I went on an exchange to Esslingen UAS which has three different campuses located in two small cities called Esslingen and Göppingen. The first three months I lived in Göppingen and I had to travel by train between Esslingen and Göppingen almost every day because I had classes in both campuses and because all the Erasmus meetings took place in Esslingen.
This was my view from the balcony while I lived in Göppingen.
Göppingen was a nice city but a very small one and there wasn’t a lot to see. I think that the most beautiful thing about this city was the landscape and that you could see the small mountains if you looked a little further.
Sometimes there were different kinds of nice markets but other days it was pretty boring and not a lot of things happened.
After living three months in Göppingen I moved to a dormitory located in Esslingen, because Göppingen didn’t have a lot to offer, only some of my lectures were held there.
View from the city of Esslingen.
Esslingen is a city that is more than 1200 years old and there are a lot of old houses with a timber frame like in the picture above. There are a lot of grapevines and Germany’s oldest sparkling wine producer Kessler is located there. Esslingen is one of the most beautiful cities I’ve seen.
The gate of Stuttgart’s Christmas market.
In December there were very nice Christmas markets everywhere in Germany. I visited the markets of Stuttgart, Esslingen and Göppingen. The atmosphere was wonderful in all of these places.
Pictures from Stuttgart’s Christmas market.
All these markets were decorated beautifully and they had a nice little details. The only thing that was missing was real snow.
Finnish Christmas market in Stuttgart.
Stuttgart’s Christmas market was a really big one and it even had a Finnish Christmas market where they sold typical Finnish products.
Gates of Esslingen’s Medieval Christmas market
I think that Esslingen had the best Christmas market. It was a Medieval one and it was built to look like in the old days and everyone there was dressed in the spirit of the time.
You could play different kinds of Medieval games like archery there.
Göppingen campus
Studying was a little bit different than in Finland. The classes I chose were more theoretical and had just a few labs if you compare to classes in Finland.
In my opinion it was a bit weird that all my classes were supposed to be in English but many teachers spoke German a lot during the classes and one teacher even spoke only German during the lectures. This made it difficult for me to study and I had to study harder at home and learn some things by myself.
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