It is unbelievable, that the first semester is already over! It felt strange to go home, because I kind of felt like leaving home at the same time when leaving Newcastle. I can genuinely say that I have settled in Newcastle within the first semester, not least due to the welcoming staff at Northumbria University and the kindness of the “geordies. Since the teaching style at my Uni back home it differs a lot to here in terms of the amount of self-study, which is tremendously higher at Northumbria Business School, I feel that I have become more independant and that I have learnt to organise myself more efficiently.
I am now back in Germany, enjoying the holidays with my family. In the following article I am going to tell you about how you make the most out of your Christmas Break and how is best to get back to your home country as an international student.
If you -like me- are not a native geordie and want to spend Christmas with your family away from Newcastle you might want to complete your assignments before you go home. I know that some students were lucky to have finished their exams in December already, but for my part the deadlines of handing in assignments were set at the beginning of January. However, if you want to have a relaxed Christmas holiday with your family, it is definitely recommendable to get cracking in November or even earlier. As some assignments have to be handed in as a phyisical copy, I wanted to make sure to submit everything before I left Newcastle. Honestly, I am not much of a swot, but I mistrust the reliability of German post services, especially during the Christmas and New Year’s period. Other than that, the library gets increasingly crowded the closer Christmas gets. This really is a well-intentioned advice from student to student only…
Now, that you have everything concerning Uni out of your head, you are finally ready to see your loved ones again, to stop worrying about grocery shopping and washing your clothes. The easiest way for many is probably to fly from Newcastle International Airport. Newcastle’s metro system is notorious for its simplicity -above all compared to the complicated Tube in London- so, if you hop on at Monument at City Centre, the metro takes you directly to the Airport within 25 Minutes for less than £5. The plane to Dusseldorf would only take 1 hour. Funnily enough, the drive to my home town, which is close to Frankfurt, would take half an hour longer than the flight from England to Germany. This is because there are unfortunately no direct flights from Frankfurt to Newcastle. Maybe some of you have encountered the same problem. For this reason, an alternative is to take the train from Newcastle main station (about 10 walking minutes from City Centre) to Edinburgh (about 2,5h ride), where a broader range of flights across Europe is offered. But you will get home eventually!
I hope this was helpful for some of you, maybe for the next Christmas Break and I wish all of you a successful and exciting new year 2016!
