Since coming back to the States, I’ve been asked “How was Germany?” more times than I can even recall. And my answer has been “When you take a trip, you can come back and tell people all about it. But I moved to a different country for four months, so that makes the question difficult to answer.” Long story short, it was the most amazing experience of my life. To start, I learned how to speak German. I entered and learned how to adapt to a total of seven different social cultures over the four months. I learned how to take care of myself and shop and travel independently. I’ve learned what it looks like to live in a community. I learned I love living in a community and learned how to care for people better, which is something I genuinely had difficulty doing before. I learned what it means to live in the moment. After getting back to Texas, I had a realization that I hadn’t been impatient in nearly 4 months, simply because, in the world I was living in, impatience was unnecessary. Not to say there are no impatient people in Germany. But because of how the semester was structured, and the fact that school wasn’t taking up the majority of our time, and because we lived in a city with so much to do and see, and because excursions and outings were often planned for us, we were given the opportunity to not worry about a schedule or deadlines or anything other than what was right in front of us in the moment. And that was a monumental thing for me to learn.
My favorite part of the whole thing though, if I had to narrow it down to one thing, was just being in places where things happened. To live so thoroughly inside of history the way you can in Europe is something you just can’t experience in the United States because the history isn’t here. When we were in Berlin, I remember thinking “I bet every single street in this whole city has a story.” And it probably does. And Berlin was just the beginning of those experiences: From walking across the square where the Nazi army was famously photographed to standing where Paul the apostle stood 3000 years ago in three different locations in Greece, to listening to music in the church Bach wrote most of his pieces in, to be in the room where Luther had his ‘table talks,’ those are things that give you such a radically new understanding of history and people and how the world really operates. Those experiences were invaluable to me.
Even at the end of this post, I feel as if I’ve still said nothing to capture all that study abroad really was. It was a fantastic and completely necessary trip. Everyone needs to see more than the world they have always been familiar with to better understand how the world really operates on a larger scale. Last semester is something I will cherish for the rest of my life.
