Starting again!

New semester and new competition. Actually, I think this competition should have started in February, when everything was starting again. But its ok, Erasmusu staff has its reasons. The point is that now that with the new semester everything changed; some things went worse and some improved, or maybe is easier to say that it simply changed. New trips, new friends, new classes and a new attitude to face Erasmus because its not the same the wonder and surprise which caracterize the group of the first semester, and this strange feeling that fills my days, mix of sadness and anxiety and hurry in order to get all the fun you can, to see everything, to travel everywhere, because you know this is finishing.

I want to speak about this. I want to leave testimony of this stage.

I already spoke about the sadness of seeing your friends leaving in the first semester. The fear to the oblivion, the feeling that they will move on and you wil stay here, going to the same clubs, same restaurants and that, of course, its not going to be the same. You are scared of all this, but before you can get over your emotional hangover new people come. I got two new roomates and it was hard to fill the space left by the previous ones. Juli and Soni were my roomates, my friends and my family and new people coming to stay in their beds, using their wardrobes and their spaces was a hard thing to assimilate. In fact, two weeks after Julia left i still could see her in the stuff she forgot, in the heritage she left for us and in the huge box she wanted to send to Spain and that was here, in the midde of the room for a long time; we were four people, Juli was still here. But then you get used to the new roomates, the new habits... you start to tell them things about you and, of course, about the times gone, the first semester stuff. When I realize how much I spoke -and I keep doing it- about the people that left, and the big room parties and the trips, I think that it must be very hard for the new people.

Yeah, its a bit harder for them. They came to a place that was full with people mourning the friends gone, people without the energy of the beggining. They arrived to a place full of ghosts. The comparisons were there all the time and the feeling that they were not our friends, that they could not fill that place. They arrived with a lot of energy and expectations and excitement about the new things, an excitement we didnt have anymore. They wanted to travel to places we had gone already and the most we could do was giving advices... advices that they probably didnt want, because when you are Erasmus you want to discover the world with your own eyes, make your own mistakes. And I think that we should have been very annoying with all the I-have-already-done-that and I-know-everything-you-have-to-know-about-Krakow attitude. If you are reading this, Belen or Fran or Ouissame or any of you guys, this is the moment to say sorry about that. But suddenly this people started to get under our skin. They organize amazing new trips and they discovered new places we didnt know and they brought noise and laughs to a place that had the feeling to be empty. It stopped to be "they" and started to be "us", or maybe we stopped being "people from first semester" and started to be Erasmus again.

Of course, it has not being the same, its a completely different experience. We dont go out so much, we want to do productive things time to time, we want to travel more and party less -I know some people could argue this- and we started to know a lot of new people. I started to go to Tandems and I actually spoke with new people, we even organized a trip with some girls we met there and it was amazing. I was more open to different things. I started to spend time with friends from the first semester that I had not being so close with before; and I discover new things about my friends and I loved them more. We argued and we tried to get over it, because in the same way the relationships grow in a stupidly fast way, the argues also have a different effect that when you are in the normal life; Erasmus takes all out of proportion. I discovered that long relationships deserve a shot, even when everybody is betting against. For the first time, since I am here, I started to feel how is like to have the heart in countries you have never been at. It has not being the same but it has being equally intense.

It has been a different Erasmus with new friends, new gossips, new cities and the same swirl of emotions. If the previous entrance was about the sadness of people leaving, this entrance is about gratitude to the new friends that brought adventure again to our Erasmus.

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