36 hours later, I’m in Germany

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Freiberger beer, ya!

So this is my first dispatch from Germany during a two-week trip for a journalism exchange program known as Atlantik-Brucke, a post-WWII program that was initially designed to improve relations between the United States and Germany by shipping U.S. journalists to the Fatherland for a tour of the country’s political and business elite. Anyway, I took off from Bismarck for Germany on Friday, flying to Chicago, to Frankfurt then to Dresden ultimately taking a bus to Freiberg, a sleepy socialism-loving mining town in the eastern part of the country where they make solar panels and very pink hotels that only a 6-year-old girl could enjoy. (We’re staying at hotel I linked to.)

We’re going to be spending the next 10 days meeting with government and business leaders in Germany, which will culminate in a stay at one of the best hotels in Berlin (and maybe the world) the Hotel Adlon. I’m on this trip with more than a dozen journalists from around the nation who work for BBC, the Washington Times, the LA Times, the Guardian, and the Center for American Progress as well as freelancers in Washington and Atlanta and journalists from regional papers like me. It’s an impressive group of journalists I get to share these two weeks with, me being the youngest in the group.

Volker Schlegel on our first night in Freiberg.

This is  is Volker Schlegel, a former ambassador for the program, which is more than 50 years old. He’s showing us around the country over the next two weeks. He also took us to a restaurant near Freiberg for our introduction to German cuisine, which is as carb-heavy as it is delicious.

My first meal included German toast, which is toast, pinapple, cheese, Mandarin oranges and jelly, layered in that order.

For the main course, wild boar roast with dumplings.

And then finally, ice cream with raspberries

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