Remagen: Where Bonds of Friendship and Adventure Blossomed

I've heard countless students talk about their Erasmus experiences, one of them my friend, whose incredible journey you can read about here from a few years ago. I believed them, but I was also thinking could it really be this amazing?

Hello everyone, I am Ana, an exchange student from Albania and this is a glimpse of the beautiful months I spent in Remagen.

When I first arrived in Remagen, a charming small town in Germany, I was both excited and nervous. Little did I know that this quaint town would soon feel like a second home. The picturesque scenery, with the Rhine River flowing gracefully through the heart of the town, was the first thing that captured my heart.

During my time in Remagen, living in a different country away from home challenged me to adapt to a new culture. I learned to balance my studies and daily life independently. Overcoming these challenges taught me resilience and opened my mind to new experiences, making me more adaptable and confident.

But what I am most grateful for and the thing I will miss the most is the friendships I made. Going to an Erasmus Exchange means that you will meet students from all over the world and some of these students became my family and people I will remember and cherish forever.  We bonded over countless shared experiences, from our little walks near the Rhine and cooking international meals, to exploring nearby cities and traveling to other countries.  And among our adventures, I would like to mention, Strasbourg when one of us forgot a phone on the way back, so we were stranded in a city in Germany the whole night, walking around pretending to hold Victorian dresses, our hectic train ride back from Amsterdam, us running through the streets of Brussels barely making it to the bus, eating bombas in the middle of the night in Izmir, and almost always being late and skipping breakfast because we were talking all night. 

And one of the days I really enjoyed was when with new and old friends we went to see the first Albanian game of the European Cup in Dortmund.  It was amazing to see us with red and black in our faces, and with the Albanian flag wrapped around our shoulders watching the game. I will always remember looking at my Georgian, Turkish, and Portuguese friends shouting Shqiperi(Albania) and cheering even more than me. It was one of the moments when I really understood the core objective of Erasmus, to immerse yourself in an international setting, celebrating each other's cultures and forging lifelong connections.

I am not a very emotional person nor dramatic and I want to come back here many times before that, but I have this very specific scene in my mind. I will be walking through the beautiful streets of Remagen, wrinkles in my face and gray hair in my head, I will dramatically take my sunglasses off ( like in those scenes in the movies) and I will say to whoever is next to me or maybe just to the empty streets, “This was the city where I live some of the best time of my 20s”. Now I don’t want to say the best time of my life because I am still very young and have a lot yet to experience, but it’s been a pleasure, and if you are still wondering, yes it really was that amazing.