this weekend's happiness was brought to you by distrikt 1840

This past weekend was our first Rotary planned trip! After Deutschkurs on Friday, exchange students Viktor, Marisa, Vicky and myself made our way to Augsburg Hauptbanhof (the train station). There, we met up with a couple other exchange pals and hopped on the train to Oberstdorf, which is in southern Bayern with the Alps. Oberstdorf is a hot tourist spot, especially in winter because of it's awesome mountains. We have a Skiwochenede in Oberstdorf in January as well, so we'll be back. We stayed in a youth hostel 15 minutes away from the main town. We were in a valley between these 4 mountains that just took my breath away. To say the least, this weekend was so wonderful. I was a little nervous because I'm not incredibly outgoing and a lot of exchange students are. I didn't want to spend the weekend twiddling my thumbs, afraid to join the party. However, getting to know this group of students was so much fun. I really broke out of my comfort zone and became friends with so many people. Games on the Friday night required sitting on eachothers' laps and rat-tailing people with a rag to learn names so introductions very quickly turned into friendships. On Saturday, we went 'tramping' or hiking as the USA calls it. We made our way up one of the mountains we were surrounded by and stopped at the top for lunch. The view was AMAZING! That's my flag. 6 by 4 feet large. It's a little bigger than is easy to tote around, keeping in mind that it can't touch the ground. Most of my exchange student friends laugh at my vehemence of the American superstition, but I don't know if I'll be able to make it 9 more months without it touching the ground. I'll do my damnedest. So the first Rotary weekend has made me look forward to every other ROTEX planned event coming up in my life, the next being the Berlin Trip at the end of the month. The ROTEX for distrikt 1840 is so cool. They organize all of our events and trips. Our ROTEX seem to genuinely care about all of the exchange students and their happiness. I'm really glad they're my mentors this year. I can't wait to see me newly-made friends again in 3 weeks!--sjinternational