As a language student, I got to spend the third year of my degree studying internationally to improve my language skills. Later, it turned out a year abroad was a great source of content!
So this is my year abroad. This is me, aged twenty, living in western Switzerland, learning French grammar at 8 o’clock on Monday mornings and spending my considerable free time exploring my adopted homeland, learning to travel solo and learning a lot of life skills along the way. Join me in Neuchatel to see Switzerland.
This is the last of the Year Abroad stories – I’ve more or less reached the end of what I can remember well enough to write about. But I saved this one for the winter because it’s seasonally appropriate and it’s one of my favourite memories of my year learning French in western Switzerland. I… More Shrieking on the slopes at Chaumont
It’s that time of month again – another trip back in time to my year as a student in Switzerland in 2005/2006. Today we’re going down to the shores of Lake Geneva. I’d found some caves in my guidebook, semi-secret ones and I wanted to depart at the crack of dawn to find them. Unfortunately,… More Chateau de Chillon
My overwhelming memory of my day out in Bregenz is how difficult it was to get there. This is a Year Abroad story. I was a student living for a year in French-speaking west Switzerland and it finally occurred to me the month before I left that there wasn’t actually any reason why I needed… More Bregenz
While I was living in Switzerland, I’d been wanting to go to Schaffhausen and visit the Rhinefalls for some time – I’d just been waiting for a good day for it and this day was apparently the one. I changed trains at Winterthur and according to my notes had half an hour there during which… More Year Abroad: Schaffhausen
When I was a student, I lived in Switzerland, studying French at a language school. There were three native English speakers in my class and we became triplets (or sometimes Les Trois Anglophones) and our first trip out together – or so I always thought – was a day in Zurich. If you’re going to… More Year Abroad: Zurich