Young dreams vs. grown-up reality

The train I take to work every morning passes by Frankfurt airport, which is an international airport where many long distance flights depart. This morning I had a group of teenagers in the train with me. They were going on a four-week-long educational trip to California, were very excited about it and couldn’t stop talking. I normally can’t stand it when people entertain the whole train with their talk in the morning, but this one was to good to be overheard or to be annyoing.

Those kids were so damn cute with their big dreams and naive thoughts about the time ahead of them. The girl that stood next to me was going to stay at a family in Chino for the four weeks. I guess this girl knew Chino from the TV series The OC, where the main character Ryan is a Chino resident. So I guess she thought Chino has some kind of Hollywood glamour and is next to the coast! That girl actually thought that she would land in a TV series world, where girls wear bikinis to school and where it is always 38° Celcius, sunny and everyone is doing great!

The cutest statement I overheard from her, was: “It will be so hot in Los Angeles right now. About 38° Celcius I read on the internet. When we will do our trip to Las Vegas for the weekend we will be freezing!” Freezing in the desert would be knew to me! Freezing in Las Vegas also would! But it got even cuter!

The girl totally freaked out about the customs check at the airport. She told all the other girls that you MUST tell the customs that you brought food to the US with you, because otherwise they will open your suitcase. She than got totally freaked out, because she seemed to have a bag of gummibears in gift wrap and guess what another girl told her: “You can’t do that! You will be in big trouble, because the X-Rays at the airport can’t scan through gift wrap and they will think that you carry a bomb or something dangerous with you!”

Luckily our arrival to Frankfurt airport interrupted their talk! I still wonder, if the girl unpacked her suitcase before the flight to rip off the gift wrap and what customs told her when she announced that she brought food with her from Germany! But even if I have to laugh a lot about their naivity, a part of me wishes to be that age again, to go to the US without a care and only with great expectations and to know that no matter how the trip will turn out to be I will go back into mommy’s arms after four weeks anyways!

Tags: California, Chino, Frankfurt, germany, Hollywood, Las Vegas, Los Angeles, OC, US

This entry was posted on Thursday, July 15th, 2010 at 4:13 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.