Time flies by when you’re having fun

When I first arrived in Remagen, I didn’t know what to expect. I arrived a few days earlier than the other exchange students. This gave me the opportunity to explore Remagen and its surrounding cities a bit more. When all the other exchange students arrived, we were invited for the “Rhine-CleanUp”. For this event we went to Bonn and the goal was to get to know each other, while also helping to clean the environment! This was a great opener and it helped with talking to everyone atleast once. Now I knew all the other exchange students it was time to meet some German friends. We were asked to give a little speech in German in front of all the first year students at RheinAhrCampus. In my speech, I invited everyone to have a party with me, because I love partying. Later, when I was standing in the student bar “BaRACke”, people already knew who I was! So this was a great way to show yourself to the German students. I felt very welcomed to RheinAhrCampus, little things like this make the difference. To top it all off, each exchange student had their own ‘buddy’, a German student at RheinAhrCampus that could show us around. Buddies are a great addition and it helped connecting with the German students a lot more, otherwise we would just be stuck with eachother! Next to all the fun and activities that RheinAhrCampus offered, there was also some work that needed to be done. As an exchange student, our classes were in English, which made things a bit easier for us. We also had German class, which was quite easy for me, because I am from one of the neighbouring countries. I thought the classes were really interesting and different from the way that classes are being taught in the Netherlands. This made me excited and motivated to participate in these classes. Because German students also could apply for these courses in English, it gave an interesting mix of backgrounds. People from different backgrounds have different ideas and opinions. This made the classes very interesting and opened up for a lot of fun discussions. Some guest lecturers were also present at RheinAhrCampus, offering very diverse courses, different from the way that is normal to Germany. These courses were really refreshing and fun to take and gave us a lot of freedom of how we wanted to fill it in. After a while all these ‘new’ things became normal to me. Life in Remagen had really started. This is when time looked like it was accelerating and days went by real quickly. Even though it was a lot of fun, studying at RheinAhrCampus was also a lot of work. It was long days with a lot of subjects. Luckily there were some events hosted by the local student association, which really helped with having a break from the packed schedule. All in all my exchange in Remagen was a great success. I met many new friends and the courses were great. Like I said before, time went by so fast, it’s almost unreal to think I am already going home again. But you know what they say, time flies by when you’re having fun.