The German Ginger Makes a Comeback

To my dedicated followers: 

It's March. I know. I said I would write all the time. I lied. You should all get gold stickers for sticking with me.

I will explain, though, as I think the maybe four of you who are reading deserve as much. 

This year is a crazy one. It's not always easy, it's not always fun, it's not always something that I want to be published to the world. And to those who think they would like to read about my struggles, I'll tell you something. You're lying. No one really likes to read a sad blog because it's repetitive. The reason for my sadness generally did not differ a whole lot over the course of a couple of weeks, and the only update would have been about the different food I ate in my sad state (more literary devices! Rhyming!). I will be the first to admit that I am a whiny person, and I will tell you about my problems until you get so fed up with me that you wish someone would call you with an emergency so you would have an excuse to leave. This would have become a portal for my first world, teen angst problems, and I didn't have the heart in me to torture you all like that. 

Also, this year contains some private moments. My first kiss, that time I cried in the bus, that time when I possibly drank too much alcohol, that time I ran naked through the streets of Bonn with the American flag streaming behind me (KIDDING MOM CALM DOWN), weren't things that I thought about telling everyone, publicly, at the time. And the stuff that I found really significant and fascinating were things like: Someone talking to me at school. Understanding a sentence. Making a joke that everyone doesn't think is just me messing up the language and having a below-average IQ. Writing a blog about nothing is no fun.

Plus I'm just lazy sometimes. It's the hard truth. 

My excuses are now finished. I will move on to what I find to be deep and philosophical and worthy of a blog. 

I have experienced 6 months in a foreign country, away from home, my family, my friends, my cats, my school, and my native language. I learned what the feeling of being truly lonely is, but I also learned how to be alone and be okay with it. I learned exactly how much awkward eye contact it takes before someone invites you to come over and sit with them (that was a painful phase of learning). Then I learned how to go up to someone myself and ask to sit down. I learned how much I need my mom, especially for those small, menial tasks that no one ever thinks of until you actually have to do it. Like sewing. Or washing underwear. I learned how to take criticism without bursting into tears of shame. I discovered how universal a smile truly is. I learned how to hug and how to comfort someone when they're sad. I learned how to depend on people I had known for less than a week. I learned there's always more room inside for a little more love, no matter what kind. 

It's an incredible sort of thing, to learn so much so fast. Most of what I learned, though, came from some amount of pain. It isn't a vacation here (not all the time, at least). For the first few months, I wanted to punch, in the face, whoever told me an exchange would be awesomely fantastic. It's like every basic anchor you have is taken and you're left in the middle of the ocean, surrounded by a different species, trying your very hardest just to survive and not drown in an ocean of social awkwardness. I had no friends to turn to at school, no common factor with them to strike up a conversation with, and no language skills to even attempt anything close to small talk. I had to get used to a new family and figure out my boundaries- was I too loud, too late, too shy? I didn't know when we ate, how long I should stay at the table, when I could shower, or where the clean plates went. My confidence was gone. I struggled. I blamed other people and circumstance for my unhappiness and lack of success. Then I realized, would I want to approach myself? I was a surly ginger, walking around and waiting for someone else to take pity and talk to me. Of course no one was talking to me, because after a point it was no one's fault but my own for being so codependent. Gingers aren't cute when they sulk. So after this revelation, my confidence came back bit by bit, and my loudness and obnoxious levels are almost what they used to be when I left. I started to swim for fun instead of survival. 

I am, at the very moment that I write this, happy. I feel international and free. I rode the bus today, and even though trains are still my preferred method of public transportation, I still get a rush every time I do something of the sort. My best friend here is Turkish, and to make up for the fact that we don't go to the same school we Skype on an average of an hour a day, which I just did about 10 minutes ago, much to the chagrin of everyone in the house who was trying to sleep (sorry guys).  I drank a chai latte in a cafe today and then bought bread and drank sparkling water, of which I drink about a liter a day. I have adapted to my life here, and I love it now. But it doesn't mean I don't miss home. I miss Whit's Custard and the library and knowing everyone I see. I miss actually doing school work, too. I miss the people of Granville. When I come back I may be a little different, with different clothes and some different views and different experiences, but I am still fundamentally the same. I still read a lot. I still like popcorn. I still like school more than is probably healthy.  And I'll come back, no matter what. 

