An Experience Called Erasmus

This week I had some experiences with language barriers and I realized that you can always deal with them.  Erasmus is made for meeting people from all over the world and for improving your soft skills.  I can really claim that I already learned a lot about cross cultural communication since I am here.  The first thing I learned is even when you don't know the vocabulary you need, you can explain it in so many other ways.  One really obvious one is to decribe it with other words.  Another really funny and creative method we often use with friends is to google the word in our language and show them pictures of it. Because even when you translate it with a dictionary into english, it's possible that the other person also doesn't know the english word and then you are still at the same point.  Never give up and just start at some point, thats the second advice I can give people when they are moving abroad.  Because you always meet people who ...

Maybe it is a quite funny title for a post on a blog about an Erasmus Experience, it sounds like a deep, dramatic, serious topic.  But actually it describes the topic quite good. Today I want to share my little culture shock experiences with you. Maybe it is more about getting out of your comfort zone then having a real cultural shock, but sometimes small things can have a huge effect on how you feel abroad.  1. The lack of a wide variety of good german bread: Everytime when my breadbasket is empty I am afraid that I will not find the same again. The sortiment in the supermarkets is changing almost every day and good healthy bread is a rarity and very expensive compared to german supermarket bread.  2. The closure of bread packages: In germany I am used to metal fasteners to close a bag of bread. Here in Hungary they have something really hard to open and you can not close them again. I think a Hungarian has to show me the trick to use them haha.  ...