Ok so the past week i spent every waking (and sleeping) moment with people from my class. For the most part it was fun.
Sunday i finished packing and went to the school to get on the bus. now the teacher told us to pack small so i did i crammed everything into a small duffel bag and strapped my sleeping bag on top. i got to the school and half of the people had bags the size of my huge bag i brought with me to Germany! (clara even had 2 bags that were bigger than the one i brought) I was just standing there thinking what on earth could they have in there? i dont even have enough clothes in germany to fill that bag and they are only going for a week! needless to say i felt very accomplished as a light packer considering i never pack light. with me on the bus i had my backpack which had all of my bathroom supplies and everything that wasnt clothing in it (all of the other kids had backpacks as well that were bigger than mine) and a banana, a sandwich, and a bottle of water. Our bus was shared with another 10th grade class who was also going sailing but they were getting dropped off before us at a different harbor. on the bus i sat with Clara. there wasnt much to do the whole time except stare out the window (which was difficult because clara had the window seat). It was also freezing on the bus almost the entire time! i had my hoodie on and my jacket over my legs and i was still shivering. after about a half hour on the bus i figured out why people brought such big backpacks... they were full of food. the trip was supposed to last about 5 hours.. from 3pm to 8pm... Germans (the one in my class anyway) have a very hard time going more than an hour without eating something i think. so there was constantly food being passed to everyone and i felt bad because i just brought stuff for myself. so after we got into the netherlands we stopped at a rest area. i bought a monster (an energy drink ... that is cheaper in europe than the US... which Clara had never tried so i let her have a drink) and a pack of some Haribo gummy peaches or something like that. by the time we got to the first stop to drop off the other kids my monster was gone and i had to pee soooo bad. so Sebastian and Markus helped me find the bathroom... then we had another 20 minutes until we left so we just stood around and talked. The rest of the time on the bus i was bouncing all over the place and taking a million pictures out of the window. When we finally got to the boat the sun was starting to go down and all there was to do was cook dinner and sit around and talk. Clara and i roomed together in a room that led to another room that 3 other girls stayed in. Our room was also right under the stairs to go up on deck. so after staying up until like 1 am then going to bed in this room the next morning was not fun...
we were supposed to wake up at 730 every morning... Monday morning i dont think i even got to sleep until 6. Apparently Sebastian slept on deck and woke up really early and came down stairs which in turn woke up the teacher then everyone in his room and so on. so everyone was going up and down and up and down not even attempting to be quiet. now let me explain a little more about my room... i was on the top bunk... the bed is located directly under a window that is in the floor under a bench if you are on deck... so i woke up to the sun shining in my face and i looked out the window and saw (if you have a weak stomach do not read this) my math teacher sitting on the bench directly over my window in shooooooooort shorts! like my shorts are longer than those were. i honestly thought i was a girl sitting on the bench until i got out of bed and he was coming down the stairs... i think i almost passed out when i realized what i had seen. to make the matter worse he wore short shorts the entire time... i saw him on time in sweat pants... and half the time he was walking around without a shirt on... and the shorts that he wore monday were not even the shortest pair! he had a jogging pair that were allllot shorter. the one day he was helping cook spaghetti and was in just shorts and i asked Sebastian why our teacher wears less clothes that girls do at the beach... then he asked the girl teacher that was on the boat with us and she just laughed.. then he asked the teacher and his response was "because i am hot" ... of course i took that as like he looks hot and i was just like ehhhhhh and then he clarified by saying that he was hot from cooking and he had already gotten spaghetti sauce on 2 shirts.
i spent most of my time with Sebastian and Markus the whole trip... they spoke english to me most of the time so i didnt get a ton of practice with german but i have started to understand more. but by the end of the first day everyone was talking about Sebastian and I since we were spending so much time together. so that stated the whole feeling like everyone was constantly watching me and talking about me. but after the first day most of the talk about me and him had stopped but the feeling as if everyone was still talking and watching me was still there ... all the time.
