For the week of August 29 - September 4, 2001

Sister city students make the summer a cultural exchange

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By DANA DUGAN
Express Staff Writer

Ketchum’s sister city, Tegernsee, Germany, is not unlike Ketchum. It sits in a mountain valley next to the beautiful Lake Tegernsee, and is a mecca for tourists in winter and summer.

Since the mid-1980s one of the many aspects of the sister city relationship has been trips by residents, including a Girl Scout troop and last year’s trip by a group of students from the Wood River Valley, to Tegernsee for three and a half weeks.

This summer, 17 Tegernsee children are here living with host families, who include many of the same kids who traveled to Germany last summer.

The 17 student visitors from Tegnersee, Germany, and their chaperones, gather with friends at Lisa Vierling’s home in Warm Springs.

Located south of Munich by some 30 miles, Tegernsee been called charming, enchanting, romantic and deeply Bavarian. Shaped during the Ice Age 12,000 years ago, the shores of the lake were first settled by Benedictine monks, who built the first monastery on the east bank of the lake in 719.

In the early 1800s, King Max I of Bavaria made it a popular holiday resort when he chose this place for the royal family's summer holidays.

The school there is in a castle built in 1764, which also houses the town hall, a church and—apropos for Germans—a pub.

It is from this rarefied and ordered environment that the group of young Germans have come. Staying with many of the kids, who they met last summer in their home town, old friendships have been renewed and new ones are being formed. As a group they have been to the lakes, have been water skiing, white water rafting and to hot springs.

They’ve played tennis and soccer together, spent two nights in Paradise, west of Ketchum, and have had family barbecues. And all of this in only two weeks.

This week, they are trekking over to Yellowstone and Jackson, Wyo., and finishing up their visit with a ride in the Wagon Days Big Hitch Parade, before departing for home Tuesday.

Though the kids seem to have virtually no differences in terms of interests and activities, there are a few differences.

"The food is very different," said Stephanie Frohmayer, 15, one of the few kids who speaks English well, and has previously visited the states.

She said, not very enthusiastically, they’ve been eating a lot of burgers and chips and that they miss their sparkling water.

"The reward is seeing the kids get along," said Christine Zierer, one of the two chaperones from Germany. "We want to make it continue. It’s very good for the young people to experience that."

Indeed the plan is for yearly visits and to continue the association with student exchanges. In fact, there have been two students from Tegnersee at the Wood River High School so far. "Now we have an open exchange because we’re sister cities," said Cindy Hamlin, one of the organizers of this summer and last year’s visits, and a host family. "They can go to our school. We have one spot a year."

Though no one has gone there as a student yet, they hope that one day a student from here will spend a year there.

There are also older girls in Tegernsee who are anxious to find work as au pairs, said Zierer.

Their own school starts just one week after they return, though admittedly they are still in vacation mode. "It’s holiday—we have a right to not know when school starts," laughed Frohmayer.

And how do they compare Ketchum to Tegernsee? It’s not only the youth of America’s towns that strikes them all, it’s the whole western feel.

"When we saw a movie—a western—we said, oh it’s just a movie, but when we go to Ketchum it looks just like the move," Zierer said.

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