Day one!
Okay, here I’m in Wolfenbuttel safe and in one piece. While Kirubel and Christian take a nap I’ll drop a couple of lines before we go to investigate the place.
The journey started today too early in a plane which they’d call in Russia ‘’a corn-plane”, meaning something big enough to water a field with corn.
The first impression of Germany was rather a cultural shock. Since the time we landed in Berlin and to the moment Andrey picked us up, nobody in the whole country could speak any English at all. The lady at the info answered all my questions about transport and telephone coding, simply: “Nah, it’s easy, you’ll figure out”. Then the other woman selling train tickets in the biggest railway point in Berlin seemed to be completely from the other planet. If not Christian, who has Swedish as his mother tongue, and took a course in German, we would never understand each other with her. Actually the conclusion I’m about to make in the end, languages rule the world, and you can’t live with English only! So Alina, what about our plans to study Chinese? I have also to say that people here really try to be helpful and understand foreigners as much as they can. The girl in the Mac was literally showing me on hands what they have in salads (yeah, try to show a cabbage). I said that I’m vegetarian, ordered a meal and added: “Also green tea, please.” Her face became extra-happy, she smiled and replied: “Oh, yes, I see, you want a chicken”.
From Berlin to our place we had to take the train first to Braunschweig. Wow, really wow: they have the coolest trains I ever saw so far. Alina, you would love the toilets they have.
The new and funny thing was also that on the platforms they have here in Germany special people who go around in the uniform and make people know that the train is coming by whistling. Together with the old-fashioned trains-just-from-the-19th-century moving around as well, it looks very stylish!
Andrey, the student from the University we are going to study at picked us up from the Braunschweig, and we all went to Wolfenbuttel by his car. It turned out that Andreas is originally Andrey. Now that’s not all. His family moved t Germany from Altay. Tell me how is it possible on Earth to meet in a small town in Germany a person from your native place which is very much in the middle of nowhere? Small, small world!
Seems like it’s already time to wake my guys up and go around the town. I just realized that I love first impressions and that’s what I miss in Finland these days.
I shall continue.
Middle day, Wolfenbuttel
