Berlin is so exciting; living here is a dream come true! It must be the most unique place in the world, you’ll never see fashion, art and music out on the streets quite like this anywhere else!

I came last year for the Karneval der Kulturen (Carnival of Cultures), and totally fell in love with this city. During the carnival, there are hundreds of thousands of people dancing on the streets, and people from every country in the world set up floats and play music and serve food from their homelands, it’s a big international party! The appreciation people have here for diversity is amazing. According to the last census, there are nearly 700.000 registered residents in Berlin of foreign nationality, from 190 different countries! I think it’s also really inspiring that Berlin has a very open and welcoming attitude towards Syrian refugees displaced by civil war: There are over 350.000 refugees living in Berlin currently, and the government continues to enact policy which makes it easy for those seeking asylum to migrate here.

All public education in Germany is free for everyone, no matter where in the world you’re from, which is amazing. Their philosophy is that if education is expensive, only the rich can afford an education, which increases the socioeconomic divide in your country, and that’s a bad thing. When I found that out, I decided to come here to do my masters in Electrical Engineering at the Technical University.

I wanted to learn German while here, and I found a really great, inexpensive language school called Kapitel Zwei, which means “Chapter Two” in German! It’s at Alexanderplatz, in the middle of Berlin, next to the enormous TV Tower and loads of shopping and hustle and bustle. Right now, there’s an Oktoberfest celebration in the main square. I had a goulash with extra sauerkraut last weekend, and I’ll probably go back again for some famous German Kartoffelsalat (potato salad!) Thanks to Kapitel Zwei, my German is improving very rapidly – I’m taking an Intensive Course for three hours, four times a week. I have a lot of fun speaking to my classmates in German and learning the language together.

I’m job hunting right now, and house hunting. I’d like to live in Kreuzberg, which is where all the artists and crazy creatives live, because it’s cheap and exciting in a bit of a dangerous way. There are lots of restaurants and bars and clubs open all night. I go out dancing with my friends on the weekends a lot, the music scene here is incredible.