Hey guys,
As you may have seen already we posted different stories from people travelling home to spend this time of special circumstances with their families and not at Jacobs. So I decided to share my going-home plans with you. It’s not a going-home story because I am still on campus, but I planned to leave more than once.
When the spread of COVID-19 started to become serious and not just something going on far away from Germany I did not think of leaving. Since I live in Cologne, which was a little later one of the most affected areas in Germany, I decided to stay at our university. But let me start from the beginning.
I wanted to go home at the end of March just for 24h to surprise a friend, but as a responsible citizen, I quitted that trip. Attempt No.1
One week later I was supposed to meet my family for a trip, what never happened because the German government already imposed the travel restrictions. This was attempt No.2
For spring break I planned to go home too, but using public transportation to go to Cologne did not seem to be a good idea regarding the risk of getting infected and then infecting my family. Being quarantined for two weeks at home wasn’t very appealing to me. Another reason why I didn’t leave campus was my idea of writing the exams here and travelling back and forth when we are expected to refrain from all unnecessary trips, wasn’t very compliant with it. Neither had I wanted to put the community at Jacobs at risk by leaving campus and coming back with a pretty high chance of being infected. Therefore I decided to spend the entire semester on campus as a lot of other students do too, just that the majority of them have a far longer journey back home than I do. Finally attempt No.3 (and I will definitely make it with my fourth attempt when this semester ends).
Right now being at Jacobs is not that bad: we can still meet the people around, of course keeping at least 1.5m distance between each other, we can spend time outside on our campus, go for walks etc. In comparison to the strict regulations in other places, we are doing quite well here. For all of you who are not on campus, we have to wear fancy wristlets with the colour of our college, so we can only eat in our respective servery. I don’t want to deny you the view of it, so you´ll find a picture attached.
I hope you enjoyed this short report which just says that I wanted to go home a couple of times and it never worked out, partly because of my decision not spending the entire semester at home. So I don’t want to complain about what happened!