I’ve been waiting for this moment for six months. I am finally going to meet her, the girl I searched for so arduously. I filled out an extensive application, my parents submitted to background checks, and our family home has been reviewed and approved. My parents, my three brothers, my sister, and I have been thoroughly researched, questioned, interviewed, and, finally, it’s happening. The moment I’ve waited for! In a few minutes, she will walk up that corridor, and become one of us for a whole year.


We are going to host a foreign exchange student.


Her name is Tara. She is sixteen years old, my age, but one thing about us is profoundly different. I am American; she is German. My family and I have been waiting in the airport for two hours, scrutinizing everyone walking into the waiting room from the arriving flights, looking for the pretty German girl with blonde hair and blue eyes. I am intensely nervous, although I was the one to persuade my parents to become a host family. What if Tara and I can’t get along? We are supposed to share a room, and if we don’t like each other, what will happen? Myriad questions swarm through my mind as we wait, and I find myself doubting my ability to give Tara the best foreign exchange experience she can have.


As all these thoughts jostle around my mind, Tara strides into the waiting room, three humongous suitcases in tow. I immediately recognize her from numerous pictures, and I tug on my mom’s arm to let her know Tara is here. I wave, calling out, “Tara!” She turns in our direction. The person I will spend the next year of my life with waltzes confidently towards me.

This was two years ago, and what I learned significantly changed my perspective of the world and the people in it. I had met people from different cultures than mine, but I had never met anyone from Germany, so I wasn’t sure what to expect from Tara. No one in my family spoke any German, I had never heard a German accent, I hadn’t even been to Europe, and I had never eaten any German food. Although I was not the one who had left her family and gone to live in a country she had never even visited, I would also experience some culture shock in the first few weeks Tara lived with us.


I began studying Spanish in seventh grade. I was drawn immediately into the rich sounds and meanings. I had known there were other languages, but this was my first direct contact with one. The Spanish alphabet fascinated me. Though similar to my own, it produced countless exotic-sounding words. Even learning the basics—sounding out the alphabet, learning the numbers, and saying, “Hola, me llamo Tory” (Hello, my name is Tory)—brought me intense joy. I spoke Spanish every chance I got, completely infatuated with it, except for the arduous grammar.
The daily tedium of learning to live with someone, especially someone from a different culture, was like learning Spanish grammar. I first had to learn conjugation, a key part of learning a language. If I could not figure out conjugation, there was no way I would be able to continue with the language. Similarly, I had to figure out the grammar of living with a stranger: what Tara liked or didn’t, what put her in a good mood, or a bad one, and what made her happy, or we wouldn’t develop a friendship. Learning these facets of each other would allow us to more than jointly coexist: we would develop a sisterly relationship. As this relationship flourished, Tara and I became fluent in each other’s lives.
I loved hearing all about her life in Germany and the crazy things kids there do. I learned that the drinking age was sixteen, which astonished me. I had thought there was a sort of universal drinking age of at least eighteen, but I was wrong. Tara told me numerous stories of parties she had gone to and of the secret, late night drinking rendezvouses that she deemed as normal. One story that really stuck with me was of New Year’s Eve. Tara and her friends had finagled some alcohol, and they stayed out until four in the morning on January 1st, just hanging out in the city, before riding the train back to their homes. I couldn’t believe that no one had even seemed the least bit interested in a bunch of kids, barely sixteen, alone and out that late. Along with learning about Tara individually, and her exciting stories, I learned about German culture. It astonished me how different our cultures were: the education systems, ideas about family, and ways people interact.


The most difficult aspect of living with Tara the first month was trying to communicate. Although Tara’s English was good, it wasn’t anywhere near perfect, and, at first, she had a difficult time keeping up in conversations with more than one person. When she would try to interject her opinion into the conversation, her thick accent and limited English vocabulary made it challenging to understand her. Guessing the words she couldn’t think of, or the ones that didn’t make sense in context, was like hearing someone speak rapid Spanish. Although I was adequate in my Spanish-speaking skills, I wasn’t quite ready to have a full-speed-ahead conversation with a native speaker.


