So the time has once again come for me to pack everything I might need in the coming 4 months, approach the airport and fly off on exchange. Which is awesome! This time, as most of you probably know, I’ll go to Castellanza outside Milano in Italy. However this time I didn’t go completely alone and spent the night in McDonalds with a crazy lady from Greece, thankfully. Sanaz and Gabriel are my companions from JIBS, and we all flew down here together. The flight arrived 19:40, 25 minutes erlier than expected, which helped since we had to travel for 71 km to get from the airport Bergamo to our university town. So, without having to show our passports (!) we left Bergamo and got on a bus to Milano. After admiring the grand station and gobbling pasta (we’re in Italy, it HAD to be pasta!) we hitched a train. Here it got difficult, since no station had a sign with the name of it. You just see a platform and hope for your dear life that it wasn’t your final desitnation. Thanks to a local person on the train it all went well though, and we got off in the not-so-pleasant weather at the Castellanza station.

Here comes the first impression of this semester: the first thing we see is three Italian guys (with the names Mario, Fabio and Paolo) doing “the wave” and happily cheering at us. Without the slightest hesitation they take our heavy bags, like gentlemen, we all squeeze together in a car (apart from Gabriel who had to wait for another ride) and got to the campus. Such an awesome first impression, you felt welcome from the first second!

At the campus we smoothly got our room keys. All of student campus is in one huuuuge building, so you never have to walk outside to get to your fellow students, we have internal phones so we can call each other for free between the rooms, they have vending machines -  and more importantly coffee machines -  a cafeteria...I never have to leave this building, technically.

But the real crown jewel is the room. You might remember how it looked back in wolves, and I was expecting something alike, only slightly bigger so that two people could fit. Boy, was I mistaken! It is so big, airy, and clean and lovely. The furniture look more of less new: we have two beds, two desks, two large shelves, two large wardrobes, two nightstands and a refrigerator. And we have our own bathroom. And not a tiny little bathroom, a proper one. I adore this room. Picture will come once I get a hold of a camera. So an inventory list will have to satisfy.

So, so far I love this exchange semester. The only enemy we have is the bell tower across the road - which belongs to a church which have way too many services and/or way too many reasons to ring the bell. Especially early.