Lockers. Canadian high schools have lockers.
It was that, more than most things that made Verena Brenner feel like she was living in a movie.
Verena is from Dorfmerken, a small town in southern Germany. She’s spent the past five months living in Williams Lake, attending high school at Lake City Secondary School.
The 15-year-old is the youngest of three children in her family at home in Germany, and decided she wanted something new in her routine.
“I wanted to go somewhere and I wanted to learn English better,” she says.
Through a family friend in Williams Lake, Verena found a host family, who met her at the airport and who she lived with for the semester.
Although she left to head back home on Wednesday, she says she won’t soon forget her experience in Canada.
Her host mom, Kirsten Jorde picked her up at the airport in Vancouver in August— after she got her student permit and other papers sorted out.
Her first impression of Canada: “There’s a lot of space. We have space too but here we’re out in the middle of nowhere.”
While her community in Germany is quite small, she says if you go just ten minutes down the road you’ll reach another town.
“There is so much space out here but I still thought there would be neighbour cities.”
She also arrived in August unprepared for the heat, she says, coming with only one pair of shorts. Still, she says, the winter has been colder than it is at home in Germany.
Fitting into another family has also been an experience, says Verena and she has nothing but gratitude for her for her host family, where she had three sisters.
She even experienced what it is like living in a log house in the (relative) country, as she and her host family moved to Frost Creek during her stay.
“My favourite part was the people in Williams Lake and the school too,” she says, adding that the town and people have been incredibly open and welcoming to her.
“The high school life you see in movies, because in Germany, we don’t even have lockers. It’s a totally different system. I loved school.”
The yellow school buses also stuck out to Verena, and the way schools are organized differs. Her school in Germany runs on a year-long system, and students stay in one class while the teachers rotate, the opposite of what happens here.
While her school work won’t count in Germany — she’ll rejoin her classmates to finish the school year when she gets home — she got a lot out of her school experience.
“Just being with people and being social and some things are never different no matter where you are, like talking to people and having friends. It’s just in a different language. People are still people.”
It’s the people that Verena goes back to time after time when asked about her experience in Canada.
“My friends are in my heart and my teachers.”
Verena volunteered at the cafe in the high school, where she met plenty of people.
She says the moment that she really realized she had acclimatized was when she had a routine in Canada.
“Once you realized you build a life, you realize you just go to school and you realize your friends there, you talk to your friends, smile at your friends, laugh at your friends and you have this life and it’s crazy.”
Her English has improved to the point where she is even dreaming in English, she says.
“I dreamed in Germany about being here and speaking English but that wasn’t the same,” she says.
Verena hopes to become a dentist one day, or perhaps a teacher and while she was looking forward to going home, she says she’ll miss the friends she’s made here. She hopes to make it back to Canada in two years.
She’s being sent home with more than she can fit in a suitcase: a handmade blanket from her host mom, a sweater from one of her teachers and other souvenirs she’s picked up along the way.
Still it’s the experiences that have made it.
“You experience a lot, you experience so much, a different culture, a different country, different people, a different life.”
Her Canadian friends have given her the perfect thing to say when she talks to her German friends at home:
“People told me to tell people that I have a moose as a pet,” she says with a laugh. “I’m not going to do that.”