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UK Address
61 Bridge Street, Kington, HR5 3DJ, United Kingdom +44 1273 711 606Ireland Address
Castleriver House, 14-15 Parliament Street, Dublin 2, Ireland +353 1 6784 800Hello and welcome back to my first blog in 2021.
I cannot believe that it is already March. The last months went by so quickly, especially after New Year’s Eve. I spent Christmas and New Year’s Eve at the DCU Christmas Camp with all the other exchange students who could not and did not want to go home for Christmas. I already knew some of them from the Quarantine Camp in September and met some of my friends again which was great.
After arriving at DCU, we had a covid test and got the keys for our rooms. I was lucky and lived in one apartment with my friends. Every apartment had a common room with a kitchen which was great because we were able to bake, cook and watch movies together. Our advisors also had a lot of trips planned such as visiting Dublin city but unfortunately one of the people got tested positive a couple of days after Christmas. After that, we all had to quarantine alone in our rooms and the food was delivered to our doors where we stood, talked and ate together so that none of us had to feel alone.
Unfortunately, one of my closest friends at DCU got tested positive and our whole apartment became close contact. Because he was not the only positive person on our floor, I had to move rooms the same day. But be and one of my friends who was close contact too spent New Year’s Eve together, ordered Chinese food and had a zoom call so that we can celebrate the last day of 2020 together!
That is why my first days in January were very relaxed, me and some friends who were also quarantining watched movies together, baked brownies, played games and talked a lot which was great because we were all in the same situation and had our worries about that.
It was a weird feeling not being able to go outside on our own although our advisors went for a short walk with us every day. There was still the possibility that me and my friends were positive which was not a nice thing to know especially because some of our friends got the COVID at the camp.
On the 8th of January, we had our 4th test and could leave DCU after 12 days of quarantine. On one hand I was very happy to be back home and to see my host family and my friends again but on the other I missed my DCU friends especially because we have lived together for more than 2 weeks and most of them live in a different part of Ireland.
We were and still are in level 5 of lockdown which means that the school are closed and we cannot go further away than 5km from our house.
Because of that, the weeks after DCU were not that spectacular but I went for a lot of walks with some friends and alone. We even had snow a couple of times which I did not expect and really enjoyed although we had a lot of sun and warm temperatures too.
