In the summer of 1986, I visited Germany for a month as part of an exchange program through my high school. A group of 15 (or so) kids from my school hosted kids from the Nattheim Gymnasium (that’s what they call high school in Germany) from Nattheim, Germany in April and we traveled the day after school let out. As it happened, I graduated one day and flew to Germany the next.
I thought it would be fun to pull out my diary from that trip and present here what I wrote down on July 4th. I’m sad to say that there are a lot of entries with McDonald’s involved. That’s one travel habit I’m happy to say I have since broken.
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We went to Heidelberg with a class [from school]. We walked up a hill-remember its a hill and not a mountain as you may think. It was a very pretty sight. Then we went to the University. We ate at the school cafeteria. Terrible food. We then had free time. We walked around and had a McDonald’s milkshake. Just about all of the American students had one.
After going around town, we went up another hill to the Castle. It had a good view. Then we went to the biggest wine cask ever, I think. It was 10-20 feet high. [It actually holds 58,080 gallons of wine.]
We had free time so Karen, Ray, Ben, Susan and I decided to take the short cut through the woods [down the hill]. Oh boy. We slipped and slid. It was a whole lot of fun almost killing ourselves. Kevin was a real pain so Karen and I tried to ignore him, but it is like trying to ignore a broken arm, leg or collarbone.
On the way home, we were talking to some of the German students that went on the class trip. They were telling us the meaning of words and told us “mist” is manure [it is Swabish for shit]. Then they said Mist like F***. Well we said Mist was not like f*ck. And they said yes, it is. Finally, we found out they were saying f-o-g. Then Karen and I felt really dumb.
Sigrid and I went to a party with the other girls in the altar-boy organization. The guest of honor couldn’t come. [I remember we ate fondue and it was the bomb.] We talked about Mr. Eshleman. And Sigrid wanted them to know what the other students call him some times. [You can imagine.] So I wrote it down. And they said it. But didn’t know what it meant. I didn’t care to explain [what a prude] so I looked up hole and then wrote that down [in German]. Then I looked up donkey but they said “donkey-hole, it doesn’t make sense”. I looked up bottom. Alles ist klar.