All Good Things Must Come To an End

Sadly this will be my last blog post for this trip. And i wanted to start by giving a huge thank you to all the the families that opened their homes for us and mad us feel welcome. I know for me at least my host family made my trip much more relaxing and enjoyable. So thank you to them for that.

On another note we went into a town called Heidelberg today. It was kind of a long drive (I think, its hard to tell when you are taking a nap), but the drive was totally worth it. The whole town was built on a hill so its design looked really cool. The coolest thing there was the castle. You had to take a tram up the mountain to get to it, but the tram ride was cool too.

The castle is made of pink sandstone and is really old. It's a little bit older than the non-existent castles in Downers Grove, and it is a little bit older than Downers North. Actually it was a lot older than that. The castle was built in 1214, that's 802 years ago!!! It was very interesting to see how different parts of the castle were built using different styles of design as they were added. Some were built in a medieval style and some of it looked much more Renaissance. Some cool things we saw there were a huge barrel(like 200000 liters huge), a poisonous tree, an ancient pharmacy, and a killer view.

After our nice day of shopping and eating in Heidelberg we headed home on the long drive back(I think I fell asleep again). We then got ready for our final concert with our peers at the music school. I want to hand it to them, because they really impressed me with how well they did. I should explain that my expectations were not overly high because my host sister told me they were not very good and her mom confirmed it. Usually if your parent is willing to tell you to your face that you band stinks, then you must be pretty bad. However that was not the case, the Bietigheim music school did a lovely job. I really enjoyed their set and it was a pleasure to share the stage with them.

This it the part where I get all philosophical and reflective on the trip so if that's not for you, move on tot eh next post. Here we go. This trip started as a vacation in Paris, but once we crossed the border into Germany we were on a totally different trip. We were then beginning an experience that will most likely have and impact on all of our lives for a very long time. I didn't fully realized how uncultured i was in terms of a world wide scale. To me, my metaphorical room of cultural knowledge seemed quite large, but as soon as I took my foot of the bus on that first day a new door was opened for me. I quickly learned that the new expansion on my room was full of new knowledge that I knew nothing about. And for the rest of the week I had to take time to process all the new info so that my new room made sense. Now, I'm not saying I know everything there is to know about it, but what I'm getting to is that this new found reality that I know very little about the world I live in makes me hungry to learn more. I'm overly exited to find a new opportunities to open a new doors to my room and expand my knowledge of world culture even more. I will never be able to thank the trip and the people who helped me learn so many new things and ultimately make my world a little bit smaller.

here are some of my favorite pictures from the trip as a whole

Thanks Europe, I had a great time. For the last time, Noah T.