Slice of Inspirational Life Experiences

Erasmus is most probably the best thing that could ever happened to me. Before my Erasmus experience my world composed of my country and I was thinking, my country has different culture and therefore I know a lot of different culture even I am living with many different cultures. Then I met with thousands of friends from tens of different culture and finally I realised that, my world began to bigger and the only thing I know is, I don’t know anything. This is the sentence that I heard from my special person for many times who made my Erasmus amazing.

I participated Erasmus exchange for two times, first one is in Tallinn/Estonia and other one is in Biberach/Germany where I met with my special person Dierk Andresen. I met with tens of peer friends but my most different and best friend is Dierk although he is almost forty years older than me.

I would make internship in Biberach and me and my professor were looking for a room for me to stay for two months, and Dierk has a local website, so my professor asked him to make a call for a room for two months and Dierk said ‘ I have a room and it’s available for two months’. This is how our story started.

I arrived in Biberach in quite hot day in July, I found his home and just after put my luggage to home our trip has started, and never stop until the day I returned. He is a retired English teacher who can also speak Turkish very well. We made daily trip to German towns and natural beauty of south Germany by bike. We were also tripping to a little bit far cities with bike and I am really missing all those beautiful times. We tripped to the Donau, Rhein Rivers, Konstanz Lake, Alp Mountains and many other natural beauties. We cycled more than a thousand of kilometres in two months. I was not a normal bicycle user and I also started to cycle, when I turned back to country I felt its absence and bought a bicycle. We also trip big cities and some big factories in South Germany, he called that factories temple of capitalism, and Dierk knows millions of things about every single city that we’ve visited, and told me about all of them, this is the part of tripping with friends that you can’t get from books.

I was making internship and he was cooking delicious food from different cultures every meal. Normally I don’t eat vegetables and I only eat standard Turkish food. Then I didn’t even understand, I started to eat the food I have never seen before. I learnt too many things from Dierk, I can’t even count them, especially I got lots of experiences about life, I learnt how to be friend, how to be a good person. German disciplinary is a well-known extraordinary things and I realised, this is the things what makes great Germany, great. I think he taught me the soft way of disciplinary of German people. Basically I can say this with all my heart, I met with many friends during my Erasmus times totally for 7 months, and Dierk is the one who affect my life most.

Dierk and I became really good friends, then I understand there is no border between people to become good friends. We are totally different, he is 40 years older than me, I am Muslim and he doesn’t believe but he came to mosque with me for sometimes, we went to church for the rite together, we ate together, we tripped together, once we watched the star raining and so on. After this friendship I can say that, I am close to achieve Erasmus programme goal to break the walls between Europe and Turkey. I convince myself, just because it is may be the best nations ever conjugated, it doesn’t mean that Europe is from a different world. We and whole world countries could join one day. Maybe European Nations will be Human Nation one day.