Tara and I began spending enormous amounts of time together, since we shared a room, went to the same school, were in the same grade, and had four classes together. Fortunately, we got along really well. Meeting Tara was like finding Spanish because, although it is not my native tongue, I feel a passion and a love for the language. I found that Tara and I had many things in common: we both adored chocolate and Caesar salads, played soccer, and enjoyed listening to loud music in the car. Bonding over these common loves, I realized that, although she was from a world away, we were quite similar.
Learning more and more about Tara and her culture influenced how I saw the world. I’d never considered that people in other countries thought of America as foreign. I had always thought of European cultures as similar to American culture. However, I learned from Tara this wasn’t wholly true. Our education systems are vastly different. In Germany, eighth grade students must choose between around four specialized categories, depending on the school, and must stick with that category until they finish school. Also, they go to school for ten to thirteen years, instead of the American standard of twelve. Another cultural difference I found slightly unnerving was the direct way of interaction. Germans will tell you exactly what they are thinking, though Americans may not deem it polite or appropriate in content. Observing the cultural differences between our two countries, I felt like I was back in seventh and eighth grade, becoming accustomed to the Spanish culture.
While I have never felt ashamed to be learning Spanish, my friends taking French have asked, “Why are you learning Spanish?” in a condescending way. I felt deeply disconcerted that people thought my learning of Spanish was less than, or not as good as, their education in other languages. When signing up to be a host family, and deciding that our exchange student would be from Germany, some of our friends were skeptical. Some people just could not understand why we would want to have a foreign exchange student in the first place, no less a German. “Germans are racist; why do you want to have a Nazi live with you?” they asked. They couldn’t wrap their minds around two cultures blending. But I’m glad that my family stuck with it, and that we chose Tara, no matter where she was from. My love for Spanish, although some might see it as lesser, was similar to my love for learning about Tara and the German culture.
Moreover, learning Tara’s little idiosyncrasies was like trying to memorize all of the nuances of Spanish. She had an intense German pride, which was much stronger than my American pride, since I have never been very nationalistic. I didn’t know people from other countries felt so strongly about their country being “the best” or “better” than another country. However, Tara seemed to think this was so, that Germany was at the top of country rankings. (This is not to say, however, that she did not like the United States, because she did, but she loved Germany.) This belief blew me off my feet. I have never thought of myself as better than another person depending on what country they are from, but I learned this was not a worldwide view. This intense national pride reminded of how some Americans believe everyone should speak English, rather than Americans learning foreign languages. They look down on Spanish as less than, while it is anything but.
As I came to know Tara and German culture better, I wasn’t quite sure if our two cultures would mesh; then, November arrived and soccer season began. Both Tara and I had been playing soccer for years, and we were ecstatic. We both made the Varsity team, and, for once, my high school soccer team was actually going to be good. However, at the beginning of the season, I began to worry that German fußball might be different from American soccer, and prevent our merging into one cohesive team. But as tryouts ended, and games began, our cultures blended without a hitch. Playing soccer with Tara was like having my first full-blown conversation in Spanish: I may not have known every word, but I was able to understand the meaning. Running on the field, we found culture didn’t matter—our two styles of playing came together as one.
Saying goodbye to Tara was one of the most difficult experiences I have been through, but I wouldn’t have wanted it any other way. The year was one of the most interesting, difficult, and rewarding of my life, and I had learned so much about German culture. As my mom and I drove Tara to the airport, I couldn’t help but think about all we had shared. We had become sisters, and I found myself amazed by the fact that our two cultures could come so readily and so easily together. In the same way that I had become close to fluent in Spanish, I had also become well versed in Tara and German culture. I learned that although they may have different backgrounds and values, two cultures can come together as one.