Oh, when does the waiting end? I haven't posted in a while because nothing worthy of a blog post has happened...until now! I just received my travel itinerary, but still I have no host family. I will be flying from Burlington, VT to Washington, DC early on September 6th, spending a day at an orientation, then flying from Washington, DC to Frankfurt, Germany the next day at 5:26pm. From Frankfurt I'll either be picked up by my host family or I'll take a train to meet them. I am excited to get this news, but I will be far more excited when I find out where in Germany I'll be staying for ten months.
I have found myself checking the AFS Germany Facebook page dozens of times a day throughout the past few weeks following their "Gastfamilie Countdown". Their host family countdown posts come usually once a day and I always wait for them with baited breath. When I started checking these posts there were around 170 students who still needed host families out of the roughly 800 who are going to Germany from around the world. As of last Friday, because they uncharacteristically did not post today, there were 111 students in a position similar to mine. I don't think I have ever anticipated anything so much in my life! I was told that I would find out who my host family was 8-12 weeks after being accepted and 6-8 weeks before departure on separate occasions by people associated with AFS. I went through a calendar and determined that the dates that correspond with these ranges were July 12th through July 19th...Those dates have passed and I have heard nothing.
A person in one of the Facebook groups I have been following has created a map that has the locations where students have been placed in Germany this year. When I was accepted I was told that most students are put in rural areas, but upon inspection of the map, many students are in cities! I would be happy in a small town, but I would be ecstatic to go someplace dramatically different from where I live now.
