Leipzig

Hello little Lieblings. I haven't written any posts since coming home because I didn't think what I was doing was very interesting and it's not particularly, but I realised it might be useful for some students going abroad next year. (Or not going) (sorry x).  Obviously I can only write from my experience and institutions will most likely have totally different approaches to remote learning. I know friends who were at Spanish unis have had almost nothing. Equally, someone doing Russian casually mentioned getting FOUR HOURS of LIVE LESSONS a DAY ! A pipe dream :') How the learning from Leipzig works seems to depend totally on your teacher. I have different formats for pretty much all my modules. These include:   Textproduktion & Konversation - 40 min Zoom calls (with about 8 international students on them) Grammatik – Word documents which are emailed to us Translation – ST (Source Text) posted on Moodle, you upload your translation to a website named Speicherwolk...

That title is a stretch and I know it :D Wednesday 18th March I'll be honest, this is the first time been in the commercial centre of Leipzig at 6 a.m. on a Wednesday, but I would guess it were no less busy than it usually is this morning. I make embarrassing eye contact with a man in high-vis while he necks a miniature bottle of liqueur. As I have made a big show of, I have been trying to avoid flying since I underwent the Flygskam epiphany... but I also believe in pragmatism and avoiding blanket rules and don't really want to shell out €360 to take a 21-hour train journey home. Luckily I still get to take one train from the Hbf to the airport. They're so much posher than English ones, with functioning and uncomplicated electronic screens showing all the upcoming stops, the  original ETA of each one, and the actualised one. Which are always the same! No braying, crackly loudspeaker announcements; no shitty scrolling dotty orange lettering you have to hover over yo...

I booked my flight home on Monday evening after the Bristol Language Department officially instructed us all to skidaddle. I get real travel anxiety so have been feeling buzzed ever since. I write this with 12 hours to go until I leave. I'm gutted; I was starting to really like it here and genuinely looking forward to my term. Tuesday 17th March My alarm awoke me at 8:04 this morning and after swallowing a vat of coffee I schlepped over to  Leipzig Tafel . The tram was maybe a bit emptier than usual, but the old Volk  of Leipzig do not appear to be aware of (or are just disobeying) social distancing advice (hedonistic nutters!), so I feel a little germy as I embark in the hip Eastern Viertel . I have come with my flatmate to do some Good during these (officially dubbed by whomstever sends Bristol Uni's daily Coroney Correspondences) ~Troublesome Times~. We aren't there long, however, before it becomes clear that we are surplus to requirements. They reassure us that th...

As I came to Leipzig before the university term started, I have been a bit lonely and uninspired. In a bit of a ~creative rut~ you might say. Hence blog posts weren't as regular as they were when I was in Marseille . Whomst could have known all I needed was a global pandemic to relight my fire?! Gott sei Dank people , I'm back! For the past couple weeks, I have been pretty derisive about Corona; just sitting back and enjoying the rich wave of memes that it spawned. I was exposed to the backlash condemning mediatised hysteria before I was exposed to the original mediatisation; so - as is quite often the case in my left-wing, right-on echo chamber - I picked up the critical, alternative line, before even being aware of the issue which was being criticised. Thursday 12 th  March This is the first day I am taking the virus seriously. In the afternoon I receive an email saying that my university term is delayed by a month - to May at the earliest. I then receive corr...

My journey from London to Leipzighypezig begins at 5AM on 1 February 2020. It is an important day: the end of my ridiculously long Christmas holiday, the end of the  Biggest Veganuary Ever , and of our time in the EU.  Mere seconds after i post this smug (and yes, intellectual) Instagram story reading "fuck Brexit bye bye" from my plush seat on the Eurostar, a tannoy announcement informs us that there are damages to the tunnel; meaning our train is stuck at the edge of England for the foreseeable future.  I am reading Frisch's  Homo Faber  in which a plane crashes and the protagonist gets stranded in a desert for hours. Somebody is punishing my smugness. Three middle-aged Brits destined for Rotterdam are pontificating at a high volume across the aisle from me. I try to read my book but instead involuntarily learn a lot about how badly each of them slept the night before, and about their upcoming annual conference. I remind myself to appreciate being ab...

Strings of oddity that I want to pull at have already been launched my way from Germany.  Trawling through  WG-gesucht  listings (German Spare Room) I am at first shocked by, then grow weary of, disclaimers that no Nazis are welcome in the various student house-shares. How many Nazis will be put off applying by the two lines stuck on the end of each advertisement? How many listings are there on the website that openly welcome Nazis? Does the absence of this disclaimer on other postings mean that its authors are Nazi-sympathisers or did they just… not think they had to specify a distaste for extreme racism? As I am still bumming around in England (German term starts in April… don’t ask why ‘cos I don’t know) I thought I may share some intrigues that my self-inflicted  Deutschebildung  (figure it out from ‘Bildungsroman’ if you don’t speak German) has surfaced. As my German is a lot worse than my French and (blame the Malory Towers books) I automatically...