Leeds to Mannheim

Hallo zusammen!

It’s another early blog this week as I’m going to Prague on Wednesday and have exams and classes before then. It’ll probably be a short post too as I have spent most of the past few days revising.

This week, I did get chance to do some things that gave back to the local community. Firstly, on Thursday, I spent a few hours volunteering at the local foodbank- Die Mannheimer Taffel. Paisley and I arrived early and I introduced us in German to the lady in charge. The lady then proceeded to be annoyed that Paisley didn’t speak German and try and sign us up to work every week on days neither of us could do which wasn’t a great start. However, the work was fun, I got to practice my German and I will go back in a fortnight. We started by sorting pastries into bags of 10 for people to just take with them and then we moved on to sorting fruit and veg into what was usable and what was rubbish. After everyone was sorted, the doors were opened to customers who could come around, take what they wanted and then pay a small fee for their goods. Me and Paisley stayed behind the bread counter and filled bags with bread that customers wanted.

On Friday, after my last marketing communications lecture, I met up with some of the people from Mannheim’s social Erasmus group to help clean Jungbusch. Jungbusch is just outside of Mannheim’s city centre and is home to Germans, internationals and students. Once everyone had arrived, we each took some rubber gloves and bin bags and set to work. Lizzie and I removed rubbish from a bridge over the Neckar and around the river itself. We were supposed to also have litter pickers to make the job easier but unfortunately the social Erasmus leader had left them with her bike whilst she ate lunch, and someone had stolen them! After a couple of hours, we met back up with our relatively full bin bags so they could be collected by the local council. When the rest of the group realised Lizzie and I could also speak a bit of German they let us practice on them too which was fun and very useful!

Yesterday was around 21 degrees, so after a morning of revision and grocery shopping, I met up with some friends for a picnic by the Neckar. There were less of us around than for our last picnic, but it was still fun and there was plenty of food. I ate far too much bread and cheese! We just played some music and relaxed in the sun, watching the Germans who were barbecuing and playing their strange drinking games.

This morning, before yet more revision (and writing this blog post) I met Eeva for brunch to say thank you for her letting me borrow her cabin bag. We went to Le Coffee as it’s so easy to get to and does great food. She had a feta and vegetable focaccia and I had Bircher muesli. The waiter was speaking to us in English but apologised later when he heard me order at the till in German which was sweet as that never happens!

Now I must do some more accounting revision for my exam tomorrow and then pack for Prague. Hopefully I’ll have a lot more to say next week!