I have a bad habit of thinking I know what something is going to be before it happens. I arrived in Munich with two goals, a rough sense of what the next several weeks would look like, and the quiet confidence of someone who had done their homework. I was not wrong about everything. But I was not as prepared as I thought I was.

The German improved. That part went more or less according to plan — haltingly at first, then with a momentum that surprised me. Ordering food, navigating the U-Bahn, holding a real conversation with a local and actually following where it went. By the end, I noticed I was reaching for German first without deciding to, which is the closest thing to fluency I have ever felt. It was one of the better surprises of the summer.

But the goal I had not written down was the one that ended up mattering most: showing up to difficult things and letting them actually affect me.

Dachau was where that happened. I had studied the Holocaust before — read about it, written about it, discussed it in classroom settings. I thought I understood what I was walking into. What I did not expect was how completely that preparation would fall away the moment I was standing there. At the gas chambers and the crematorium, something in me went quiet in a way it hadn’t before. It was not abstract anymore. The thought of standing where people had stood, people who had no choice, who were stripped of everything, made the whole weight of it land differently than it ever had in a classroom. I came away not just more informed, but more grateful — for the trip, for my education, but mostly for the simple fact of being free to go home afterward.

That gratitude is what I am most determined to carry back with me. I would have described myself as an appreciative person before this trip. I think I was, in the way that is easy to be when nothing has recently interrupted your assumptions. Munich, and Dachau specifically, made that kind of inattention harder to justify. It is easy to move through daily life without noticing the blessings you have. This summer made that much more difficult to do, and I am glad for it.

I will also miss things I did not expect to miss. The pace of daily life here. The cultural density of a city where museums and performance and history are not occasional treats but just part of the fabric of the place. The feeling of paying attention to everything because nothing was automatic. At home, it is genuinely possible to move through an entire day on autopilot. In Munich, that was never an option, and I think I did some of my best thinking as a result.

To whoever is reading this as a future FHC student considering Munich or a summer program in Germany: go. Go even if your language skills are not where you want them to be. Go even if you are a little afraid of how much you do not know yet. The city will meet you where you are, and it will ask more of you than you expect, and that is exactly the point.

I used to think it was a little cliché when people said study abroad changed the course of their lives. I now know what they meant, because it changed mine too. I gained better German, an incredible group of friends, and a comparative frame for my criminal justice coursework that no classroom alone could have built. But more than any of that, I left with a deeper commitment to gratitude — to actually seeing the world around me rather than just moving through it.

That is something no tuition could cover.

Tschüss, München. Du fehlst mir schon.