Last week
was finally the time for my courses to begin. My personal curriculum for the
summer consists of both German and English courses (literature, grammar, regional
and culture studies), most of which seem really interesting albeit effortful
and time-consuming. There is yet not so much to tell about the studying, but as
much as I like the University of Freiburg, there were a few times last week
when I felt a bit lost – or let me put it this way: I missed the
uncomplicatedness of my home university. And I’m not only talking about the
times I searched for a class room for a half an hour. First of all the libraries:
I guess there are separate libraries for most of the areas of studies, then in
addition to that there are two bigger libraries (of which one is tram-ride away
from the university – just to make things easy for the students..) and in all
of them the loaning systems vary. Some books you can loan with the loan time
changing from one day to two weeks, some books you can only read there and for “loaning”
some books you have to pay. Very confusing. Another thing these Germans have
managed to complicate is printing at the university – and with all my
literature classes I will be needing the printer a lot. The system is anything
but simple, involving different passwords and sending files from a computer to
another, and so I had to give up on printing the first time I tried last week
or I would have been late for my class. But I intend to give it another try
today. This time I’ll take some extra patience with me.
The
beginning of the semester brought some rhythm into this rather spontaneous life
I’ve been enjoying here so far, but of course there are plenty of other things
going on as well. I guess parties are a pretty obvious part, but I’ve also
spent a lot of time with the other exchange students cooking Italian and Finnish
food, grilling, jogging and doing sports, visiting the great Cathedral here and going to
the cinema! I will let pictures do the talking:
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| Cooking Italian style |
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| A Finnish lunch at our place. |
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| Grillabend |
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| A visit to the lovely Japanese garden nearby my home. |
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| In the Japanese garden with the lovely Fransesca. |
