Two months in Germany

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After two months of living in Mannheim my life has become more or less stable and I even strarted to like it.

About the first week of these two months I've already written here, and now about what happened after. 

My German is already quite good for a person studying it for 4 months. I can explain what I need in the shop or to chat about some basic stuff. 

As I didn't manage to find temporary accommodation before arrival I continued my search already being here, in the city I didn't know at all. In total, I visited 4 appartments, this is briefly about my success:

• first time I had to ride a tram and then a stop by train to the city nearby and this was the day of my arrival in Germany,
• second time I missed my stop in train and waited for the next one for 20 minutes,
• third time I didn't manage to find how to reach the place and at my second attempt missed the stop by bus.

Dozens of sent and unanswered requests were making me depressed, 2 week long rent was going till the end and we came with this problem to International Office and Artem and I got rooms in dorms in the same flat (with 6 more people). There are pictures of my new home (before I put my stuff everywhere).

After getting an accommodation finally it's possible to focus on studying and social life! 
As for studying, it's extremely different from what we had on bachelor. Firstly, all me courses are in classes for 150-300 people. I've already written that we're 350+ in the same year and I thought it would be impossible to make friends with someone because you meet someone, then next time see in a month and have already forgot each other. But no, you meet new people all the time and see them quite often.

Also, a lot depends on how much time you spend on self-education. In GSOM you have a lot of homework but usually it's practise of theory you learn at lectures and you almost always know where to begin. And here we have to read coursebooks and, honestly speaking, I've lost my behavior of doing it and don't really like. All in all, selfdiscipline - all that we need. 

The third moment I don't really like is that there are not so many English-taught courses, and what is more, it's not always possible to get all that you want. Actually, the only course I had such problems with - case study for corporate finance, there was GMAT-based competition but in the last moment I was taken, Marketing and strategy courses, where a lot of attention is dedicated to practise, and therefore, number of seats is limited, distribution was random and many people didn't manage to take some courses they needed (but they finally solved it somehow). Actually, university and studying is the long story, so soon I'll tell you how my usual day here passes :)
As for spending free time, there are not that many options for it in Mannheim. These are some events of my life during last two months:

Two trips to Vincent's countryside (finally, we're able to see almost every weekend!)

Wurstmarkt festival, wine version of Oktoberfest, where people are drinking wine from pints. 

Trip to Heidelberg (the most beautiful of the cities nearby).

Halloween (I was a cracked doll)

In total, this note is a bit awkward as, on the one hand, nothing happens, and, on the other hand, living abroad is full of events every day. In the future I'll write more separately about Germany, university, culture, learning German and stuff. I hope, I'll overcome my laziness and posts would appear more often :)

It would be cool also to have a Q&A session about what you're most interested in about living in Germany, studying and so on. You can send them here or in comments, and I'll answer the most important in separate post :)

Mannheim :the first days

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I've been in Mannheim for 3 weeks, that's already enough for writing about some first experience about studying/living and stuff, but yet - my notes from the first days (the first 4 days to be precise), later it will be less detailed. A little spoiler: I'm disapointed a bit, firstly, because my expectation are quite high after exchange in Taiwan and, secondly, I need some time to get used to many things.

For some reasons, I don't do that many pictures so there are mostly text.
September, 1st
I didn't mange to sleep before flight but I was so overwhelmed by excitement after landing in Francfurt it kept me awake all day long.
The first negative impressions caught me already in the airport: I couldn't find train station to go to Mannheim. It turned out I had to go by bus to another terminal. After standing in the queue for tickets and overcoming difficulties of finding platform I managed to get into the train. Have to admit, that already at this step I realized that Germans are attentive and ready to help people. They don't come to you first, like Taiwanese, when they see you're lost but if you come to them they will tell you in all details how to find what you need.
There were few seats in the train and I had to sit on the floor and hardly could keep myself from crying because tickets costed 25€ for 30 minutes ride and I wasn't sure my buddy got my messages that I'm coming.  But happily she was waiting for me on the platform. I wanted to finish all the enrollment procedres as fast as I could so we went directly to the university. But it wasn't as fast as I expected: I needed to visit several places and stay in the queue almost everywhere. But everything was successful and I'm officially the master student in  Universität Mannheim. 
As looking for accommodation takes a lot of time and energy, me with my classmates from GSOM Ksenia and Artem reneted an appartment for the first 2 weeks on airbnb. What's interesting, there is a cat Lotta living here, she is very nice and non-problematic (eats only in the mornings and evenings, goes to the potty that you can clean only once two days, meows rarely and mostly for the reason). 

September, 2nd
In the evening we had a bub-crawl for freshmen (both bachelors and masters, 90% were Germans), what turned out to be a great disappointment. 
Just 4 days before I participated in making pub-crawl in GSOM: 5 teams of 10 people were visiting 5 bars, where they were expected by buddy team memebers who made them do some crazy tasks (push-ups with drinking, crocodile, crazy photos,..) and suggested tasks for extra points (speed beer drinking, body-shots, kissing team members). And here we had 20 teams of 30 people who just visited 2 bars drinking and talking and then everybody was supposed to go to the club where we didn't have enough place even for a half of participants. 
September, 3rd
In the morning there was a campus tour for the same freshmen, which happened to be less useful than expected because I already know the half of it and for another half I don't navigate well in the campus yet. 
University is located in the Palace, which is the main sight of Mannheim, and some surrounding buildings. There is a huge library of our faculty, as told, totally full from 8.30 a.m. starting from October, huge cafeteria, where lunch costs 2,80€ and many other places, where I'm about to start navigating. That's the lunch mentioned, as you can see you can be totally full after eating it :)

After excursion and lunch there was a game in the city. Our team (made from master freshmen born in March) made 2 tasks: building piramide laying on each other and breaking a ballon between two bodies. Also, for bonus points you could drink something or "do something funny". I was dissappointed they didn't make us do this previous night when it was more properly to drink and play games for violating each other's personal space. Coming to the 3rd station we were standing in the queue for so long that gave up and went to drink coffee with the rest of the team. Coffee was tasty but bees attacked it which spoiled all the joy.
September, 4th
Introduction day for our program, Mannheim Master in Management. Dean and student council were presenting.

Dean said we're 350: 100 on English track and the rest are on the German-English one. Average GMAT is 678. 

After there was a meeting with people from Areas (they are 6: Finance, Marketing, Management, Informations Systems, Accounting and Operations Management), but they were just answering questions in person, again in German, so the only output from this event were free drinks and pain-au-chocolat. 

In couple of hours there was a meeting of all foreign students with international office. There were several hundreds of us: exchangers, full-time students, PhD. 

We were told there are about 1,100 of international students in the university. President gave a speech (I would never think this man is a President of whole university if I saw him on the street, so not typical with heads of universities in Russia), presenters said inspirational stuff, staff of International office was presented. 

Aslo, we were told "Raise your hands who is from Europe/Asia/North America etc." and I was rising both on Europe and Asia because haven't decided :D

After, some organisations presented themselves: VISUM (organisation helping foreign students and making a lot of events), Christian organisation helping with studying German and integrating into German culture, and Institute of Sports. The last ones turned on some music in the end and made us a collective training. 

After there was the best part: we went to cafeteria where we had free refreshments, sandviches and cupcakes.

This is how my first working week passed. After there was another, devoted to searching for accommodation and moaning "I want to go home", the third that was about to moving into the dorm and trying to understand what the studying here is. But about that - in the next episode, stay tuned ;)