Wednesday, October 23, 2013

Apologies



I don’t know if anyone will be reading this, but I felt the need to explain my long absence, so I decided to write this post. Let me apologize for my being absent for so long without any sort of explanation before. I had some severe personal problems that I prefer not to specify here, but I have them more or less figured out now. However, I will not continue this blog, at least not for the next few months because I am doing my semester abroad now and it’s hard to find any free time at all. I am always at university or at some sort of Erasmus event with some friends.  

So, for anyone who is interested in knowing more about this, well, I am in Rome now. Actually, I applied for Erasmus (in case you’ve never heard of it, it’s a European exchange program) in England, but at my university there were only four places available while about 200 students applied for it. But they offered me to go somewhere else. So, I ended up choosing Rome, since I learned some Italian at school and I’ve always wanted to see Rome. I’ve never been there before, I’ve also never been abroad alone or for more than two weeks, so as you can imagine coming here was quite exciting for me. 

And I have to say, I absolutely love it. There are so many beautiful places to visit here, there’s always something new to see. I love being abroad anyway and I love the Italian language. I love waking up in the morning with my window open and hearing people in the streets talk in Italian. Of course, it’s also much warmer here than in Germany. What I love most is meeting so many people from all over the world (mostly Europe) and making friends with them. I actually even avoid the other German students. I mean, there are enough of them in Germany, so why would I want to spend all my time here with Germans? The only slightly negative thing about talking to all sorts of different people all the time is that I feel like my English is actually getting worse here. Most of the Erasmus students don’t know much Italian, so we usually talk in English. Unfortunately, so far I haven’t met any native speakers and a lot of the students are not very good at English, so you have to try to adapt a little so that they can understand you. By the time I am back, I will probably speak English with an Italian or a Lithuanian accent; Lithuanian because I am currently spending most of my time with two girls from Lithuania. 

By the way, one thing that you should NOT do here is being out alone at night as a young woman. I always meet with some friends when I go out, but Rome is so big and no one lives near my apartment, so at first I always went home alone. Normally I don’t have a problem with that, I also do that in Germany and I am not someone who is easily scared anyway. But I can tell you that it was not a good idea.
I had to learn quite fast that even during the day, it can be quite difficult. Something that I still don’t know how to do is being unfriendly with men. I am used to trying to be friendly and normally, when I’m not interested, I still try to let them know politely and in Germany that works. But in that aspect, Rome is very different from where I come from. So, I’ve been told that I am too nice. 

Anyway, I am going back to university now. Actually I just wanted to explain why I haven't been around anymore. Again, I am sorry for not having continued my posts like I said I would. But I hope you understand. If you have any questions about Rome or anything else, don’t hesitate to ask. 
I hope all of you are fine and have a great time, wherever you are.

Saturday, January 5, 2013

Setting Priorities...

It’s about 2 AM where I live and after having worked on writing a paper for university all day (more or less), I decided to go to sleep. Well, I couldn’t fall asleep with all those things I have yet to do going on in my mind, so I got up again. I don’t even know where to start, should I finish my paper, should I finally work on my application for my semester abroad, should I catch up on all the Chinese vocabulary or should I try to study for that math test that I will most likely fail if I don’t start understanding anything very soon. Or should I prepare that presentation that needs to be done for the next week? And what about the nine other exams I have to study for? (And this is only concerning university, my life happens to consist of other things too.) I wanted to get all these things done during Christmas holiday. There are only two days left. You see, there  is not much time left to work on my blog, actually the days are way too short to get at least some of these things done, especially because after the holidays I am at university for about 12 hours almost every day again, so there is not much time to catch up on all these things anyway. 

That’s why I decided that I eventually have to set priorities if I want to pass any of my exams and go on that semester abroad (which I really, really want to, I have been looking forward to this for a long time). 
So, I am sorry to announce this, but I will be on a temporary hiatus for some weeks. 
As I don’t want to give up blogging permanently, however, I consider this as a break and will return when my exams for this semester are done, that is probably at the middle or the end of February.
I will still be around to continue commenting on my favourite blogs when taking a break from studying, but there won’t be enough time to write any articles. Actually I even have some ideas, I just wish I also had the time to get them written down. Of course I could do that quickly, but if I wrote them while being stressed like this, they would be really bad, I wouldn’t be able to concentrate on writing them.
I also wanted to use this opportunity to thank all of you people that continued to come back here and all of you who have left their comments, I truly appreciate every one of them. Thank you for the support and for your wonderful opinions on whatever I decided to write.
So, I’ll probably be back in about six weeks (that’s actually not that long) with new posts and I would love if you too returned to read them. I hope you have a great time with whatever you are doing for the next weeks.