Mount Si High School students travel to Germany as part of exchange
July 30, 2010
By Laura Geggel
NEW — 12:01 p.m. July 30, 2010
Mount Si High School students Marley Robbins, Max Reppin, Franziska Hanke and Anna Neubold walk toward the Tetraeder in Bottrop, Germany. Students hiked to the site and climbed the Tetraeder, allowing them a view of the region. (Photo by Jodie Magnuson)
Last fall, a group of 21 German students visited Mount Si High School. This summer, Mount Si students saw them again, but this time in Germany.
A group of 18 Mount Si students was in Germany from June 26 – July 13.
The Mount Si students stayed with host families, took field trips to museums, cathedrals, Cologne and Berlin, and sat in on several classes with their German counterparts.
Junior Kenzie Parker said she felt at home with her host family.
“It was a change, but most of the family was exactly like my family, which was cool,” she said. “They acted the same way. The dad was a goofball and my dad’s funny.”
German teacher Sven Lutzka started the exchange program by e-mailing several American high schools, asking if they would be interested in a student exchange. Mount Si German teacher Edina Kecse-Nagy answered his e-mail, setting the exchange into motion.
“We wanted our students to leave the confines of the foreign language classroom, so as to enable them to gain some first-hand intercultural experience in the U.S.,” Lutzka wrote in an e-mail. “Our prime goal is to help our students gain understanding, acquire knowledge, and develop skills for living in a globally interdependent and culturally diverse world.”
Kecse-Nagy was unable to go on the German trip, so Mount Si Spanish teacher Linda Wickswat chaperoned for her.
Mount Si 2010 graduate Jodie Magnuson took four years of German, but said so many people spoke English, she didn’t speak much German during the trip. Her host family took her mini-golfing, which is different from American miniature golf. She said it had four differently colored balls of different weights and textures.
Though she did “really bad, I lost both times,” Magnuson said she had fun, and made up for her loss by shopping in the different cities she visited.
Other students went different places with their host families. Parker went to Belgium and Amsterdam with her host family. Though part of Parker’s family is from Germany, she still found it hard to acclimate to the food.
“It was really different,” she said. “We ate a lot of bread and I tried a whole bunch of new food. I had bloodwurst. It was weird. They eat a lot of meat and schnitzel,” a thin piece of chicken that is breaded and fried.
After going on a boat tour down the Rhine-Herne Channel, the Mount Si group woke up at 3 a.m. so they could take a seven-hour bus ride to Berlin. They started with a bus tour of
the city and broke off into small groups, exploring Germany’s capital and seeing Checkpoint Charlie, Brandenburg Gate, the Holocaust Memorial and the World Cup game between Germany and Spain.
“They were very sad,” after the loss, junior Bobby Rollins said. “They take soccer very seriously. For all of the winning games, they would drive around and honk their horns and wave their arms. You could tell that they lost, because there was no noise.”
Wickswat lived for two years in Belgium during the 1980s and visited Berlin when the wall was still standing.
“It’s very interesting now to see how different it is,” she said. “Before, you had a wall separating it and you had two cities. Now, it’s a modern city.”
Magnuson bought eight pieces of the Berlin Wall for her friends, excited to have a piece of living history.
Before they left, the Mount Si students gave presentations of the differences and similarities they saw between America and Germany. The students found that Mount Si had more after-school activities, like clubs and sports, while school in Germany was viewed mainly as an academic center.
Upon leaving, “They were crying at the airport,” Wickswat said, but noted that the German students would visit Mount Si in 2011.
“They were so amazing and they were the nicest people I’ve ever met,” Magnuson said. “I talk to them on Skype every day.”
Laura Geggel: 392-6434, ext. 221, or lgeggel@snovalleystar.com.
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