A life-changing experience.!

Hallo! 
My name is Esjona, I am currently at the end of my ERASMUS Exchange Semester abroad at RheinAhrCampus, Germany. When I decided to stay for one more ERASMUS Exchange Semester here, I had no doubts that the second ERASMUS Exchange Semester was going to be different from the first one. During this ERASMUS Exchange Semester, I strengthened the skills acquired in the previous ERASMUS Exchange Semester, but also gained new skills. I strengthened the friendships that started in the first ERASMUS Exchange Semester but also created new ones.  

 In the winter ERASMUS Exchange Semester, I had the possibility to attend classes that are completely in German because now I can understand and speak the German language. While attending these classes, I should confess that was not always easy, but since the classes were taking place in person, I started creating friendships with my classmates who were native German speakers. They were always there to help me in case I didn’t understand anything. 

By taking part in the Academic Internship, I was given the trust to be the leader of the podcast team.  My team and I did many interviews, listen to unbelievable stories, met wonderful people, produced great podcasts and at the end of this experience, I can say that the effort was worth it.  The experience helped me to develop my leadership skills, to learn how to manage the projects and how to delegate the tasks to the team members based on their skills and also where they want to improve themselves more. 

During this semester, I made friends from Brazil, visit Paris with my friends from Georgia, Azerbaijan and Germany as well as ate the Chicken Butter Masala with my Indian friends. Oh, I remember celebrating Carnivals in Cologne. Never could I have imagined that I would travel with all the movies characters on a train in real life. On that day I had a cool conversation with the Grinch of Christmas who was sitting next to me on the train to Cologne. As I mentioned Christmas, I had also the chance to visit Christmas Markets this semester. The atmosphere there is incredibly warm, even though the temperatures in Germany are -1 grade Celsius. I found out that I love drinking Glühwein while eating some Pommes. It was a very diverse semester and I feel incredibly lucky for being part of it. 

For me, it has been 10 months since I left Albania and I came to Germany, and believe me when I say that by accepting the opportunity to do an ERASMUS Exchange Semester at RheinAhrCampus, I made one of the best decisions that I could have done, a decision that I would do again and again.