The American way of life
Atlanta 1996 - We were there!
At the end of September 1996 five palefaces from Germany headed
West!
Five bravehearts headed for the great frontier seeking adventure and
excitement!
Equipped only with unbelievably heavy suitcases five students from the
BA Stuttgart took on USA! And what fun they had....well, most of the
time,
anyway!
During
the day
we all worked at the Marriott Hotel Chain in Atlanta in
different
Departments like Accounts, Personal, Human Resources, Front Desk, Sales
& Marketing, Controlling and Catering. At night we were to be seen
in places like the Martini Club and The Tongue & Groove,
and so on and so forth! It was a fabulous time in which we did not
really
have to much responsibility at work and we had our evenings free to do
as we pleased. That is exactly what we did. We means:
Monika G.
Silke S.
Matthias B.
Jürgen K.and
Marika N.
We all lived in the Olympic Village in the rooms that the athletes
had
used during the Olympic Games in Atlanta erlier in the same year.
Although
we were very curious, we never did find out which athletes had stayed
in
our rooms and slept in our beds. Matthias and Jürgen lived in a
apartment
together with three other guys form the BA Stuttgart and one poor
American
student, who was somehow mistakenly stuck in de middle of all the
–German-ness!
Moni, Silke and I lived one floor above them. We had no American
company
sharing our apartment!
Americans are realitively open people, so we soon had contact to the locals! Matthias & Co. attracted plenty of female attention! It never did lack for female company in their apartment. The American girls pobably liked the accent. I forget all the names of the different girls. There were so many! Someone who we probably never will forget though, was "How ya dooooing?!-Maria". She was very kind and a special friend of Silke’s. She drove us around town and took some of us shopping. She seemed to like showing us Atlanta and the surrounding areas. After a while she got a little on our nerves!
We
saw almost
everything that Atlanta had to offer. In two months you can do a lot of
sight seeing! The Coca-Cola Museum, CNN broadcasting centre, Arts
Festival
in the park, Scarlet O’Hara memorials and so on. We went to ball games
like American Football at Georgia Tech and Basketball. The Atlanta
Braves
were playing their final Baseball Games. We got a real dose of the
American
way of life. I think most of us quite liked it!