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