🤎 Brown meets Blue 💙

3. FIRST WEEK

So after colors ended, the real school started. All around the week of colors we were asked to sign up on the courses we wanted to take, so I signed up my architecture courses, I was so excited even though I'm my country I study arts and no architecture, but the courses were similar so I just validate them. During this week we started a tradition of getting together to cook traditional dishes of our countries. Jose started by making arepas for the blues, it wasn't all of us, just the ones that we were friends such as Cecile, Gianna, Andrea and her friend Carmen who we grow to like her. Jose Also invited his friend Sebastian to help him cook and be friends with us, it was nice to have this tradition, it made our days without colors less boring. We shared a lot of gossip and things in our daily basis, it was so nice.

Also in that time I was still struggling on getting a bank account as any virtual bank accepted my passport, fortunately I still had my money from my normal card in Mexico. So at some point I gave up and went directly to get a German bank account. This was going to be a struggle as I didn't speak any German but it was gonna be just for six months and still it took me another two weeks to get my bank account done. If anyone wants to live in Germany, chose Deutsches Bank, even when Commerzbank is a good bank and is the one I chose, traveling around Europe I could find more Deutsches Bank atm and sucursal.

Also that week I started to hang out a lot with Aria and Carlos, sometimes Isabel also joined us, at the same time I was having dinners with George and Dominiks, it was so random that we lived super close. During this dinners, Dominiks and I noticed that our schedules didn't matched at all so we arranged to have a weekly breakfast every Monday, that way we could stay in touch and still be good friends. So that's how Monday breakfast with Dominiks started.

This week I used to text a lot with Massimo, trying to figure out more about him, but he was so closed that made it difficult to me to know what he was thinking, anyway I tried. I also told Gianna about me liking Massimo, as she was also Italian and talked with him more than I, she could tell me a little more about him. She was concerned that I would break his heart but how when he didn't gave me the opportunity of even approach to him. Not because I was annoying, turns out that he grew in an all boys school and high school so he didn't know how to deal with girls at all. I got why he was so clueless really.

One day, Me Andrea and Carmen went to a reunion of our faculty on campus about which project we had to select, like it was mandatory for bachelor students that surpassed the 5th semestre to take a project. There was this project that I really liked the purpose, it was about redesigning a church that was devastated by an earthquake in the middle of Italy. You can guess we studied architecture.

As a person that comes from a country with constant earthquakes and most catholic so there's churches everywhere, I saw it as an excellent opportunity to challenge my knowledge about this. Even though I am agnostic and I reject the concept of a religion, I still love the architecture of some churches in my country and while younger I used to be a catechist, yeah, I think no one should be surprised how I passed from being a super religious close minded kid to end up being a liberal bisexual agnostic adult, of some other friends experiences we see it as the natural pattern.

Anyway, that's here where I noticed that Spanish people are really narrowed to their country. About Andrea and Carmen I had a really good relationship with them but for the rest of their friends, omg almost all of them were Spanish! Like if you go out of your country, you mostly want to know people from other parts of the world, but they were almost only Spanish. If they wanted to be friends with Spanish people, why did they left Spain? Anyway Massimo told me before that it's a problem that most Spanish have when they do Erasmus but that's how they are.

We were having a lot of gathers in Aria's place with Carlos and Isabel, I also invited George and Dominiks to join us as they lived close by but most of the time they were doing something else. George used to have a lot of sports to do while Dominiks also had more friends and he spent most of his time with them.

Also this week I started to make my daily meal habits. As I come from a country we're meat is the base for the food dishes, leave no it was difficult and I didn't had any support of my family, but coming to Germany, it was the paradise of non meat eaters. Here I could finally do my journey to vegetarian without restrictions. Of course I consulted with my mother as she was a doctor but she had no problem and gave me a lot of tips about how to do it, of course this was also thanks that her boyfriend is from India so he is a basically lifetime vegetarian. So eating vegetarian here was a blessing and also so easy and delicious so I have no complains. Dominiks used to say that I was being brainwashed to hate meat but just because he lives eating meat everyday and he love it.

If I'm honest, one of my cousins got cancer as soon as I got here, some days before me coming he was diagnosed. For me it was devastating as he is like big brother for me, he's been in my life the last 9 years, he's the husband of my favorite cousin and like a really important part of our family. In the moment he was diagnosed, they just moved to Canada due to the insecurity lived in Mexico, as the state where they lived was a battlefield between two powerful drug cartels in Mexico, everyday there was a shooting and to grow up as an honest businessman was impossible. They moved to Canada to start a new life as my cousin Susana started studying her master degree in Vancouver and her Husband Luis started working there. They were really happy the first six months until Luis got diagnosed and all family in Mexico started moving to Canada to help.

The reality is that we are not wealthy, I remember the first 6 years of my childhood as a really poor person, and even when we moved to a decent middle class house, we still struggled to cover our basic needs. While my father was still here we were really poor and everyday there was violence in my house, but when he abandoned us when I was 14, that's when we actually started living. My mom finally could had access to her money and sweared that she would never let her family down again. As the time passed, we learned how to spend and how to save money so that way we could afford to visit other countries, but just because of hardworking. Hard work that still wasn't good rewarded in Mexico.

I wanted to give up and told my mom to give him all the money as difficult times seemed to approach but she told me: "you need to go out of this fucking country and this is the first step. We worked ages for this and you are not giving it up! We will be fine here dealing with it, you need to leave!" It was a final decision. The fact that my cousin was suffering and everyone but me was there to help him made me feel prepotent.

One night there was a cocktail party in one of the dormitories that wasn't mine, Massimo was going to be there, so even though none of my friends was going, I was just to see him. Being honest, the party was pretty much empty as it was during a Wednesday but he spent most of his time with me. I was really down that night and he listened how I felt about my family having a hard time in Mexico and Canada and I could do nothing to help them.

He actually didn't know how to help me as he wasn't really close to his family and in Europe they don't have as much family problems as we did but he still tried to comfort for me and understand me. He is such a nice guy and the fact that for me he was attractive made me want to be more with him, even though he didn't even noticed my feelings for him. I stayed there as long as the Ubahn allowed me and left feeling relieved and warm hearted.

-M