Six months brought more than I ever thought possible, and I still have a little over three to go. I'll see what, and who, they bring, and, when appropriate, keep you updated. 

The First Farewell

Here I am, sitting on my living room floor, belongings scattered all around me, looking a little bit like a crazy person. Some are to be left here, at home, while most are coming with me, to a different home. I am leaving Granville, Ohio, in just a little over 9 hours. I am leaving for 10 and a half months. I am leaving. I can say it out loud, finally, after waiting and waiting and waiting, having to endure everybody's question- "When do you leave?" for an entire summer, and then some. I've had a surprise going away party thrown for me, by friends who went around in the dark alleys of Granville to plan it without my notice (I'm kidding. There are no alleys in Granville), and I just read the letters written by the attendees of the party. Let me give you a brief breakdown: 100% told me to have a great time, about 75% mentioned sausage and/or wienerschnitzel, and 25% told me to have fun with the German boys. There were a couple 'lederhosen' thrown in there, too. Stereotypes do not exist here, as you can see. It was a great party, with lots of m&m's, many of which were stuffed into envelopes and subsequently given to me by the perpetrators (YOU KNOW WHO YOU ARE).

My family also dropped my brother off to college. I was perfectly fine until the parting lunch, when I got appropriately teary-eyed, and gave him the biggest hug I could muster, and left. I then went to Biltmore- a huge house- and afterwards ate dinner at T.G.I Friday's with my mom. Over my spinach salad, I suddenly started to sob. That was so much unintentional alliteration I'm happy it's documented. Anyways, our waiter came over to ask us if we needed anything, took one look at my tear-filled eyes, my face twisted into that awkward 'crying face', and mumbled about getting water, walking as quickly as he could without looking like he was running. The reason for my tears, you ask? A combination of a few things: first, that it was different without Colin. There were no snide remarks, no banter that we thought was witty, no 'gentle' shoving. It was quiet, and I missed him. And the second reason, which occurred to me in the car (at which point I was, yes, still crying), was that I realized how long ten months are. I could see all that time stretched out before me, and on the other side was a pushpin that was my family. I am going to go ten months without getting a bear hug from my dad, or sitting on the couch talking to my mom. I'm going to wear outfits she'll never see, and I am going to make friends with people they'll never meet. For ten months, I am without them. I felt a sort of terrifying exhilaration, something that I can only compare going to the top of a really, really tall roller coaster, and looking down to see just how astonishingly far it is to the bottom.

Back to the very-near future, I am going to leave tomorrow (or, I suppose, today, since it's 12:07) for Annapolis, spend the night there, then go the my Orientation, at which time it's goodbye to my parents for good, and hello to the other 49 AFS-CBYX students. We leave on Friday, September 7th, at 5:26 in the afternoon, and then land in Frankfurt that morning, German time. It's four days full of Orientations of every variety, from safety to what to wear when meeting the Secretary of the Secretary of your Senate representative. A little explanation: because of the program, Congress-Bundestag, we are supposed to meet with the representative from our area, but as it turns out, Congress isn't in session that day, so we are meeting with the people who are eighth on the list of people they have readily available to meet, and must dress appropriately.  It's four day of getting used to being away, without being plunged into the scary, murky, incomprehensible waters of Germany. So it's only a little terrifying.

Back to the present, I am too busy with the problem that is my luggage to be really freaking out. That comes later, probably at 3 in the morning, when my cats and mother will hear me pacing and moving about. I can put 44 pounds in my checked luggage, and 22 pounds for my carry on. The weight, surprisingly, is not as much of an issue as I had thought. The space, however, is. Do you know how incredibly difficult it is to try and choose what clothes to bring on an overseas adventures, where everybody will be meeting you for the first time, and since you know basically nothing of the language and will be forced to stand there like an idiot, slurring the phrases from your Traveler's Guide to Germany book, and then shove these life-changing clothes into a little purple suitcase? IT'S TOUGH. So I am forced to sit here, still on my living room floor, debating who can stay and who has to go. I like to imagine all my clothes, huddling into the deepest crevices of my suitcase, trying to avoid taking up space so I don't throw them out of it. Simple pleasures, as they say.That is a task that will be completed once I'm done here, but I felt like this was pretty important too.

