Guten tag my name is Dora Pfeifer, and I am an 18-year-old exchange student from Germany who spending the 2006-2007 school year at LHS.

I have been in Laramie for almost seven months getting to know the American culture and improving my English skills.

My hometown is Kiel and it is near Hamburg. It is located at the Baltic Sea and it is almost ten times as big as Laramie, what makes it much different from Laramie. I live in Kiel with my dad, his wife and with one of my older sisters, Elsa. My other older sister Anna lives only a couple blocks away from us.

Like everybody else in my town I love sailing and handball. In summer I often go with my friends to the beach that is about five minutes away by car.

I applied at EF Education (the organization I am with) for the year abroad like one year before I left. I had to take an English test, so they could make sure that I was able to understand enough English. Notwithstanding the passed test and the seven years English in school I could understand people just as little as they could understand me in the first two weeks here in Laramie.

Before I left Germany I was very afraid, because I did not know what it is like being so far away from home for such a long time. When I sat in the airplane I thought, “What am I doing here?”. However, when I finally got off at Laramie Airport after a long flight with stops in Chicago and Denver I knew again why I decided to spend a year abroad and that I was earlier without a reason afraid. The family which picked me up at the airport and with which I’m staying the entire year gave me from the beginning on the feeling to be family member and not only a guest. And like my family, almost all people who I here met in the past seven months are very nice and try to help as best as possible. They are even nicer then most people I was used to in Germany. This might be because of the rural surrounding area and maybe because of the different mentalities.

Already after the first week I knew that the organization EF Education, which organized the exchange, was right when they told me that that'll be “the best year of my life. “