The two free weeks may in fact be not quite as free as I'd been hoping, thanks to the sort of German bureaucracy that requires foreign students to visit (and queue at, and present a respectable facade in broken German at) some seven different government offices before obtaining a university enrolment. Clever me, I've raced through five in the four days I've spent so far in Freiburg. But everything shuts on the weekends, so I feel justified in taking off for now.
The rugby I saw last night in a smoky bar somewhere by the river, packed with French twenty-something guys watching the rugby and French twenty-something girls watching their boyfriends. The guy on my left was reading a comic book. The girls on my right were drinking beer from shapely things that looked like oversized cocktail glasses. The cheers at the second French try and at the end were matched only by the gales of laughter at the haka. For the sake of my mourning friends back home, I'll say no more.So I'll spend some time talking about my week in dear little Freiburg, where I'll be studying for the next five months but which (due to lack of net access) I've so far had no chance to introduce.
It's a town of 200,000 people in the bottom-left corner of Germany on the map, close to Switzerland and closer to France.
It's very flat, with lots of trees and grass and a river running through the middle.
It's in a valley, and if you walk for twenty minutes* in any direction the town suddenly stops and steep hills covered in forest suddenly start.
(*I speak from experience. I managed to arrive in town on a public holiday I'd never heard of. Absolutely everything was closed, including the office at my residence which would let me move in, so I had a lot of free time to wander round.)
It's very sunny.
It's surprisingly dense, with lots of people and lots of cars and even more bicycles.
It has a university which is celebrating its 550th anniversary, and is a thorough enough student town to have cheap beer gardens and Italian restaurants and ice-cream parlours.
I have a large and very empty room to myself, and share a kitchen and bathrooms with a dozen other mostly German students, most of whom haven't yet moved in. It's one floor of one building of a giant three-thousand-resident student village set in a park with nice woods and pond twenty minutes from city centre.
I've spent most time so far with the other exchange students (mostly European -- the Americans can be heard, sometimes, but they don't turn up to outings) and with my housemates. People are friendly and intelligent, so far as my limited German can judge. My limited German's rapidly improving, from necessity.
I got complimented on it on Friday night, in fact -- "much better than most English people's, you can actually be understood".
Anyway, time to go see some Strasbourg sights.
2 comments:
Excellent blogging you've got going there. Keep up the great work.
Haha New Zealand is really not the place to be at the moment if you don't particularly care about rugby.
People are calling for people's heads and whatnot.
Anywho, have fun over there. Viel spass!
This is Simon Youl, by the way.
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