Even though some parts of this post may have seemed a little down, and made being an exchange student sound like the equivalent of throwing yourself down a roller coaster track, I'm actually really and truly excited. Because even though I may be terrified, and wracked with sadness at the thought of not seeing everyone for 10 months, I feel alive. With the grief comes the elation- it's a price, but right now it's worth it. There's always something to look forward to, because there's always hope.

So until July, Granville, goodbye. Try and not to grow too big (it's funny because we're sadly small), and try not to have too much fun without me. I'll be back, and I'll still be me. I'll just talk about Europe alllll the time. Plus, I'll bring back some Nutella and weinerschnitzel. But until then, auf wiedersehen. 
-The German Ginger

The Day I Became the Chosen One

This post is a tad bit delayed- sorry about that, for the couple of you who look upon this blog faithfully. This summer is the busiest I've ever experienced, and I'm not sure if it is that way because I'm trying to cram everything I physically can into three months before I go, or simply because I'm older and now there are various activities that I can do outside of walking distance (a perk of having friends with licenses). However, the big news of this post is I GOT A HOST FAMILY! To you who are reading, it is no surprise and you will nod and possibly crack a smile over my accomplishment, but I was beyond relieved and telling everyone I knew that yes, in fact, Germans do like gingers, so you can just shut up now with the ginger jokes. And it was scary to think that people might not want me, which is self absorbed but true. I know it's hard to think of taking up a kid, who probably doesn't speak the same language, and there were so many of us that needed, and still need, someone to take that step and volunteer their family and home. But I got a host family, and it changed everything. The prospect of leaving my home for a foreign country, into the home of people who will feed and shelter me for year, was finally made concrete when there was a face to put on it.


The tally comes to: 


1 father, a doctor
1 mother, a nurse
2 sisters, ages 15 and Kindergarten (that's an age, right?). Theresa and Clara are their names, respectively.
2 brothers, in the 2nd class and 5th class (don't ask what that means, because I don't know), their names being Jacob and Konrad.
1 overall beautiful and gracious family who has decided to risk taking a 16 year old American girl into their home.




So, I'll live in Swisttal, a little town near Rheinbach and Cologne, going to school in the former. My institute of learning is Erzbischoefliches St. Joseph Gymnasium, an all girls Catholic school. But wait! The school is underfunded, so boys go there too. The news of education lacking money has never brought such a smile to my face, and the knowledge that the male gender is also walking the halls is a bit of a relief. I have absolutely nothing against girls (I am one, just to be clear), but too much of any one thing/ gender can be tiring. My sister, Theresa, and brother, Konrad, will both go to school at the same place, and I'm glad for that, because I think sometimes I'll just need a familiar face. 


So, what now? I'm going to every doctors appointment my mom makes for me, from the oral surgeon to the optometrist. I have a passport, a suitcase, clothes, my tennis racket, and shoes. I have almost everything on the checklist with a checked off, but I don't think that has much to do with being ready. Being ready is being prepared, mentally, for what's ahead. For leaving my friends, my family, my cats. For missing homecoming and Christmas Eve and Prom. For meeting new people, for learning a new language. Being ready is coming to terms with the fact that I am going to struggle, that I am going to have hard times and sad times, times when I'm ready to come home because all I want is a hug from my mom or to play tennis with my dad, or to talk to someone about something familiar. But it's also being excited. I'm going to go to a foreign country, where there are trains and buses, and cities nearby, and people ride bikes everywhere and bread is served with every meal (or so I hear). I'm going to have great times with new friends, and tell stories to my old ones. I have a chance to experience a year filled with life, to the point that it's almost bursting. Yet it's so much harder to say what I'm excited for than what I'm fearful of. It's easy to point out and say 'this will be missed', because I know what I'm leaving, and can imagine myself without these familiar things. But I don't know what I'm going towards, not really. There is a vast possibility for the unknown to reign down upon my life in these upcoming months. And that is exciting. 

