Giant ice cream servings and the long, hot summer weather were only a few of the things German exchange student Lotta Bublitz noticed about St. Paul during her first few weeks here.

Hosted by junior Danielle Socha’s family, Bublitz is attending St. Paul Academy and Summit School for the 2012-2013 school year as a junior. She comes from Hamburg, a German city of 1.7 million. She decided to participate in the exchange in order to improve her English, make friends, adapt to a new surrounding, and enhance her personality. “It’s a whole new experience, and after the year, I’ll be more me,” she said. “I’ll know that I can live and survive without my normal peer group and manage by myself.” After this trip, she hopes that she can get a better idea of what she wants to do in the future.

Bublitz’s first impression of Minnesota was “green and full of lights,” when she arrived on the plane in mid-August. Once here, she observed several cultural differences. People travel more by car than by bike in America. Cities and suburbs in Minnesota are more clustered than those in Germany. “I think the whole [U.S] is really spread out,” she said.

Her father, sister, and friends also did student exchanges to the U.S. “They said [it was the] best year of their life,’” Bublitz said. “I think they found a new family in a foreign country and that it’s so much fun. After that they really know who their real friends are back at home.”

Bublitz applied to school as a standard student, without an exchange program. She arranged it through SPA’s Director of Admission Heather Ploen. Using connections with her father’s host family from his exchange, Bublitz found the Socha family.

This isn’t her first time in the U.S. When she was around four or five, Bublitz visited the east coast, including Maine and Cape Cod. Four years ago, she attended a wedding in California and visited Hollywood, San Francisco, and Yellowstone National Park.

In her opinion, Hamburg, Germany is “the best city in the world. It has everything,” she said. Back at home, she often went shopping and hung out with friends in the city’s downtown.

Her other hobbies include playing the flute, running, tennis, and traveling with family. She has visited China, Egypt, parts of Europe, and the southern part of Africa. Aside from English and German, Bublitz also speaks French, enough that “I [can] get what I want,” she said. “I was in France and people understood me. It was amazing.”

Her favorite part of traveling is to “feel the atmosphere in a country. You can learn a lot just from books, but not the way they really live [there].” she said. She also enjoys talking with and meeting people from other countries. In the future, she hopes to visit South America and India.

One of her favorite travel memories was on her trip to Botswana. “We visited the village of the natives and played with the children,” Bublitz said. “In each hand I had two children because they all wanted to hold my hand playing around. I talked with an older member of the village and then a little girl, I think she was two or three, touched my skin because I was white.”

On her first few days of school at SPA, Bublitz met several challenges, like classes “so small that everybody just say[s] something when they know something,” she said, “and I need my time to think about what I want to say and it’s hard to speak at all.”

Still, she has enjoyed her stay so far. “So many, just like, nice experiences.” When asked if she would come back after the school year ended, Bublitz replied, “Of course.”