A really not challenging presentation

Here I am, at the end of my ESC. As I sat here with only one week to go, everything comes to mind.

Maybe is better to presented me first: I’m Giorgia, I’m 23 years old and for the last year I have lived in Germany and I have worked in a primary school.

As my name can tell, I came from Italy: the Bellissima Italia as someone call it. After finishing my bachelor’s degree in languages I decided I wanted to try something different before beginning another two years of study. As a lot of language students may understand, graduating in languages does not mean that you know the language as a mother tongue. In fact, you have the feeling that you have just wasted three years of your life doing nothing. At least, this was my feeling.

When I arrived here, I couldn’t speak, and I also couldn’t understand. At the beginning I was speaking more English than German. Having to do with children is also not the easiest job in the world: they don’t really understand what you are doing there, why you are in Germany alone without your parents. Some of them were actually curious and when you tell them that you came from Italy, you could see their eyes sparkling and telling you that they were already in Italy, but they don’t actually know where they were.

Some of them also helped me a lot: when I couldn’t say the name of something or I couldn’t pronounce the word really well, they were there trying to teach me. Most of the times they were right, sometimes they were wrong. One time I nearly missed an appointment because they made a mistake in saying to me in which way the hours are read. But I managed to resolve it by asking to am adults.

Also, it was the first time I was living alone. Well, not actually. With me there was and there is my boyfriend and we live together with 5 other people. I know it’s a bit strange that we do this experience together but here it is it was a good experience for both of us, but at least everything, good or bad, was lived and experienced together.

Another important point is living with the other: this, I must say, is a sore point. During this year I was constantly in conflict with some of my flatmates. This has culminated in a really nasty situation that is really long and complicated that I really need an article alone to describe it.

To sum up, this year has been really satisfying but has also put me in some uncomfortable position that I needed to resolve alone or at least try to resolve. It’s a life lessons anyway that I will bring with me forever.