Conclusion

If there was one thing I did on my trip to Germany it was learn. A learned a little bit about the language like small words and phrases. I also learned about the cities we visited and the different landmarks in those cities from the many tours we had. These tours included both historical and cultural components, allowing me to develop a good feel of the place I was in. The tour I learned most from was likely the tour of the Dachau concentration camp. Along with the city tours, we had many company visits and factory tours, which involved quite a bit of information for us to learn. We visited 5 businesses, a research institute, and a hospital. We learned all about the history, performance figures, and products of the organizations. They told us about their processes, which we got to see firsthand during tours of the factories. We learned about how they work with other businesses to achieve common goals. They described to us what the future might look like for them and what kind of research they do to develop their ideas. I definitely learned the most at KUKA because it was the company that my group was assigned to do our group presentation on. Outside of these things scheduled by the program, I learned a lot from the German students. I got to learn how things are done over there and what life might be like as a German. I learned about our differences, but was surprised at how alike we were. We were able to develop strong friendships with them in two short weeks and I really enjoyed my time with them. Lastly, I learned about myself. I had never been outside the U.S. prior to the program and wasn’t sure how I’d like it. All in all, I would definitely say I made the right choice with the program.

May 15

Day 13 was our first and only free day of the trip. All of our planned activities had been completed, so how we would spend our day was up to us. I took advantage of my first opportunity to sleep in until about noon. However, I wanted to start my day right away, so that I would not waste my last day in Germany. A few of us decided to go to downtown Augsburg to get something to eat and explore the city a bit for one last time. Andrew and I decided to eat at a small bakery. We both got sandwiches (not the same one) and I didn’t think mine was anything special, but Andrew seemed to like his a lot. After lunch, we saw a few fellow Plus3 members and decided to join them for some shopping. We went around to a few stores looking for something to spend our remaining euros on. I didn’t find anything, but some of the others did. Some of us, including me, chose to go back to the hotel until meeting for dinner, while others chose to continue shopping for a little longer. For dinner, we went to an indoor biergarten. All of the American students and a few of the Germans were there for a last meal together. I wanted to get something German for my last dinner there and I went with the Jungschweinebraten. It was like a pork roast with a dumpling and it was delicious. After dinner, we didn’t want the day to end because we were not ready to leave. We decided to go to a bar to hang out for a little. It was a pretty cool place, it even had a Super Nintendo which was pretty awesome and of course I played it. After hanging out there for a couple hours we decided it was time to go back to the hotel and get some rest for our trip back home the following day. Unfortunately this meant it was time to say our goodbyes to the German students that were with us. It was really hard to leave the new friends we made because we didn’t know when or if we would be seeing them again. We thanked them for their kindness to us and headed back to sleep before the long day ahead of us.