My stay in Bristol

The 7th week was marked with the final preparations for the CAE for which I had to go to London, which was completly different then Bristol since everything was bigger and took you a bigger amount of time to get there. The Exam went quite well (without knowing the results) but was tiring, since the three paper based parts were more or less non stop following each other. The woman I had the speaking exam with was originaly from spain, but spent her last 15 years living in London. She told me, that she is going to retourn to spain in the following week since the rents in London have risen enormously in the last years and as a single mother working in the health sector it has gotten harder and harder over her time in London. Because her son wanted to see his homecountry and their living standarts would be better back in spain. Since it was beginning of november you saw an increasing amount of red poppies. I learned from my hostmother that they are a symbol for the fallen soldiers in the

While I only came to Bristol to imrpove my english, other students came to BLC to prepeare themself for living in the UK. One of them, Vicki from Neuchatel, left the school last week after finishing her CFE, to start working in the UK. She made this decision because her boyfriend, who is originally from Venezuala, has been living in England for last few years. He came to England because of the economic situation and hyperinflation (up to 1000000% a year) in venezuela. Luckily for him, he is semi-italien which allows him to live in europe. In the end of the 5th week I went to the city of Portsmouth with my parents who came visiting me in the UK. In Portsmouth we went to the National Museum of the Royal Navy Portsmouth which showed (with ships from the napolionic era to the present days) how naval warfare and the life of the soldiers on them have changed. It was surprising to how cramped the early warships like the H.M.S Victory were, when you consider how many people were in these shi

The time is really running fast, unfortunately the weather has changed in the middle of week 4 and the warm and sunny days belong now more or less to the past. Of course it could be worse, the storm Callum for example presented himself only in a few houres of rain while other parts of Britain, like Cornwall, were flooded. The school focused in the 3rd week on talking over different cultures (which might has been a bit onesided since only the teachers were from switzerland) and the fourth week was more or less marked by structures and sentences on how to discuss in english and generall english speaking. Some expressions I've learnt are for example: having your wires crossed or to clear the air. Some words, which are rather not related to the topic, which I've learnt are: geordie, weepy, cheesy, elated, imposter syndrome or apprehensive. On thing that surprised my a bit in cultural regard about the UK is the fact that following the statements of multiple locals curry has tak

It's surprising how fast the time goes forwards, in my I ask myself has this really been already two and a half weeks? The second week has been marked by really nice weather, maybe you could argue that the thing with the bad weather is rather some kind of a stereotype. At the school, this week focused more on writing as well as some grammar in form of the claft-sentences. The lessons focused on how to write a formal letter or an essay which would bring you a good mark at the CAE. It was a good refreshment of older and more passive stored vocabulary as well with the structure of texts. Generally speaking the advanced certifcate seems to easier then I thought. I was surprised about my results in the reading and listening exam part we made (~85% each) and with still quite a few weeks left I'm thinking about to try the exam. New vocabulary I've learned last week is for example dull for boring, bloke as an informal way to say a person, as well as many other words like: twee,

After a little bit more then a week in Bristol i guess it's time for a first review. I'm quite happy about the fact that it turned out that BLC is a relative small school and so the classes aren't that big (about 3-8 students per class). I came into the CEA class which was for me somekind of unexpected because I really didn't rated my english that high. In my  morning class were only two other students Jan from Munich who also was a new student and Aisha Claire from Bern who ha s been at BLC for about 6 months now and in the afternoon class are three other swiss students (Chiara, Marine and Christopher) which results in five swiss and one german. But until now everyone is fine with english and no one speaks german or french (2 frechspeaking swiss) with eachother. The hostfamily is really nice, even though the information i got from the school about them was faulty at best (some things changed 15 years ago). Briget the host is a really nice person who knows quite a bi

In the following 8 weeks, I will travell to Bristo UK, to improve my english and my knowledge of the english culture. I choose Bristol as destination because it's a location which isn't that overrun by foreign language students then other locations in the UK but still is a bigger city (Population of around 459'000 people (acording to wikipedia)) and so allows for more things to do. My main for the trip is the improvement of my english since it's nowadays nearly impossible to work without a good understanding of the english language. Following to that I'll spend 30h a week in a language school in Bristol (BLC). Especially I hope to improve my oral english and to increase my vocabulary. But it would be wrong to only vistit a school to learn the language and not try to learn something the people and culture around it. Also it will be my first longer trip in a country with a foreign language. With this only a few days after my 18th birthday, I'm also looking forwa