Why Go?

Because I like to casually drop the fact that I am going to Germany into every conversation I ever have, I frequently get the questions "Where are you going in Germany?" "Why Germany?" "What's your mom going to do?" and, simply, "Why?'. Well, my inquisitive friends, I have (some) answers. 

First, I have absolutely no idea where in Germany I'm going. A host family has to choose me, and, as some of my lovely companions have pointed out, it's possible that redheads aren't exactly desired things in Europe. As of now, I have no proof to dispute that. 

Ah, Germany. The lovely, clean, beer-drinking, bratwurst-eating, and, most importantly, German-speaking country. The question that almost always follows "Why Germany?" is "Do you speak German?". The answer, sadly, is no. I have an app on my Ipod, and for about two months had a Germany tutor who I saw once a week. I do, however, speak French and Spanish. And English. Yet, barely a lick of the language of the land I'm going to be living in is inside my head, which is why people get this alarmed look on their faces, nodding violently so they can feel like they're covering up their shock and horrified surprise, all the while imagining me in a foreign land, most likely dead. But the CBYX scholarship is fantastic, and the only full ride I found to go anywhere. Later, I found scholarships to go to places like Morocco and India, which would have been awesome also, but by that point I was already pretty far into the process. I have always, for my whole life, desperately wanted to travel, and being an exchange student sounding extremely appealing. For example, I asked for a globe for Christmas. Not when I was seven. This year. Beat that coolness. So now I get to go to a foreign country, at no cost to myself, for an entire 10 months. That is why Germany takes the cake. 

Now to the dear Bridget, aka my mom. You may think that people are being strange and nosy when they ask what she's going to do, but they have a valid point. My brother, Colin, is going off to college in North Carolina (Davidson, to be specific), I'm going across the ocean, and she and my dad are divorced, leaving her with two cats and a year of solitude. But she is a strong lady, and I had her blessing before I was even accepted into the program. I believe she once told me, "Don't use me as an excuse to not do something you want to do." She's a wise one, that Bridget. And I love her and will miss her more than I can imagine at the moment, where she is only a room away, but she's going to be here when I get back, and she knows I'll come back still her daughter. 

Leaving friends and family and a town I've known practically my whole life while I'm sixteen and right in the middle of high school doesn't exactly seem sane. This has been brought to my attention countless times, from both those who wish I wouldn't go, and those who just want to make me cry. The two often overlap, like some sadistic Venn Diagram. Anyways, going in the first place was a long shot. I applied on a whim, wondering when I would hear anything, and everything just kept going and going until I was making my fateful Facebook update, alerting the internet of my success. I thought about it frequently. I thought about, mainly, what it would be like to be rejected from the program and stay. I'll be honest- I wasn't always extremely upset by that idea. I knew that I would always travel, someday and somehow, not necessarily during the four years of my life that people reminisce, or cringe, about. I couldn't even dream of affording the paid program to Germany, or any country, so if I didn't get the CBYX scholarship, it was a done deal. I wasn't going to reapply any other year, as I didn't want to miss my senior year, and taking a Gap Year just seemed silly to me when college is full of possibilities. And I love it here, as much as I complain. I love how I can walk down the street, and 95 percent of the time see someone I know, and stop in the shops and have all the store owners recognize me. I love my school (yes, I am that girl), with all of the classes and teacher and I have taken and met. I love my friends, this summer being especially full of fantastic people, which in a way makes it both harder and easier to go. Let me explain that. The harder part is understandable, something that is to be expected. By having such a great time with everybody, I will have much more to miss when I'm gone, and it's tempting just to stay and laugh with them. But it also makes it easier, because, had I not had these great experiences with these people, I might have been afraid of what I was leaving and coming back to. I am an excellent doubter, one who can elaborate a tiny situation until I end up a wreck of worry. Being confident in my friends allows me to leave them, knowing they'll have happy thoughts of me to keep with them, as I will have of them. Hopefully if any of them are reading this, it will guilt them out of thinking bad thoughts about me when I'm gone. This gracefully puts me into actually supporting my life-changing decision. I find few activities more thrilling than meeting new people. I relish the chance to talk to someone on the sidewalk or in a waterpark, sometimes at the expense of my mortified friends. All of them have are different, and I know that everyone knows that, but if you really think about it, it's sort of amazing. You could have a clone in Ireland or England or Germany, but you both would be totally different because of who you know and where you live. And when you met, it would be freaking fantastic, because you would be extremely interesting to the other you, given the fact that you were identical but totally different. I digress. I want to see the world and the people in it, and as much as I love Granville, I have pretty much run its source of fresh people (all 3,000 of them) dry, excluding the small children, who disturb me. Seeing new sights and eating new food and living a different life are all things that create my dream life, and I have the chance to live my dream. How many teenagers can say that? I have now reached that point of writing and tiredness where everything I write makes a small amount of sense until you actual read it, a scenario that is reflected quite frequently in my social life. I apologize that I spent a freakish amount of time and energy on certain topics, and almost none on others. Maybe next time. So I say, bis später.  

