Over the past year, I have become somewhat obsessed with the notion of travelling lightly. It all started when I read Tynan's 2016 Gear Post. The idea that someone could travel the world with nothing more than a 20L backpack was shocking to me. As someone who just brought multiple suitcases worth of stuff to study in Germany, the notion of only having to carry a single small backpack on my future travels seemed quite appealing.

Last year I had the honor of starting off my November at an international youth affairs conference in Strasbourg, France. The conference, From Trenches to Bridges brought together over 200 students of 43 nationalities to draft a Peace Charter for the European Parliament. The words of the charter are below:

Last year in Hamburg, I didn't blog as consistently as I had hoped too. As a result, I still have many experiences to share. To inaugurate this series of recounted stories, I wanted to talk about my first Sunday in Deutschland.

The first day of school at my high school was this past Wednesday, and with it came Masaki's first day of school in the US. To help him reflect on his first impressions and to share with us what school is like in Japan, I asked him some questions about the differences between our school systems.

This Friday my family and I met the AFS student from Japan we will be hosting for the next 10 months. We have hosted before, for shorter periods, or last year when I was on exchange, but never for this long as a family of four.

It was my last Tuesday in Germany, and the time for my going away party in school had finally come. I was so excited to finally bake some vegan cake/pie for my entire class, that my friend from Japan and I had gone as far as to make a Schwarzwälder Kirschtorte (Black Forest Cherry Cake) and an apple crumble pie. The morning of our party came, and as the two of us were leaving for school (a bit late) I realized that neither dessert would fit into the basket of my bicycle. I had imagined this idyllic situation with both goods perfectly situated in the basket, but instead, we had to place the apple pie on an angle, and I carried the Torte on my left hand.

This apple pie recipe comes from the neighbors of my friend in Bern, Switzerland. Vielen dank nochmal, es ist immer noch ein mega Hit :)

As you read this, I have just said goodbye to my host family, and an entire life of mine, and gotten into the ICE Train 579 to Frankfurt. This train will bring me away from all my new friends, and back to a series of plane and car connections resulting in a return journey to Pittsburgh.

This last week was definitely one of if not the absolute best week of my exchange. I was on a school trip the whole week in Schloss Noer on the Baltic Sea. It was a band trip, so the 95 students from my school (from Grades 5-11) were split into bands, and spent the entire week playing music instead of normal school classes. This led to us preparing two songs to play on Saturday at a concert in the School's Cafeteria/Auditorium.