Portsmouth and Seacoast Clubs Welcome GSE Team from Germany

By Ann Kelly

The Portsmouth Rotary Club (lunch) and the Seacoast Rotary Club (breakfast) jointly welcomed our visiting Group Study Exchange (GSE) team from Germany’s Rotary District 1890. We spent four terrific days showing them our corner of New Hampshire from April 29 through May 2.

Days were filled with sight-seeing tours and vocational meetings, and evenings were filled with food, fun, fellowship, and more food. Several of our visiting German friends mentioned how they’ve gone up a size in clothing, thanks to the never-ending spread of sweets they’ve eaten their way through since arriving in the U.S. on April 20!

Many thanks to our Rotarians who opened their homes and squired our new German friends around town!

• Peter Beck (lunch club) hosted Klaus Nielsky, GSE Team Leader and Mayor of Schleswig, Germany
• Leonard Seagren (lunch club) hosted Fabian Gieschen, Manufacturing Procurement Manager
• Joan Nickell (breakfast club) hosted Maren Weisse, Real Estate Manager
• Rick Page (lunch club) hosted Torben Mothes, Bank Manager/Auditor
• Ann Kelly (lunch club) hosted Kinka Tadsen, Wedding Photographer and News Reporter

Additional thanks to our Rotarians who hosted dinners, helped organize activities, and participated in vocational meetings:

• Midge Nelson (breakfast club) hosted a delicious welcome dinner of gigantic lobsters.
  Police Sergeant, Tom Grella (breakfast club) gave the German team a behind-the-scenes tour of the police station — jail cells, and all!
  Police Chief, Lou Ferland (lunch club) invited Klaus to ride shotgun around town in his cruiser and help him keep the peace! (Klaus scored a second city tour later in the day in an engine alongside the Fire Chief. It pays to be Mayor, right?)
  Dave Underhill (lunch club) gave Kinka and Ann a tour of the new PPMtv broadcast studio (located in the former Children’s Museum on Marcy Street).

The team also visited City Hall, lunched on scenic Bow Street overlooking the harbor and tugboats, shopped the outlets in Kittery, and exchanged backgrounds and ideas during their respective vocational day.

Highlights from the vocational day included: open house tours of Rye’s waterfront homes on the market; the soup-to-nuts operations required to deliver the daily news — from reporting and photography assignments, to layout, to going to press with The Portsmouth Herald’s new, gigantic, warehouse-contained press that prints 1.2 million newspapers every week; banking operations at Piscataqua Savings Bank; and a tour of a manufacturing facility in Somersworth.

On behalf of the German team, Kinka sent me the following email: “We would like to say a heart-felt thank you! You made our stay unforgettable and wonderful. We enjoyed every day and we are grateful to meet so many kind people!”

The team left Portsmouth on May 2 and will spend the remainder of their trip with clubs along the Maine coastline. They will return to Germany on May 20, after attending the District Conference.