Leeds to Mannheim

Guten Nachmittag!

It’s been another really busy week so it’s going to be interesting to see how I fit things in when my travelling starts! Thankfully by next Friday one of my classes will be completely out the way and I will have finished all lectures for another one giving me more time midweek for work and revision! However, I have signed up to volunteer at a local food bank on some of my free days so we shall see.

Last Wednesday after sitting through the worst seminar I’ve had during my time here, I went to Kombüse (the vegetarian restaurant) with Kathrin. I was supposed to be practicing German again, but she was a bit hungover and I think found it easier to speak to me in English than try and understand my German! I had an amazing enchilada with fajita vegetables; it tasted so good. After eating I only had a few hours before going back to uni for an accounting lecture and immediately after that I went to an event with the Insights society. The event was a quiz about German heroes with each team asking yes or no questions until they could guess who the person was. Our team surprisingly won, despite us having no idea who some of the people were. After the quiz finished people stayed to play a really strange game where everyone had to follow one rule and another person had to ask questions to guess what it was. The game would have been okay but the rule had been described to the guesser as a sickness, so they were asking if people were pregnant, had depression, or had headaches when the rule was simply that we all had to answer as though we were someone else in the room!

On Thursday, after a morning of note writing and working, Cecily came over to make vegan chocolate cake. It was fun to spend time together and we baked a really delicious cake with the best (non-butter) buttercream I’ve ever made. We had to try quite hard to stop ourselves actually eating half the cake in one go but I’m glad we didn’t as it meant we both had a treat for the next couple of days. This came in handy particularly on Friday when I was inside nearly all day revising, finishing my essay and writing lecture notes!

Eeva and I arranged to meet for breakfast on Saturday at a café that specialises in pretty brunches. Unfortunately, when we arrived, after a half an hour walk, it was absolutely packed and there were no free tables. So, we walked back into the city centre and ended up at Le Coffee, where we had been for cake the week before. There I had a muesli and granola bowl which was tasty and very pretty, packed with Greek yoghurt, oats, granola, bananas, nuts and coconut. I also had a chocolate milkshake which wasn’t that great. Eeva had a mozzarella, tomato and hummus sandwich which came on a wooden platter with a granola yoghurt and fruit on the side. Regardless of taste, it all looked incredible. In the afternoon, after some more work, I met up with Cecily again. We ate buddha bowls full of sweet potato, couscous, peppers, onions chickpeas, sweetcorn and hummus and watched Beauty and the Beast on Netflix.

The following day I invited Derek round to make cookies as he had bought me cookie cutters for our secret Santa and had also added to my collection with an Angela Merkel cutter he bought in Berlin. He had never made them before, so I let him do most of the work and the icing. Unfortunately, we didn’t have colours or anything to actual ice with but he was pretty creative with just the icing and a knife, attempting to draw pretzels, euro signs and the Brandenburg gate on Angela Merkel’s face. They weren’t the prettiest biscuits I’ve ever made but they did taste pretty good. After baking we went for a walk with Cecily as it’s such amazing weather at the moment and ended up in the Irish bar watching the end of a rugby game with some of the boys.

Monday was a busy day with work, cooking and lectures. In the evening I went to a Social Erasmus meeting with Paisley. This is a society that works with exchange students to help with different things in the local area. Paisley and I have signed up to do a few 2-hour shifts in die Tafeln, a local food bank, and to help with a city clean up at the end of March.

Today is more an ‘enjoy the sun’ day after six-and-a-half hours of non-stop lectures yesterday followed by two hours of tutoring and German homework! After a seminar and a meeting with my Economics lecturer this morning, I headed to the banks of the Neckar for a picnic. Everyone brought a few different things including quite a lot of cured meats, cheese and biscuits. I had brought some chocolates, mini Frikadellen and some (directly-translated) yoghurt poultry which was in the reduced section at Lidl. The yoghurt poultry didn’t really taste like anything which was probably for the best! We sat in the sun for a while eating far too much, chatting and listening to music. It’s been a really nice day and I cannot believe the weather is like this.

Hopefully the weather stays nice this weekend as I am visiting Raina in Brussels.