Several years ago Michael began a sentence at a family dinner with these words, “So, one of my German kids . . .” That is as far as he got before Ty and Christopher took full advantage of harassing Michael about where he had been hiding his German kids, how many did he have, were they doing okay, how savvy he was to have kept them in Germany, how casual he was about declaring he had German kids, and a great many other joking jabs that had our whole family laughing far past dinner. Even now someone will randomly ask, “So, Michael, how are your German kids?” It has become one of our favorite family quips and all Michael was trying to do was tell us about a kid from his German class.
All of this came in very handy when Ty & I traveled to Germany recently. While we were staying in Colonge, I got an email from Michael’s German teacher asking for families to volunteer to host a German exchange student from Cologne for 3 weeks. I read it as destiny. Without hesitation I excitedly offered up our home and told Michael his German kid was coming for a visit.
A week after arriving home from Turkey, Pauline flew into the airport to great fanfare and several very happy boys.
Of course we spoiled her. Ever since Chris and Stephanie moved out of the house, I have been trying to find ways to adopt more kids into our family. She was very willing to accept all of our offerings. We had a great time learning about her culture while introduing her to ours. We were never quite willing to share her breakfast, though – red peppers with gobs of cream cheese. She fell in love with white chocolate Kit Kat bars and homemade caramel corn. One of the biggest shocks was going to the movies at our favorite movie theater which has 6-7 different restaurants in the lobby where you can buy a real meal and eat it while sitting in your reserved seat to watch a movie. She was impressed. The movies in Germany had nothing like this – plus they only serve sweet popcorn.
Pauline thought Ty was hilarious. She giggled every time he decided he needed food – which was a lot. She came with the notion that all Americans weighed too much and Ty had a great time convincing her that she, too, could be happy if she would just eat more. He also took her on her first motorcycle ride (she LOVED it! and must, MUST have one!) and introduced her to shooting guns – a terrifying idea but once she discovered that she was a marksmen, she thought it wasn’t so bad. Her favorite pasttime, though, was shopping. We did A LOT of shopping. She wants to work in the fashion industry and has very specific tastes so we shopped and shopped to fill bag after bag of things she hoped would all fit in her suitcase. Forever 21 quickly became her new go-to store.
Since she was here over our school’s Fall Break, many other host families were taking their students camping. This was clearly dreaded. Camping is not very popular in Germany and anyone who had to go camping with their host family was called “victim” by the others. We took the popular route and made a quick trip to Las Vegas. Marriott has a hotel with fantastics views so for a steal-of-a-deal, we got to enjoy this:
While this happens to be our least favorite city to spend time in, we did enjoy miles and miles of great shopping. Pauline went home a very happy exchange student. We thoroughly enjoyed having her and hope to see more of Michael’s German kid in the future.
