Erasmus trip.

Yesterday I met the other Erasmus students in Bari for the first time. There are about 150 students in Bari (not a lot... the city has about 350.000 inhabitants, so 150 get lost very fast/other Italian cities have thousands of Erasmus students. But this was a reason for me to come here since I'm more interested in meeting Italians).
With two busses packed with 130 students, we went on a tour of northern Puglia and saw a village, a castle, and Trani, a really nice city about 50km north of Bari. I liked Trani best, it has a really picturesque port and a lot of small, cheap, family-run restaurants. Will definitely go back and spend more time there.

Meeting the other Erasmus was quite interesting. The biggest group are the Spanish (about 80% I'd guess), who form a closed group and talk Spanish all the time. There is not really a chance to access that group, and I don't speak Spanish anyway. The Spanish also live together in shared flats. I talked to a somewhat more open-minded Spanish guy yesterday and asked him why the Spanish are not interested in socializing with anyone but Spanish people... he told me that the reason is simple: most Spanish speak neither English nor Italian, just Spanish. Thus, it is much easier for them to stay in their "Spanish group" and avoid contact to people who don't speak Spanish. I don't quite understand why they came here, though... they don't seek any contact to Italians either and obviously don't speak any Italian.
The other big group, although much smaller than the first, are the Polish. Most of them are really open-minded, friendly and interested in other cultures. They speak a lot of languages: English (all of them, and quite well), German (some), Russian (most), French (some), and most have at least a basic knowledge of Italian. I enjoyed meeting them.

Then there's a couple of French and some Turkish people, and, surprise... almost NO Germans! I met two German girls, one of them quite strange, the other one was quite nice.
Spent my day mostly with two Turkish girls, Gamze and Nihan, and some Polish people, and, of course, chatted a lot with the Italians who went on the trip with us. I was surprised to see that my Italian skills are better than those of most other Erasmus students. It's quite strange... some people even asked me on the trip to order some ice cream for them in a gelateria or asked me if I could ask for a price... these are really basic things that everyone should have learnt after 2 days in Italy! Some of these students have been here for a month, and they don't speak a word....???!!! I don't get it. Even without doing a language course, you can sit down with a dictionary sometimes and look up some important words. I do it every single day.

The trip was a blast though, and ended with a huge party in a disco here in Bari. Today I didn't get up before 2 p.m. and felt really wasted.

The weather forecast is promising rain for the next days... oh well, time to sit down and study some.