Last Breakfast on a Friday. Goodbye. I will miss you all a little bit. James, I am coming to your wedding in Koeln. Nathalie, I will follow your acting career meticulously. Erik, this is not the end.

Like any other great adventure, this one came to an end almost by surprise. Just like that, after weeks that seemed so painfully endless, an end came out of nowhere. Counting down, 10, 9 … 3, 2, 1, Null! and the Language Pledge was over on a Thursday night filled with neat dresses and suits, good food and a teary eye here and there.

I have been taking all this time to process what happened last week but I still struggle. I remember the last exam on Wednesday and the unbelievable relief. I remember enjoying the Vermont sky one last time. I remember packing and empty dorms. I remember faces that shared 7 weeks of their lives with me, deep in the greenery of Vermont. I remember how unexpectedly I was emerged in a world of German and some more German to go with it.  I remember the oddity of the first conversation in English after the countdown; almost entirely different personalities; people I know and people I do not know so much about.

Wow we! I am in awe by the persistence and patience that everyone showed. I am so proud of us.

Friday we packed and kept our tears to ourselves for the most part. Said goodbyes and farewells which went back and forth between English and German. We wished for some more time. We parted ways with a strange aftertaste of German in our mouths.

Thank You everyone for being part of this experience. Thank you for all the times you were there for one another and for all the times you made Breakfast, Lunch and Dinner. Thank you for inspiring to strive for more and to never forget how cool German is.

Also, Thank you to everyone who cared to read some of this posts. Hope you learn some German and be simply badass!

As they say in German, Auf Wiedersehen!

Andrej Blazhevski