Blogger of the month for February

April 15, 2015

Blogging against the cold

It's cold, wet and gray outside. Some people wish they could go to a South Sea beach in this weather. The 23-year-old student Hannah is different, she is spending this winter in Siberia. Voluntarily. And since the nights in Russia can be long and cold, she kills the boredom and cold by blogging. In her blog UntermGefrierpunkt she tells funny and exciting stories from her semester abroad in Novosibirsk. There you will find the Russian response to global warming , Tolstoy and cockroaches . Hannah's blog offers the perfect distraction from the not-so-cold German winter and is therefore our blog of the month for February.

Hannah is actually studying Slavic studies in Berlin, so a semester abroad in Russia was almost mandatory. And so many of their fellow students also decided to stay in Moscow or St. Petersburg. Since Hannah had already been to both cities and even completed a voluntary social year near St. Petersburg, she decided against doing the same as her fellow students. She wanted to get to know another side of huge Russia and go to where many people used to be sent into exile: Siberia.

With almost 1.5 million inhabitants, the capital of Siberia, Novosibirsk, is anything but a small provincial town and is the third largest city in Russia after Moscow and St. Petersburg. However, it is not really an attraction for foreigners and tourists. Which Hannah discovered both advantages and disadvantages soon after her arrival. At the beginning she quickly reached her linguistic limits, even though she had been learning Russian for several years. Their lack of knowledge of Russian usually coincided with the lack of English or other language skills among those around them. Which didn't really make communication any easier. On the other hand, at her university, her dormitory and in other everyday life, she is always the exotic person that everyone wants to get to know. So, despite the language barriers, making contacts pretty much happened naturally.

Hannah blogs to practice writing, to inspire other students about Siberia and also to pass the time. The evenings and nights in the dormitory can be quite long. The curfew is from 11 p.m. to 7 a.m., and then you can only come in or out in exceptional cases. So if you don't want to explore Novosibirsk's nightlife until 7 a.m., you should get back to the dormitory in good time. And so the 23-year-old often sits at her desk in the evenings and writes about her life abroad. Not only to keep her friends and family back home up to date, but also, as I said, to practice writing. Because Hannah would like to become a journalist after her bachelor's degree and true to the motto: “If you become a master, you practice early!” She is already working on her future career. The practice seems to be paying off, because on Hannah's blog you thrive on a lot of word sense and often wordplay.

Hannah will be in Novosibirk until the end of June 2014 and will continue to fill her blog with life until the end of June 2014. However, she doesn't know yet whether she will continue to blog afterwards. Although she really enjoys publishing a new entry every two to three weeks, for her a blog is always tied to a benefit. And she doubts whether her student life in Berlin is as interesting to others as life in Siberia. That's why she'll probably give up being a blogger again in the middle of the year, but by then her blog will definitely have been transformed into a wonderful, digital educational novel.

You would also like to become blogger of the month or know someone who should be. Then simply write a short message to rademacher@uniglobale.de

Blogging against the cold It's cold, wet and gray outside. Some people wish they could go to a South Sea beach in this weather. The 23-year-old student Hannah is different, she is spending this winter in Siberia. Voluntarily. And since the nights in Russia can be long and cold, she kills the boredom and cold by blogging. On her blog

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