It wasn’t long before I got the chance to really use my German after completing my two month language course. I had just crash tested it with a weekend meeting in Remagen, but the following week saw me on a train steaming towards Stuttgart to take a four day computer training course, completely in German. The instructor of the course is an AIESEC alumnus and donated his services which normally run at DM 3,000. Since there were other students who were paying this price, there was no way that we could slow the course down for me.
The course itself was actually in a suburb of Stuttgart called Wendlingen which required me to commute about 50 minutes each way from my temporary lodgings in downtown Stuttgart. The AIESEC local committee there is quite large and has enough trainees come during the year that they rent several apartments downtown. I was lucky enough that my course fell during a time when nobody was living in one of the rooms, and so basically had my own little apartment during my stay. This week was actually the first time that I really felt like a trainee in Germany. I arrived by myself in a strange new place, I unpacked a few things into an empty room that would be my home, albeit only for a few days, and I met the people that I would be living with for the duration of my stay. I went to work / class for the first time and had to try to get through my first day in a new language (I still speak English at work in Cologne). I was invited to the weekly meeting of the AIESEC local committee which just happened to be the meeting for new members where they explain what AIESEC is, and where everybody introduces themselves. I was even there long enough for the weekly meeting of the other trainees which just so happened to be an introduction to Germany for all of the new people. Since I was trying to speak German through all of this, it really felt like I had only just moved to Germany as a trainee in Stuttgart, and that my time in Cologne, working in English, had just been some kind of extension of my earlier life. All of the new things around me, the new language, the commuting and keeping normal working hours were actually making me homesick, something I hadn’t had to deal with much after months in Cologne. Though on my fourth day when I had to say goodbye to everybody from my class, and the people I had been staying with, I kind of regretted that I hadn’t been able to stay longer. I think I finally realized what it’s like to be an AIESEC trainee after all of these years.
