Reflections

What is left to say? One month has passed since my return to Hamburg, but still I often think of my experiences in California. I enjoyed my stay over there a lot which was mostly due to the nice people I met, the beautiful nature I saw and also the interesting physics I learned about.
My time there would have been quite different without my awesome "WG" (shared apartment) with TJ, Carena and Tia. Thank you so much! Living with the "locals" is the best way of getting to know the life in a foreign country and of making friends. Also in the institute I met so kind and helpful people. I really hope that those who are planning to come to Germany for physics or travel reasons will make their plans true soon! Furthermore, I was lucky to have Howie as my supervisor who organized so much for me.

I came back after one month with better impressions of the United States than my expectations had been. I realized how manifold the various states are and how much the student life in California differs from the life in the prairie of the Mid-West... In addition I was impressed by the breath taking landscapes outside huge cities.
People are very friendly, open, talkative, willing to help, but therefore not each phrase/ greeting should be taken too serious (like "How was your day?" when paying at the supermarket). In total I prefer living in Europe rather than in the US, but after this short stay I could indeed imagine living there for a bit longer.

I have been reporting about my experiences in detail on this this blog, focussing on the freetime activities so that the readers might get the impression that I did not work at all ;-) But honestly I sometimes resisted the Californian sun and I did work on my master's thesis! I just thought that it is more interesting to read about trips than about calculations... This blog was intended to keep you posted while I was away, as a kind of public diary to remember everything for myself and in the end I hope that some students considering whether to go on exchange to Santa Cruz might find it useful. My advice: go :-)

I am concluding this blog for the moment, but I strongly hope that in the next years there will be more opportunities for physics and non-phyics experiences abroad! :-)