I'm here! And have been for 5 days now. I have so much to write about I thought I'd write 2 seperate blog posts: the training days and then the second one about my first day at school.
Sooooo where do I start. Last Sunday I suppose. My parents kindly drove me to Heathrow for my flight, then said goodbye at security. Even for an unemotional family like ours it was quite emotional, I felt really rotten leaving my parents behind to deal with troublesome grandparents etc while I got to start a new life in Deutschland.
Once through security I met up with a couple of people on the same flight as me going to Altenberg for the training, which was good as I spent all of 5 minutes through security on my own so had no actual time to dwell on going away before I was sucked into meeting new people. We all sat together on the plane (they were all lovely) and most of us went onto the same hostel. Someone on the fb group had described Station Hostel as a Turkish jail, but it soon transpired they clearly hadn't stayed in a hostel before as it was fine, facilities were much better than average even if the beds were a bit firmer than desired.
First crucial lesson learnt though: when booking alone and female, don't book the cheapest option in the hostel, as I ended up in a 6 bed room with 5 grown men. I'd gone to bed quite late as we'd been playing cards downstairs, so only the 3 korean guys in the room knew I was a girl. So the next morning I get up to find the other two guys wandering around the room in just their boxers. Awkward. Was more embarrassing for them though, when they turned round, saw I was definitely female, turned an interesting shade of red and quickly got dressed.
Anyway, the next day we went to Altenberg, which is a beautiful former monastery (complete with CATHEDRAL!). Here I met Katie (I'll name her as I imagine she'll be mentioned a lot) who was in a room with me, mainly because her school is in the next village over from Orscholz, where my school is. What a relief to find she is a) nearby and b) lovely, it really reassured me to know there is a kindred spirit so close by.
The rest of the training was good, good food in general, the teaching was helpful and our group was made up of the 10 people going to Saarland from GB, Ireland and Canada. We generally stuck together as a group as Saarland was nowhere near the other states being trained (Niedersachsen und Nord-Rhein Westfalen) and it was hilarious, so much "banter" and we left promising to meet up soon (in fact they're meeting up tonight but I can't go as I'm staying with a teacher til tomorrow. )
Highlights of the training included: being invited to go flying with our legend of a teacher Herr Busch, spending an evening being told over and over again how I looked like gold medal winning Irish boxer Katie Taylor by two Irish guys (which is apparently a compliment) and the talent show, where Julia did the Saarlanders proud with her amazing piano skills.
Anyway, sickeningly early Thursday morning we were coached back to Cologne, and from their Katie and I parted ways with the other Saarlanders as we work on the other side of Saarland to them (basically as far away from Saarbrucken as you can get without going into Luxembourg) and headed to Trier on the train.
Best. Train ride. Ever. We got chatting to a mature German lady sat opposite us, who lives in Trier. A few minutes later, she got her husband to come over. Cue 3 hours of amazing conversation (all in German) with the sweetest couple I have ever met. He was an 'economical geography' lecturer (whatever that is) at Trier university, she a teacher at a Fachhochschule. They were amazing, so in love still it was ein Bisschen unglaublich! We asked how they had got together and it turned out that when they were 16 and 18 and Germany lost the second world war, they both lived right on the border that was drawn between East and West Germany, so the woman couldn't go to her old school, had to move to her future husband's and the rest is history. At this point in the story the man gripped his wife's arm, looked tenderly into her eyes and said "if Germany hadn't lost the war we would never have met; every cloud has a silver lining" (or a German version of that phrase. By the end of the journey they'd given us their contact details and insisted we come and visit them for tea sometime and we parted good friends. They also gave us cookies, win.
After that Katie and I parted and I caught a train to Perl to stay with a teacher for a bit. The house is really cool, just 400 meters from the French border and a couple of miles from the Luxembourg border! Pretty much the centre of western europe. The teacher is very nice if a little reserved, so, alone in my room for the first time since I came to Germany it suddenly hit me what I'd done and I felt an urge to cry. All of a sudden I missed everyone, not just my close friends and family but my course mates, my lecturers, my old job as a waitress, basically where everything was familiar and minor difficulties were just that, minor difficulties. Not being a wimp however, I held the tears back and went to chat some more German with the family, as dwelling really isn't healthy in this situation.
So that ends this blog post, it is rather long but it was always going to be. Needless to say I am still happy and looking forward to my year abroad so all is well.
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