Hello dear Steemians!
It's me, Ellie. As part of my examination to a child care taker, we have several internships. But special about this is, that we can do one of them abroad. It's like studying abroad for one semester, but for a shorter period. We were ableto stay 6 weeks in any European country. I've chosen Italy and went to Rome in September last year. We've been two girls there, sharing a flat and working in the same institution: the kindergarten in the German School in Rome.
To talk about something that big would be too much for just one post, so I decided to make a report series (if you're interested). This one is about the preparation, the arrival and our first daysin the Italian capital.
Prep-time: Most important is how to survive. No mother making you dinner or wash your clothes etc.! It was great to experience self-reliance. A good thing is, that we got help from an organisation called "Erasmus". You receive money of them, but with the following conditions: we got an extra task from our school to work on while we've been there and most importantly: you have to organise everything by yourself. This means looking for an institution, a place to live (own apartment or guest family, we were free to choose), how to get to your destination and travel around etc.
So this is what we did. Our internship started in September, so we began to look for institutions in February. Rome both accepted us immediately, so this is where we would go to.
We booked quite cheap flights by Lufthansa and got our flat over AirBnB. I really recommended that page, so many nice people sharing their rooms and houses for (at least sometimes) a quite affordable sum of money! We organized it well and were very excited about the day of arrival. The travel was quite short, because the distance from Frankfurt (Main) to Rome by a plain is only about 2 hours and a bit. It was a big uncommon to me to travel with public transport from the Italian airport to our rented flat, because I'm used to short distance, which I mostly drove by bike at my hometown :)
Saturday:
The day of the arrival, was very busy and went over quick. We've seen so many things that I can't even remember all by now.
Our hirer was a nice, young Italian man and his mom. Only him could speak a little english, but it was enough to communicate. They showed us everything at our new home and then they left. Then we could finally settle down. we got a really great apartment for our stay in Rome, we had a big kitchen/living room and each girl of us had their own room and bathroom.
Luckily, we had Wi-Fi, too, so that we could check where the next shops were. We even found a grocery store, which we already knew from Germany. I experienced, that grocery shopping is quite different in Italy: most things are more expensive, bottles are non-refundable, but fruits and veggies were relatively cheap, to my pleasure :D
Besides that, we messaged our relatives back in Germany. They were happy everything went well so far. But our first independent day was over fast and we went to bed early, exhausted by the many experiences made.
Sunday: One of the first things I've recognized in Rome was the colosseum. It was my first time in Italy ever and abroad for such a long time. We arrived just a day ago and on the next, we decided to explore some part of this big city. Before we left the flat, we checked how to get to see a view points. The public traffic is actually well organized in big city like Rome, but it was hard to know without a time table or a map of the city. We wandered around and took our first pictures. The best thing about the internship so far? Definetily the weather! It was sunny and pretty warm, in Germany it was cloudy, gray and cold. I could get used to that ;)
Monday:
This was our very first morning view, where we waited every working day to catch the cable car. We never actually knew when the next one would be coming, because they always run late. But there were 2 different lines until we had to change trains and it was quite easy to remember. From the flat to the school, we were using 3 different types of public transport every way, which took us about 45 to 60 minutes, depending on traffic. We were looking forward to meeting the kids and the team, excited about what will happen. You will get to find out more about my work, sightseeing and other stuff in Rome soon!
Hope you enjoyed this report! More content like this will follow. If you have any questions, just ask, I don't bite :)
-E