The First One

Well hi everyone! This is my first blog ever, and I feel sort of bad because I am not currently in Germany yet. I am, in fact, in my living room watching Juno. However, after luring you here under false pretenses, I will give you a brief summary of what has been going on concerning Germany. I received the Congress-Bundestag Youth Exchange Scholarship (CBYX), and now I am going to Germany for a year. I applied in January, and had to get all of my stuff together for the application in two weeks, because I discovered the program really late. There was a snow day the day that the letters of recommendations were due, which caused a rather large freakout on my end. But everything got in on time, and I was accepted as a semi-finalist. Then there was an interview in Mansfield, where all the semi-finalists were split up into two groups and we had individual interviews, then a group activity. The individual one was rather painful, because they went alphabetically. My last name is Tyznik. Very rarely do the other last 6 letters of the alphabet show their faces. That day was no exception. However, my interview time finally came and I babbled, talk about books, gave the wrong number for the amount of people in the world (I was off by about 4 to 5 billion), and then I was done. The group activity was fun- no talking was allowed. Overall, I think it took about 3 1/2 hours (ish). That was in February. There was a Facebook page for those of us waiting, and basically we just sat around and talked about how anxious we were. The final news came in April, which to you may not seem like a long time, but two months is a really, really long time to wait for news that will decide the fate of the next year of your life. I got a call at about 9:00 at night, and I started crying/laughing/hiccuping and the lady who called me was alarmed and tried to congratulate me while subtly getting off the line. The only person who was home was my brother, Colin, and I was screaming and jumping, which made him extremely uncomfortable. I then called everyone I could think of, and spent the next hour on the phone. I then ran down the road to meet my mom, and at 9:30 at night we were both  jumping up and down and screaming in hushed tones on the sidewalk.
Five were accepted from Ohio, and there 50 overall from the AFS portion of CBYX (acronyms are fun, aren't they?). So far, we have had a Pre-Departure Orientation, which taught me what to do in the case I get sexually assaulted in a foreign country. Good stuff. And I have done two conference calls, which involve the fun beginning of 'Who Can Shout the Loudest for Roll Call'. It really is delightful, especially those times when it randomly stops and we get half our information.  Apparently there is punctuation that implies sarcasm, and I have yet to figure out how to get that onto my keyboard. But I'm looking.
I leave in September, but first I'll go to D.C. for four days and have a Gateway Orientation and meet some Congress folk. I have no idea where I'm going- my medical application was just accepted by Germany on Friday (it's Sunday), so now my name will be fought over by hoards of hosts families. I will do my best to keep you all updated, which is probably just my mom- hi mom!- but nothing is really happening right now. Obviously that did not stop me from writing a small novel, but hey, it's a disclaimer to your boredom.
Until next time,
The German Ginger