Day 161: Vaaacaaation!

Right now, at 3:27 a.m. on February 22, 2006, my spring break officially begins. The German university system divides the academic year into semesters, each consisting of four months of classes, one month of exams, and one month of vacation. That means the main vacation months for a student in Germany are March and September.

My exams “ended” about a week and a half ago (I put “ended” in quotation marks because I still have one left on March 21). Until now, I’ve been busy finishing the dreaded protocols. A protocol is a report you have to write after completing a lab experiment. Writing one is quite tough if you didn’t really understand much during the experiment because you did it in German: you start from scratch, and the data you collected hardly matches what was theoretically supposed to happen. That’s why, while a German student might need a single day to write a protocol, for me it takes at least a week.

And I’ve just finished my last protocol. Ahead of me lies a month and a half of vacation, which I plan to use for an intensive German course (though I don’t know where yet—the Goethe Institut costs €900…), studying for the March 21 exam, and working on assignments for the courses that didn’t have exams.

You might think, dear reader, that there won’t be much “fun” for me during this break. But you’d be wrong: tomorrow I’m flying to Köln (Cologne) to spend a week in the Rhineland with my friends from the faculty (a mix of us Erasmus students and those coming from Spain). We’ll be there for Carnival and also do some sightseeing in the beautiful cities along the Rhine. I’ll keep you posted.