See you wherever my next Erasmus will take me

Sarah Lädke from Germany studies Physics at her home university in Göttingen and has recently spent one exchange semester at TalTech. Although Tallinn wasn’t her first choice she feels she has a second hometown now.
Why everyone thought Sarah went on Erasmus to Iceland? What’s the deal with Spanish tortilla versus the Mexican one? And why Sarah so strongly prefers the wine from the year 2019? All these and more in Sarah’s Erasmus story.

Tallinn instead of Stockholm

My name is Sarah, I am 22 years old, from Germany and I spent the last semester as an Erasmus student at TalTech. You may ask yourself why I chose to go to Estonia. Actually it wasn’t my first choice and when my faculty offered me this spot instead of my first choice Stockholm I was kind of sad. But I reminded myself that it’s always good to try something unconventional and new so I went for it.

Erasmus in Iceland?

The German translations of Estonia and Iceland are ‘Estland’ and ‘Island’, so as you probably reckon they sound pretty similar. All my friends and family that I told about going to ‘Estland’ for an Erasmus semester, answered with “Oh nice, how interesting, I always wanted to go to ‘Island’. I’m going to visit you!”. After enlightening them they replied skeptically “Oh ok, why Estonia?” or even “Never heard of Tallinn before, where exactly is that?”. So if you want to know what I tell them about Estonia now, how my Erasmus turned out, what I’ve learned and whether I have any regrets, keep on reading!

First things first

First some basic information about myself. I study Physics in Bachelor in a rather small town called Göttingen. Famous for and proud of physicists like Carl Friedrich Gauss, Max Born, James Franck or mathematicians like Emmy Noether. It is a town where more than 20% of residents are students and it’s university is one of the biggest in Germany. If you consider coming here I can only recommend it, small but very alive! So I spent my 5th semester (winter term 2020/21) in the four times bigger town Tallinn at it’s University of Technology which was smaller than half the size of my own university. TalTech is really cozy and I felt welcome from the beginning.

The times we had

During my time in Tallinn I’ve been living at the Academic Hostel Akadeemia Tee. I know that similar Erasmus Hostels exist in any Erasmus city. I shared my flat with three other girls, Nina from Georgia, Laura from Italy and Irene from Spain. It was so interesting and fun to explore living in a new country while learning so much about so many different cultures. Next to our flat there were a bunch of others with students from France, Poland, Czech Republic, Portugal, Slovakia, Romania… and lot’s of Germans as well. We went to the gym together, to games of the TalTech Basketball Team, did weekend trips to Saaremaa, Tartu and Helsinki, went to the opera, to many different saunas, went ice bathing, ice skating, played paintball and laser tag and of course sometimes we went to the library as well… We had countless fun nights in the hostel and theme parties like Beach Party, Pajama Night, Movie Night, Beer Pong Tournament, Mustache Night or Halloween.

This time Spanish tortilla

One evening’s theme was “tortilla night”. Irene, my Spanish roommate, put kilos of potatoes and 20 eggs on the list. The people who went shopping, wondered about how Irene wants to eat her tortilla wraps but ignored it and just bought it all. Back at the hostel we found out that Spanish people understand their “tortilla de patata” when talking about “tortillas” instead of tortilla wraps like every other nation would. “Tortilla de papata” is a typical Spanish potato omelet, which basically consists of potatoes, eggs and a lot of oil to fry it. So we ended up with double the amount of food we needed that night and just organized a second tortilla night the following evening. But this time it was “Spanish tortilla night”!

The year of the decade

Another regularly repeated event was “wine tasting evening”. Everyone had to bring a supermarket wine, not too expensive obviously cause the overall goal was to find well tasting affordable wine in Estonias supermarkets. While praising the grapes and introducing the vineyard and the family of our wine to the others, we discovered that everyone bought wine from the year 2019 by coincidence. (And we were almost 20 people…) From this day on we decided that 2019 was “the year of the decade” of supermarket wine and since that night we all kept buying only 2019 wine.

Earth citizens

During all these activities I met so many new, open minded and tolerant people with lasting impacts on how I see the world. Aren’t we all the same? We’re all Europeans or even “earth residents” (I know that sounds a little cheesy), just born under different circumstances with different languages and traditions.

I am really glad I came

During my stay I never felt homesick, maybe it’s because I lived abroad before for even longer and I was used to it or it was due to the lockdown and covid situation and I felt like not missing out on anything back home. Of course covid situation sucked in Estonia as well and without it my stay would have been even better but it was a good choice not to cancel but to go anyway. I am really glad I came.

Second home now

I left Tallinn, a town that feels like a second home now, with the regret of not staying longer, with the habit to buy wine only from 2019, with a lot of new recipes, many new friends all over Europe, some new Estonian words and phrases (It‘s such a difficult language! Have you ever heard of prepositions?) and with the certainty that I’m gonna do Erasmus again. And this time I know, it doesn’t matter where I go, it’s about the people you meet and the experiences you make and every town has it’s own special character which is worth exploring.

Wherever my next Erasmus will take me

I really enjoyed living in Tallinn, even though I had the pleasure to live in Mustamäe and I still feel like there is so much more to see after I had already lived there for almost five month. I am sure I will come back more than once in my life to walk through the streets of Tallinn’s beautiful Old Town.
So if you’re still just thinking about going and not convinced yet, read some more blog posts and then apply! I guess every Erasmus alumni will tell you the same. It’s easy to apply and you will probably never get a better and similar supervised chance to live and study abroad again.

See you maybe in Göttingen or wherever my next Erasmus will take me! Nägemist!

Greetings from Germany,
Sarah

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