Outgoing Exchange to Germany

Harry and JoBeth Yarbrough were exchange directors for an outgoing exchange to Germany in June 2007.

The group spent one week in Freiburg, Germany, followed by a second week in the Bockhorn, Germany area. Early in the planning process the Bockhorn club offered us a chance to join their bus tour of southern Norway, to begin immediately after the week in Bockhorn.

Our arrival in Europe was at the Zurich airport, where the P.A. system greeted us with soft sounds of cowbells and mooing. Double-decker trains sped us toward our hosts in Freiburg. Thus began a week of seeing a community and its surroundings through the eyes and experiences of our hosts and their friends.

Group tours had English-speaking guides, greatly increasing our understanding of all we saw and heard. That first day's tour of the historic downtown area included innumerable interesting facts and sights. As we hiked up the hill above the city, we came upon a statue of a reclining lion. Communication was fun and greatly helped by two-way dictionaries.

In Bockhorn, as in Freiburg, we found that gardening is a major interest of people we met. During the delightful summer weather we ate many meals in the fresh air with lawns and flowers surrounding us. It was strawberry, cherry, and other berry season. Our first meal as a group began with white asparagus soup. Some of us were introuduced to smoked eel. The eel was cut into four equal pieces approximately the size of a hot dog, and eaten with a piece of bread each.

In northern Germany our group toured a brick factory (most houses and a little bit of street paving are brick), went to the wonderful emigration museum in Bremerhaven, toured Bremen of the Bremen Town Musicians Grimm tale, and saw up close a North Sea port for importing oil.

One sight many of us found very comforting and quite graceful in Germany was the slowly turning, three-bladed, modern windmills. We saw some in the Black Forest near Freiburg and many more in northern Germany. What a peaceful power source! Windmills don't seem to be needed in Norway, though, as we were to see that thousands of waterfalls are available.

The ferry from Germany to Norway was new, huge, and luxurious, and our crossing was smooth. After the Oslo stay our busload started the road trip (with a few shorter ferry rides), covering a lot of southern Norway. Mountains, waterfalls, and fjords made for amazing sights. We got up close to one glacier. Imagine our surprise when we arrived by road in one fjord-side town to find the Queen Mary II docked with its mooring rope tied directly on shore.

Our last night in Norway we stayed in Ulvik, where the back door of our room was a few feet from the fjord. Beautiful sights, learning more history, making new friends-all made the trip worth that month away. It was truly "a good destination" that took us to Germany and Norway.