The Last Week in France Part III

The time with my boyfriend passed by quickly as always, and soon he had to leave to work in the morning. I came with him and we had a short breakfast in our favourite "boulangerie" (bakery). I would not only miss him and my life in Amiens, I would also miss things like "macarons", "pain au chocolat" and (the best thing ever) "tartelettes de framboise". There is no country which offers pastries as good as in France! So I took every chance to eat some of them, even if I could notice that my trousers and other clothes were beginning to shrink a bit. But I would only have that one semester in France, and I didn't want to spend it with thoughts like "well, better only eat salad for the next week" - I would do more sports in the warm and sunny Tenerife, I was sure about that. I brought my boyfriend to his apartment and went back to the student's residency - it was much too early to go into the city centre, and I wouldn't find a parking anyway. So I went back to bed for a while and would take a bus later to enjoy the nice weather.

A lot of last times

The following days until the weekend were quite similar to that. I mainly passed my day in my bed, watching series or working on my ideas for a goodbye-present for my boyfriend. Sometimes I took the bus to the city centre and walked around Amiens, because I really knew that I would miss that place a lot soon. I tried to remember everything about it - the architecture, the people, the nature in Parc Saint-Pierre and so much more stuff. I also went running one last time, without my boyfriend, and wished that I could take that parc home to Germany with me. It would be just perfect to do sports! In the evenings I waited for the message from my boyfriend that he had finished work and I could pick him up - it had become a kind of daily ritual, it was just always like that and I loved that so much. We passed the nights together, had dinner and breakfast and tried to enjoy our time. But it became more and more difficult the more days were passing by and the nearer the day of my departure came. I just hoped that it would work out somehow and that our love was strong enough to survive the distance. Maybe one day there would be a solution and we would find our ways fitting together - we would see.

International Dinner in the Residency

One evening, the Scottish girl invited me to come over (she was living in the student's residency building next to me) to have a goodbye dinner together with some others I knew from several Erasmus events and parties. I was happy about her invitation because she had become one of my best friends there in Amiens - we were quite similar: didn't like parties so much, loved to go for a coffee or have a Crêpe somewhere and had kind of the same humour. So I had to postpone the evening with my boyfriend to go over there, but it was okay. We had passed almost all the evenings together during the last two or three weeks (except the two nights I had been in Germany) and we would survive one night we couldn't be together. Furthermore, we had to get used to that for the next time. So I had a shower, put on some nice but comfortable clothes and left my residency building to walk over to building C to her apartment. I met her already in the floor when she was bringing things to the kitchen. The kitchens in building C were much newer and nicer, so I liked cooking over there. She had told me just to bring a plate and knife & fork, so I brought my bag into the kitchen and said hello to everybody. I didn't know the others so well, but they were nice and my Scottish friend had also told me that the two other English girls would come, too. So it seemed to become a very nice evening, and I was happy to have one like that before I would have to leave. Even if I had not found friends for life in France (most of the people in my university were quite cold and not interested in international friendships) I had experienced a lot of wonderful events and evenings/afternoons with other people from different countries and that's what Erasmus should be like. Furthermore, I had found the most wonderful person ever which might influence my future a lot and let me fall in love with France even more.

She had decided to cook some chicken with potatoes and vegetables and afterwards, as dessert, we wanted to do some crêpes together. We all helped to prepare the vegetables and while the chicken had to be in the oven and the vegetables were cooking, we played one of my favourite games: "Jungle Speed". It's a simple game which makes a lot of fun. You have cards with different symbols in different colours and in the middle of the table there is a piece of wood. Everyone receives the same amount of cards and one after the other reveals one of his cards. When two have the same symbol (colour doesn't matter) they have to grab the piece of wood in the middle of the table - the first one wins and the slower one has to take all the already revealed cards of the faster one. Then there are some special cards which make it even more interesting. It's always a lot of fun and makes time pass by incredibly quickly because it's full of tension. And so the time until the dinner was ready passed really fast, and we could eat soon.

The dinner was delicious and we had a lot of fun while we were eating. It was quite nice to talk in French, English and a bit in German, all together during one single evening. There were almost no misunderstandings and we were laughing a lot about characteristics of our countries and cultures. That was also one thing I loved a lot about Erasmus - talking about cultures, about special things in your own country and learning a new language. I would have never believed that before, because everyone is saying that but it always sounds like the standard sentence when you talk about your experience abroad. But actually it's really one of the most fascinating things, how you change your attitudes, your points of view and how much you learn about other countries just by knowing some people coming from there. Of course, it's not one person representing one whole country, but you still get an idea how it's working there from histories and behaviour etc. For me that was much more fascinating than the facts we had to learn by heart in university in our intercultural courses, because there it's mainly about models and theories, but nothing you can use 1:1 in real life. You have to be there, experience the differences and similarities and that's how you get to know it.

We finished the dinner and after having cleaned up the kitchen a bit (there were still other people from the floor cooking their dinner and they needed space, too) and washed the dishes, we started to prepare the Crêpes together. The dough is simple, you only need flour, eggs and sugar for it, and if you don't have a balance, you just mix some of it and see how it works out. As the others had already prepared the thin pancakes several times before, the dough was ready quickly, and we put them into the pan. After a while all Crêpes were ready and we could enjoy our dessert. It was even more delicious than the dinner itself! Afterwards we took some pictures together to keep that evening in our memories, and we started to clean up the kitchen completely. It was a mess, because everybody had done something and we hadn't cleaned up anything before, just the dishes a bit. It took us more than half an hour to clean up - also because of the other people that were cooking in there, but finally everything was tidier than before and we sat down to relax and talk a bit. After one or two more hours it was time to say goodbye - the kitchen in the residency was closed at 23h and there was somebody going around, seeing if there was still somebody inside, so we had to leave. As the rooms there were all 9 m² we couldn't go to my friend's room, so we decided to go home. I didn't have a far way to my building (for one time), so it took me about five minutes to arrive at my room. I was very tired, so I went to bed immediately and fell asleep quickly.

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