My Dorm Was Built When?

Today marks one week of "Language Camp" at Schloss Wittgenstein, a castle built in the 1100s and converted into a boarding school in the 1900s. Like many buildings in Europe, especially those over a thousand years old, there is no air conditioning at the Schloss. However, the cool mountain air and large windows in every room, offering breathtaking mountain views, help compensate for that—though the bees that call the Schloss home do somewhat offset this (but that’s another story).

The lack of air conditioning is certainly not the only difference we've noticed between the U.S. and Germany. For starters, cold dinners and hot lunches, rather than the other way around, have been the norm in the Schloss cafeteria. And sporadic hiking, which seems to be a universal pastime in Germany, fills much of our free time. Many days we make the steep trek a mile down and back through the woods to get into town and buy döner kebabs or Spezi.

Amidst the novelty of a new country and the anxiety of the task ahead—spending ten months in a foreign land—we’ve found comfort in runs and hikes together, late-night conversations, impromptu dance sessions, and old Disney movies.

A phrase I’ve heard often is, "It doesn’t feel real yet." In the span of a week, we've met and lived among fifty students from across the U.S., plunged into a new culture, and begun to mentally prepare to adapt all over again in a month when we go our separate ways to live with host families spread throughout Germany. Life at the Schloss doesn’t feel real because it represents a complete upheaval of the status quo, but the shared experience of discomfort and exhilaration makes it an adventure like no other—one that demands to be fully embraced.