THE EXPERIENCE OF MY LIFETIME

By Alex Hoffmann

            Four and a half months and almost 4,500 miles ago, I had the experience of a lifetime.  Last April, I traveled to Berlin, Germany, and its suburbs along with six other students from Dixie Heights High School.  It was there that, with only five other teams representing the United States, we competed in Odyssey of the Mind at Eurofest.  There we met teams from Belarus, Hungary, Cameroon, Kazakhstan, Russia, Ukraine, and several other countries.

            Odyssey of the Mind is an academic program for students ranging from fourth grade all the way up to college.  However, those of us who participate in the program like to think of it as more of a creative program than an academic one.  Teams of seven or less are given around half a year to solve a problem that tests them in many creative ways.  These aren’t your average two-minute problems, though.  Last year, my team was challenged to create an eight-minute skit that featured three “pages” and larger recreations of them, each pair changing in a similar fashion.  One of these changes was required to be technical, and a character in the play had to noticeably change size, also technically.  All of this was done with a $145 budget, by the team, and only by the team.

            We did well enough in competitions to qualify for the World Finals, but more importantly, our school’s predecessors in Odyssey did well enough with a Buddy Team the year before to earn Dixie a spot at Eurofest.

Berlin being the furthest away from home I’ve ever been, this truly was an experience of my lifetime.  Halfway around the world, the culture is different, yet strangely similar in ways.  Seeing people that looked just like me speaking a different language really blew my mind.  Before, I had been used to hearing a different language only from those who didn’t look like me, or from my teachers.  I now look at the world through different eyes, thinking how hard it would be to be a foreign exchange student to adapt to such an unlike culture.

             For only having spent three days exploring Berlin, I feel like I gained a life’s worth of knowledge and understanding.  We stayed at a Youth Hostel there, and only a block away, there existed a sort of punk village.  A tall gray building with only a few full windows left, and covered with graffiti housed who knows how many people.  The blasting of music and hiss of the aerosol paint cans seemed to keep us from having any desire to go in.  And the young men and women walking in and out of the “village” with green or purple Mohawk and laced boots did not really help either.  One of the last nights we stayed there, we saw many of them at a local G8 (Group of Eight) protest.

             None of this bothered us though.  More so, it opened our eyes to a whole new world.  And even if some may consider this bad, then the good still heavily outweighed the bad.  The Eurofest competition, which took place at a camp thirty minutes outside of Berlin, focused mainly on a combined problem, in which three or four teams from different countries came together to work on a problem together.  Our team was grouped with a team from St. Petersburg, Russia, and a team from Gdansk, Poland.  As you know, these two countries have had a bloody past, and the problem proved to be tougher than we had first thought. 

 In the end though, our “super-team” competed magnificently and wound up in second place out of 11.  Seeing these two teams coming together like that and my team being stuck in the middle of it was tough, but most certainly worth it.  I doubt I’ll ever have another experience like it again.

             After seeing what was left of the Berlin Wall, Checkpoint Charlie, the Reichstag, the Brandenburg Gate, the Jewish Holocaust Memorial, Hitler’s bunker, our boat tour of the Spree River, playing soccer with some of the best players I’ve seen, some of the best (and worst) food I’ve ever tasted, and so much more than I had ever expected, I am so grateful to have been chosen for the team.  I will never forget the places I went, the people I met, and the amazing times I spent there.  It truly was the experience of my lifetime.

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