Week 15 (Mon 7th May – Sun 13th May)

Personal blog

This week we said our first goodbye to the first ERASMUS student to leave and go back to her home in Spain.  It made me realise how time has passed by so quickly and it’s important that you make the most of it and this gave us the incentive to make more plans with the other students.  We had a Spanish omelette party and pancake party for the Spanish girl and exchanged our contact details and personal messages for each of our journals and also enjoyed the delicious food!  We also promised to keep in contact and I hope to visit her in Spain this July.  I love the networks and friendships we have developed with the students here and appreciate that I had the opportunity to build these through ERASMUS. I think this has been the best part of my ERASMUS experience and would encourage people to go on ERASMUS because of this.

We also had our last class and handed in our term papers which really made us aware that the experience really is coming to an end.  To celebrate finishing the papers, we went to Tivoli in Copenhagen with the Dutch girls and we also wanted to make the most of our time with Trisha as she goes home next week!  At dinner in Tivoli we discussed some of our best experiences in Denmark to date and we quickly realised that we have had so many experiences but have forgotten a lot and lots of the experiences feel like they happened ages ago rather than a few months ago!  We all agreed that the Berlin trip as an ERASMUS group was definitely a highlight as it was where our friendships really began to develop as well as our cultural awareness within the group.  We did however agree that it has been disappointing that we didn’t get to know each other sooner as we all arrived at different times and lived in different accommodation.

The Dutch girls and us in Tivoli gardens

This week we also decided to visit Malmo in Sweden as it is only 30 minutes from Copenhagen by train.  It was a quaint place with nice, old-fashioned buildings and some cobbled streets and a canal which runs through the city. We also found that the culture and scenery there isn’t particularly different to what we have seen of Denmark’s.  Fionnuala and I however will be lucky enough next week to go to Gothenburg and Mullsjo with two Austrian girls and see more of Sweden; which will allow us to contrast and compare some different places in Sweden.  It feels great to be able to say that I have visited parts of Germany, Denmark and Sweden and seen a lot more of Europe than I ever expected at this stage of my life.  It has only inspired me to want to travel more and see more of Europe but also consider international travelling; for example America.  This also means I have a lot of saving to do when I get home!