A frog from a Grimm fairy tale, in Marburg

The last week of summer school is already here! Crazy.

We were so busy the last week because we had to prepare a presentation about our country’s energy policies and strategies on top of classes and field trips. Luckily we had Monday off to catch up on sleep and do research for the presentation. We had to give the presentation on Thursday, but both Tuesday and Wednesday were filled with activities, so a lot of us ended up preparing for our presentation in the time we had left – which were basically the time we had to sleep in, so all of us did not get to sleep very much.

Tuesday we had classes all day, and a career fair in the evening.

Wednesday we had a field trip to Giessen and Marburg.

Marburg is the city where the Brother Grimm collected a lot of their fairy tales, so all over there were little figures from the tales. The city has a lot of Gothic architecture and other old buildings. The old part of town was so charming with the cobblestones roads and the timber framed buildings. It was funny to see the old buildings where the 2nd floor was larger than the 1st – this was done because they paid taxes (or something like it) for the area occupied on the ground, not the area of the building. So they could gain interior area by building the upper floors bigger than the 1st floor. Of course there were structural restrictions to how large they could make the upper floors due to the strength of their materials and their knowledge (or lack thereof).

A small square in Marburg

Thursday we gave our presentations. Thankfully the subject came pretty easily to me due to having had several courses which covered different facets of the energy policies in Denmark. So I didn’t need to use as much time as some of the other students – damn some of them looked tired.

In the evening we had a farewell party where we chilled and drank a bit. None of us really had the energy to go crazy so most of us went home pretty early.

Receiving my diploma!

Friday we had time off until the afternoon where the closing ceremony was. Here we got our diplomas and some gifts from the Darmstadt University with their logo on it. The teachers received some wine for planning the summer school.
In the evening we had a relaxed party with dinner so we could say goodbye before leaving Saturday morning.

It was so sad to say goodbye to everyone. Molly and I went with the first group to the airport so we could get help getting there by a local 🙂 . This meant that we had to use so many hours in the airport – and there is not that many things to do in Frankfurt airport. I ended up using 11+ hours in the airport before my flight took off.
And then I was home again and ready to sleep and relax the rest of the summer 🙂

Summer school in Darmstadt was an incredible experience, and something I would definitely recommend to anyone who wants to learn about Germany and meet new people.

Thanks to everyone who was part of my time in Germany 🙂