Having conveniently forgotten over the past few weeks that I was in Spain to do a Physics degree, last Monday morning came around all too quickly. My first day was going ok until I arrived at my first maths lecture. Trying to understand a heavy-accented Russian man (with a cold) talk about partial differential equations in Spanish is no small feat. And then we started doing some relativistic quantum mechanics in one of my other modules, which proved rather tricky too. I think the hardest thing, rather than understanding the Spanish itself, is trying to slot into another university’s teaching system as, unsurprisingly, they may not teach topics in the same order as one’s home university does, meaning they will take some knowledge (which you may have no idea about) for granted.

All this, along with trying to keep hanging out with the other Erasmus students I’ve met (who frustratingly…