You Can Call Me El

I arrived in Germany on 8th September 2014 and will leave on 13th June 2015, making my official time living here just over nine months. A year abroad is often hyped up to be the best year of your life, meaning there's a lot of pressure to not only have a great time but also tell and show everyone how fab it all is. Before you leave for the adventure, people you tell are either thrilled or terrified on your behalf; it's rarely a lukewarm 'oh that sounds nice' reaction when it is revealed that you're moving to a different country for a significant length of time. In my experience this interest peaks just before you depart, then cools massively leading up to your first return home, when it becomes clear that life abroad leaves you looking mostly the same with no immediately obvious scars.  This diminished interest could be partly my fault; I must have made Chemnitz sound very uninspiring, judging by the number of people that still think it is a tiny, rural village (i...

My first post of this name was one of the very first blog posts I ever wrote (the third, in fact. You can have a look at it again, if you want). Cringeworthy though it absolutely is to return to your previous writing - I am still scarred from rereading a diary I wrote when I was about eleven that is just tragically, crippingly boring - it was one of the main reasons I wanted to keep a blog this year; being able to look back and remember the small details of your daily life that you would otherwise have forgotten is really lovely. In terms of life at Georgius-Agricola-Gymnasium - it has been brilliant. Not all the time, obviously, there have been some truly frustrating parts to it too - let me briefly count the ways. The top spot for annoyingness must be occupied by the printer situation: there is one functioning printer in the entire school that is manned by a succession of receptionists of varying levels of helpfulness, ranging from 'yep just use my computer to log into your em...