In 1 day, 6 hours and 30 minutes I’ll be leaving the UK. At least for a month, since I have plans to meet up with a couple friends in Manchester then. At the start of this internship I was hoping that at the end I would say all these cliche things everyone says after their stay abroad. That I experienced a different culture, had a lot of new experiences and made a lot of new friends. Those same things I said after my stay in Canada seven years ago. That I would look back fondly to my time here.
Unfortunately I don’t feel any of these things.
The best thing about this „trip“ were the people I took it with. My roommate Julius and the two people living in walking distance from us, Thore and Dustin. Julius never complained about me staying up longer than him, or anything for that matter. He went out with us even though that isn’t his comfort zone. Thank you for that. Thore and Dustin lived about a 20 minute walk from us so we met up at least 2-3 times a week, whether that was in the pub, at the kebab place or the square where we got our lunch on weekends. I guess I wasn’t quite accurate when I said I wouldn’t look back fondly on my time here, since the time I spend with my friends is something I’ll happily remember for the rest of my life.
Sadly for the most part this was the only positive here. The majority of the time I did not enjoy work, I’ll go more into what exactly I did here in another blog. Traveling fees in London are also ridiculous, where in Berlin I pay 50 euro a month, in London I had to pay 200 pound, but to be fair I knew that going in. I was hoping that my host would live closer to my work, but that was never guaranteed.
Speaking of my host mother, from the get go I felt like we didn’t get along very well. I don’t blame her for most differences we had, it was simply a matter of opinion most of the time and I feel like we got along better the last few weeks. But I have to say neither the room nor the house were what I expected. I’ve gone over this before, but the tiny room with just the beds for us two and the creaky bed, the shower I barely fit in at all and being able to hear everything in the house left me disappointed.
I guess I did make new experiences, but they were mostly not positive ones. I met people, but the I wouldn’t call any of them my friends. I also wouldn’t say I experienced the culture here the way I was hoping to. At work I barely spoke to anyone as my coworkers mostly kept to themselves, the person I spoke with the most was the student from Spain. I didn’t have a lot of contact with my host either, other than for dinner or if there was a problem. I did experience pub culture a bit, but that was mostly just drunk Englishmen, most of whom were quite likeable to be fair.
I didn’t think I would say this when this all started, but I would have rather stayed in Berlin for these two months. I love English and it is my „chosen“ language. It’s what I speak with my friends online and with my brother, every show I watch or every game I play I do it in English and my ultimate plan in life is to immigrate to Canada one day. I thought just getting to speak English for two months would be worth it, but unfortunately this trip has left me sorely disappointed.