, an absolutely gigantic city in Bavaria (Germany's southern region), were as modern and busy as New York City. The key difference is that many Germans prefer to walk or bike, making the cities that much more enjoyable.

My personal favorite spot was a castle known as Schloss Neuschwanstein (schloss means castle, neushcwanstein means new swan place.) Disney's castle was modeled after Neuschwanstein but can't compare to the original. There really is nothing in America quite like a castle, and this one was absolutely stunning. The sheer size, the elaborate decor, the strategic location (on top of a mountain whose winding road we scaled for an hour on foot!), the history, the view. It all impressed me. And this was near the trip's end, when I was ready to return home to sleep in my own bed, use toilets I understood and eat a nice (BEEF) hamburger without fear of mad cow disease.

For the most part, this trip was a wonderful sightseeing experience that only whet my appetite for travel and my love for all things German. But I experienced some things I never expected. I overcame some misconceptions about relatively insignificant parts of German society. I was surprised to learn that while the streets are unusually clean we even saw a man scrubbing the sidewalk there is a lot of graffiti.

I learned a lot about people from my own country. My friends on the trip were from Florida, Virginia, Texas, Colorado and Seattle. They were great, and we had a lot of fun comparing our lives, such as what we do for fun and how we dress. In Virginia, it's all about Birkenstocks, but in Colorado you're not cool unless you're cruisin' the loop every Friday night.

It took awhile for the trip to sink in for me, since I never expected to go to Germany, especially not in such a unique situation. It wasn't until a week or two after I got back that I was hit with the full impact. I got the chance to see the world outside my own. I know and understand my life and the lives of those that affect me. As for others, I may read about them in the paper or hear about them in class. But going to another country made me realize how much more there is out there, and it put things into perspective.

I'll be honest. It wasn't a life-altering experience, but I did see things that changed the way I look at life. Who could have known an essay could take me so far ...

Copyright 2001 Cowles Publishing Company
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