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When I arrived in October in Freiburg to my bare and empty bedroom, I got depressed. I mused glumly the way I muse glumly almost every time I move house: that my living standards have plummeted, and that my personal comfort has reached its all-time low. So my floormate Achim (who felt a bond with me because he'd visited New Zealand) took me to IKEA. We bought me a carpet and drawers and duvet and hangers. And curtains. Because I hated my curtainless blind-less windows and felt as if everyone was staring in at me. More precisely, we bought material and curtain-rings and a curtain-rod, and I sewed it in to curtains.

A month later, someone mentioned casually that the shutters on their window were stiff. I asked myself what shutters these were, and later examined my window more carefully. It turned out that I had window shutters too -- it was just that they were the clever German sort that roll down the outside when you twist a little stick on the inside, and I'd never even noticed them. They were wonderful. But I didn't want to look oafish. So I went sour-grapes, and let on that I'd spent the six hours sewing curtains not because I didn't know about the wonderful window shutters, but because I didn't like them.

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Over lunch one day in the university cafeteria, some of my classmates started laughing in a not-too-malevolent way about our differential geometry lecturer, who was Australian, and sometimes while lecturing twisted up his German words in little ways like pronouncing the German word "Mannigfaltigkeit" [English "manifold"] as "Mannifoldikeit". After they pointed it out to me, I started noticing it too. Then I started noticing the little half-giggle that went around the class each time it happened. (Deep down, Germans are proud of how difficult their language is.) Then, for camouflage, I started joining in occasionally too.

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I found myself in Rome one January Sunday morning, prying open a heavy door in a tall windowless wall of a big blocky building on a sidestreet, and discovering inside a Baroque church, just as a random website had promised me the night before. Moreover, it was a romantic decaying Baroque church, with sixth-century foundations and an interior by a famous seventeenth-century architect called Francesco Borromini and peeling gold-leaf curlicues all over the walls. And, moreover, it was a tiny romantic decaying Baroque church, just big enough for the twenty nuns who were seated hymn-singing at the front and the nine parishioners who eventually gathered for morning Mass and for us.

I found it fascinating, and beautiful, and also a little sad. The nuns were subdued, and their singing wavering; their faces were hard to read. Altogether I couldn't help thinking that nowadays being a nun -- or, at least, being a nun, and maintaining your belief in the importance of what you do, without the constant external reassurance you would have had from the calling five hundred years earlier (back when admiration for nuns was widespread and passionate, and convents were very prosperous) -- must be sometimes a difficult business.

After the service, one of the nuns stayed behind to show the old church to two little boys who'd been brought by their father.

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Late the last night of term, I was out in town with friends, and we were cold and decided to go hang out at one of their apartments. So we separated to go pick up our bicycles from where we'd parked them, and met up again in town centre. Then we all cycled out to Sarah's through the dark empty streets: fast and smooth and quiet and swerving round each other. Like geese in a flock. Or witches on broomsticks.

Limbo

Hong Kong airport has free wireless. I'm hanging round, arrived from Munich, leaving later for Auckland. I'm excited about going home, and I'm exhausted.

I don't know how I'll feel when I get home. Germany, with its delightful and demanding system of mathematical education, has taught me how to work -- or at least, one way of working -- and it's this: you simply clear your life of distractions, until there's nothing else to do. I'm looking forward to being back home in a land where I bother cooking properly, going for runs, seeing movies and concerts and talks, listening to schoolchildren debate, and a hundred other things. But will I be able to learn as much maths as I did in the last few months? I don't know, and at the moment I honestly don't care.

Germany's taught me other things too. I'm better at organising things -- travelling, and bureaucratic niceties, and random encounters with friends. It's taught me some German, unsurprisingly. I still don't speak or read it very well, but I can understand when people talk to me, and I can survive. It's taught me things about myself, or possibly just made me realise things I already knew:

• I like having, or at least find it easier to have, isolated friendships rather than big clumps of them.
• I like home comforts. Real travelling, where one wanders the desert with a passport and spare undies, I'd find difficult.
• I'm easily amused. I find most things interesting. (I think this is a good thing.)
  

It's been wonderful, and I'm grateful I went. But -- I think -- I'm also going to be grateful when I'm home.

The time has come

I've been saying goodbye to people.

I went cycling west the 20 km to the Rhine with my maths friend Clemens. It was a gloriously sunny day that looked like New Zealand February rather than German; the countryside was yellowed and very slightly rolling, with fields and apple orchards and vinyards and a couple of typically delicious villages. We hit the Rhine at the smallish old town of Breisach, puffed up a hill to its cathedral, and ate lunch looking out across the river to France. Then we lurched and bumped the steep cobblestoned way down.

I met my neighbour and fellow exchange student Alex on the trams, and elicited within moments both that she was sad to see me go and that she'd happily take all my furniture off my hands. So we spent much of the next day or so transferring carpet and curtains and chest of drawers and kitchen utensils down the stairs of my building and up the elevator of hers. My room's nearly emptied now.

I went out for lunch with my floormate Max. I went out for ice cream with my exchange student friends Alyssa and Vanessa. I ate cake with Elliot.

Emily I'm meeting for dinner now; her job is to keep me from dejection on my last night in Freiburg.