I’m very excited to start taking German classes again at Colby to apply a lot of what I learned during my semester abroad and hopefully show my professors how much my language skills have improved.That day my husband and I were standing on our stoop. While I feel very happy to now be home, I do miss living in Berlin and being able to speak and hear German wherever I go. I don’t know how much reverse culture shock I will experience, but it supposedly hits you a lot harder than you expect.
There are definitely things about living in Germany that I will miss like hearing German everywhere I go or being able to speak and order in German at restaurants and cafés. We’ve also been talking a lot about reverse culture shock in our last few weeks. It’s hard to lose that routine after feeling so comfortable and settled in a foreign country for the past few months. I plan on returning to Berlin again in my lifetime, so I will see the Fernsehturm (TV Tower) and Brandenburger Tor or take the S-Bahn again, but it’s the last time that I will have that routine of traveling from my homestay to the IES center and the last time. And while I will see many friends from my program in the near future, there are some people I met that I almost certainly will never see again.
After officially completing my work for the semester, I walked around my neighborhood yesterday for the last time in the afternoon and around Mitte before getting dinner with friends just to get the last few glimpses of Berlin permanently engrained in my memory. It’s hard to think that my semester abroad is over. Even cuter – you can also say Tschüssi to mean “bye-bye”! (literally ciao like the Italian) in response. You usuallyuse Tschüss to say goodbye to friends or when you’re leaving cafés, and I’ve also noticed that if you say Tschüss, then a barista will usually say Tschau-Tschau Germans pronounce it as if it had two syllables, which sounds like chew-oos for all you native English speakers. While you may already be familiar with Auf Wiedersehen à la Heidi Klum on Project Runway, Tschüss is a much more common way of saying bye and is one of my all-time favorite words in the German language. While I am very excited to be back home and back at Colby so soon, I will definitely miss the experience of living in Germany and all the people I met along the way. This past week was filled with stress from finals, goodbyes, seeing and doing things for the last time, and a 16 hour travel day. The day that I leave Berlin has inevitably arrived. Two pictures of me in front of the Brandenburger Tor, 4 months apart
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