Leeds to Mannheim

Hallo

This week hasn’t been filled with any major trips, but I’ve been keeping myself busy spending time with different people. On Thursday this started with a girl’s night. We all went around to Emma’s and ate different snacks (mainly a lot of biscuits) and just chatted for a while. It was nice to spend time with a big group, especially since they are all from the UK and so are the only people I know that are staying for next semester too!

After a boring start to Friday with a double International Accounting Tutorial, I spend the afternoon watching a German TV show- Deutschland ’83. It’s a really interesting show based on the cold war and the effect it had on East and West Germany. Hopefully, I picked up some words from it but I may have just been reading the English subtitles… In the evening I went around to Elena’s ready to go to a party in her accommodation. We ordered pizza on the German version of Deliveroo and sat, chatted and did our make-up. The party started at 10 so we decided to go for 10:30 which was still too early and there were only about 10 people there! By 11 however, it was absolutely full of people and the music was really good. Apparently the German’s love a good High School Musical remix! It’s probably a good job I don’t really drink as the drinks they were serving (although very cheap) were about ¾ spirit to ¼ mixer! At 12:20 the police turned up and shut down the party. We have no idea why but at least it meant I wasn’t too tired on Saturday.

On Saturday, I met up with some of the girls from the UK again to go shopping in Ludwigshafen (just across the river from Mannheim). We got the train which literally took 3 minutes and headed straight to the shopping centre. This is the first place I’ve been in Germany that has something that resembles a Christmas market already, so we also had a quick walk round there and looked at the food! The shopping centre was exactly the same as any in England, but it had some great gift shops and I’ll definitely be going back before I come home for Christmas. Saturday evening was spent binge-watching Netflix because its too cold now to do anything else!

Sunday was also not that eventful apart from going for my weekly cake with Elena. The café we found this week was lovely, the waitresses even made an extra table for us as it was full, and it even had Christmas decorations up already. For cake I chose something that resembled a mini mountain covered in chocolate. I’m still not entirely sure what it was but it tasted alcoholic inside. The rest of the day was spent resting and watching more Netflix though because it was raining outside, and I had a busy week ahead.

For the remainder of the week up to now I have had an intensive seminar in marketing. This basically means I go in and listen to a lecture for around 6 hours every day for 3 days rather than going to it once a week for 12 weeks. The lecture has been interesting, but the room is too small for the amount of people and it’s very difficult to concentrate on one subject for that length of time. Being in every day has forced me to attempt eating in the canteen once again though and I now understand how to get cheap meals! You can effectively get the same meal plus soup and salad for 3 euros cheaper if you go to one counter rather than another or if you put all the components of the meal in separate bowls rather than on one plate. That’s still pretty strange to me!

As it’s Halloween I’m going to a ball tonight and tomorrow is bank holiday, so I can rest ready for another intensive seminar starting on Friday.