Fascinating Second Semester

I am Lisa Shiryayeva, from Azerbaijan and it was my second exchange semester at RheinAhrCampus in Remagen. In comparison to the first semester when I was not feeling confident, the second one was completely different and I was more helpful for new international students who were just arriving from all over the world like Portugal, Brazil, Jordan, Lithuania, South Korea, Denmark and Spain. I was scared to be honest, because a lot of friends of mine left Remagen in the summer and it felt like discovering Remagen all over again. However, it turned into completely different, but incredibly amazing semester even if sometimes temperature went too low.

When everything was starting in September, Germany was treating us with good weather which gave us the opportunity to chill together outside a lot. We got opportunity from the university to have excursion to Deutsche Telekom which I think motivated a lot of us for being successful in our studies for work place like this in the future. Doesn’t matter if we were in hiking trip to Drachenfels Schloss or just eating pizza near the Rhine in Cologne, we enjoyed it a lot. What I can say is, it was a completely different semester from the first one I had here, but not less interesting and fascinating. When now I am thinking about these 6 months, it feels like 6 years because I had so many things happening around me.

A lot of events happened which changed my life. There are too many things to mention – starting with my first Karneval experience where I had fun being a lady bug, and finishing with the intensive weekend workshop Managing Cultural Diversity which made us meet so many astonishing people from all over the world.

The saddest part is I will miss a lot people whom I got used to seeing every day, and then suddenly this all just disappeared and it is tough. First of all, it is the team of Sprachen/Internationales: Laurent Borgmann, Andreas Faulstich, Barbara Neukirchen and Rashimah Rajah who were incredible kind and attentive and will miss hearing their “Guten Morgen” and “Bis morgen” every day. Also, of course I will miss a lot all my friends – does not matter if they are international or German students. The positive side is now I have so many places to visit and I have a house to go in a lot of different parts of the world now and also I will be very happy to see them in Azerbaijan where each of them for sure has a house as well.