when it came to jobs and helping out i tried my best. everyone was assigned 3 jobs to do sometime during the week. I had cooking on monday, shopping on tuesday, and dishes on wednesday. after trading with some people i ended up with cooking on monday (which all i did was help make salad and then stand there the rest of the time because they didnt have anything else for me to do... and then they didnt have enough food so my cooking group and a few other people just had to have left overs... i just had some Vla (dutch pudding)), then i did dishes on Wednesday and Thursday. When it came to work on the boat its self i tried to help as much as i could but it was hard. The skipper was yelling orders in german so of course i didnt understand anything he was saying so i was just standing there until i figured out what everyone else was doing... but by that time everyone else was already doing it and i couldnt help... so there were some kids (which i think are like the type of kids that think that they are better than everyone else because a lot of the other kids told me not to worry about them no one likes them anyways) that kept getting mad at me or making comments like "thanks for the help" or just talking about me right in front of me (i guess they think that just because they are speaking german when they say my name that i wont know that they are talking about me).
when we were sailing the only work we had to do was raise and lower the sails, or move them. then we werent doing that we could do pretty much what ever. a lot of the kids sat down stairs in the dining room playing card games and listening to music. there were only like 3 people that were "allowed" (were popular/cool enough) to plug in their ipods to play music off of. they constantly played like the same 20 songs over and over and over for 6 days strait! The 2 songs that i think they played the most were: the song from the Titanic (which for some reason everyone knew the words to ... i mean every guy even was singing this song), and The Lazy Song by Bruno Mars (which again everyone knew the words to). so i spent most of my time on deck... literally on deck. there was so much wind on this trip that if you stood up it felt like it was 40 degrees (F). so the only way to stay warm was to lay on the deck in the sun... if there was no sun i was below deck.
our travels took us to 4 different islands. we started and ended at the port in Harlingen. i dont know the names of any of the except for the last one which was called Terschelling. it was the biggest place that we stopped... all of the other places were just little towns that had like one or 2 stores. In Terschelling we had a lot of time to explore and the first night that we were there there was a flea market type of thing throughout the whole town. Sebastian, Markus, and I first went and got Dutch fries (they are supposed to be the best fries but they tasted just like any other fries ive ever had). then we went to another store and I bought a patch for my jacket. then later on we went around some more and i bought a necklace and then we just walked around a lot. now Markus speaks mostly german and with me and Sebastian he speaks english. we were walking around and he said in english "i want to go to a Spa"... we were just like What? a spa why do you want to go to a spa and hes like i want to go buy stuff at a spa. finally he said it in german and Sebastian figured out that he wanted to go to a grocery store called "Spa". so after laughing for a while we made it to spa and they bought food. At one store on a different Island we went and bought some food. Sebastian flipped out because they had Doritos there which they dont have in germany. now these were what americans know as Cool Ranch Doritos... in the netherlands however they know them as "Cool American Doritos"!!!! i started dying laughing. i think seeing those was one of the highlights of my trip... along with seeing the Seal in the water while we were sailing!
Throughout the whole trip i had fun but i really started to notice some differences between me and the rest of the class. I dont know if it was just me and the certain people or the culture, but there were some hard times where i just wanted to come back to germany and go back the to family that has accepted me. before i came everyone was telling me that everyone in the school love exchange students so i was expecting everyone to talk to me and be nice but some people were just flat out mean and rude... or at least thats how it came off. the night that i had to cook i cut bell peppers with clara and i showed her how you can easily clean the peppers by pushing your thumbs on the stem (creating a hole) and then ripping the pepper in half... she thought it was pretty cool. the next day when all of the guys that are the jocks/ "too cool for you" type of people were trying to cut the peppers i showed them how to do it and all the guys laughed at me (the teacher did too but i think he thought it was cool while they thought i was an idiot). then the next day the guy i had showed before asked me to show another girl... i did and they all laughed except one girl who told me that we dont live in a jungle. but i am going to try to stay positive and try to keep my mind open to all of these things and try to see things from different points of view and try to not judge the people on just how they interacted with me on the trip. hopefully when i go back to school everything will smooth out over time.
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