Community on this trip built itself slowly, rather than all at once. The first night, over schnitzel and spätzle at a traditional Bavarian restaurant, I remember feeling a little nervous about whether we would actually connect with the German students or just politely coexist for two weeks. That nervousness didn’t survive the meal. They asked questions like they meant them, wanting to know about our lives back home just as much as we wanted to know about theirs, and by the time we left, it already felt like something real had started. I remember walking back that night thinking the hardest part of this whole exchange might already be behind us.
The connection deepened at the university a couple of days later. One student lit up when I mentioned I had been a cheerleader in high school, and she admitted her own high school never had a prom or Friday night games, only exams and college prep starting much earlier than ours does. She kept comparing our lives to what she had seen in American movies, half joking but clearly a little in awe, and I realized how much of what I consider ordinary is, to her, almost mythical. Another student, originally from Brazil and studying abroad in Augsburg herself, added a whole different layer to the conversation, comparing her own experience of culture shock to what she imagined ours might be like. Conversations like that are what made the trip feel less like tourism and more like actually knowing people, even the ones who were themselves a little bit far from home.
The friendship that stuck with me most was with the student I was paired with for the city tour, who is coming to Pittsburgh in the fall. Walking through Augsburg with him, I admitted I understood his complicated feelings about his hometown, since I have similar ones about mine. Then, almost in passing, he told me he was nervous that the political climate in the United States might affect his plans to study there. It caught me off guard. It was the first time on this trip that something happening back home reached across the ocean and touched a person standing right next to me. I found myself wanting to reassure him, and also just sitting with how strange it was to realize decisions made far from either of us could shape his semester.
The connection kept showing up in smaller, quieter moments too. Getting matcha and Börek with a few of the German students on our work day in Augsburg didn’t need an occasion anymore. We just showed up and talked about nothing in particular, comparing notes on everything from gas prices to gelato flavors, the way you do with people you have actually built something with. Even something as small as hearing them switch effortlessly between German and English depending on who they were talking to made me admire them a little more each time.
By the end of the two weeks, I noticed I wasn’t counting down to see the German students anymore the way I might count down to a scheduled group activity. I was just looking forward to seeing them, full stop. That, more than any single event, is what I will remember. Not one big moment of connection, but a string of small ones, dinners, jokes, admissions about our hometowns, a shared worry about the future, that added up until the distance between “German students” and “friends” quietly disappeared.
