T-minus Seven Hours To Lift Off

Guten Morgen, Aggies! I hope everyone is ready to hop on the plane today and leave for GERMANY! I’ve packed and repacked my bag about eight (acht?) times, so I hope I’ve finally gotten everything that I need. I left yesterday from home to fly to Texas, so now I’m at a Houston hotel, and I have nothing to do but wait and get more and more excited for the trip! I’ve been going through the schedule and looking up the different sites and museums that we are going to visit online, and everything looks so interesting. I’m especially looking forward to the tour of the Otto Bock facilities in Duderstadt because I have been considering the Biomechanics track of Biomedical engineering so that I could design and build prosthetics.

I’ve also been trying to learn some of the German from my orientation notes and from the AIB packet, but I’m not having too much luck with that. I found a German Dictionary website that will pronounce the words for you, and I found out that I’ve been saying basically everything wrong. But hopefully being in Germany and hearing others speak it will be a lot more helpful, and I won’t be totally confused the entire trip! I am a little nervous about getting in a situation where I absolutely have to try and communicate with someone who doesn’t speak English in an emergency of something. I studied abroad last winter in Costa Rica, and there were a few times where I’m not sure what I would have done if I didn’t speak or read Spanish. Also, to a lesser extent, I’m worried about not being able to read simple things like German menus or store names, but I think we’ll be able to survive those situations with a little practice.

One thing that I’m really looking forward to is the cold weather. I know that this sounds crazy, but winter is my favorite season (and I’m not talking about the wimpy winters that we get in Texas) and I really hope that there is snow (“schnee!”) while we’re there. I haven’t been sledding or ice skating in years, so I’m hoping that we’ll get a chance to do both of those things. From looking at the pictures from past trips, I also think that everything will look so gorgeous covered in snow, and I’ll probably take a billion pictures myself.

Now that it's getting closer to departure time, I had better go make sure that I have everything packed and ready to go. Can't wait to see y'all in a couple of hours.