“I know someone who spent a week there. He went grocery shopping twice a day, there was nothing else to do.” This was the first time I had found somebody who had even heard of the city, which, for the next nine months of my life, I planned to make my home. The second, a history student, was not much more promising: “I’ve read about it, that was the location of one of the earliest pogroms.” No one else seemed to have heard of Fulda. But, as I stepped out of the Cambridge bubble and applied to become a language assistant for my year abroad, Fulda was about to hear of me.

I have now spent eight months in Fulda, and plan on spending the next eight weeks telling you about it. About my experience of trying to adapt to a new culture, that I should, with German citizenship, already call my own; about how I’m not alone in this task, with Fulda, like the rest of Germany, attempting to take in and integrate refugees; and about just how different German and British society really are.

Fuldaens are almost as unsure about us Brits as we are of them. Turning up to the Citizens Bureau to register my residency, my British passport was met with a look of surprise. They hadn’t seen one of these in a while and weren’t sure if this made me English, British, or United Kingdomish. Even more problematic was my German naturalisation certificate, which I had applied for straight after Brexit and had received less than a month before my arrival in Germany, leaving me without enough time to apply for an actual German passport before leaving my British home for a new German home abroad.

Factors like the small international presence in Fulda give the city a totally different feel to Cambridge. With a population half the size, and a student population less than half the size of Cambridge’s, Fulda’s cultural environment is radically different. With fewer people come fewer and worse services. We have clubs that are sweatier than Fez, and supermarkets that, during the week, have shorter hours than Sunday-Sainsbury’s. And on Sundays themselves, Fulda’s entire shopping scene rivals Sunday-Sainsbury’s with a Sunday-shut down.

“If refugees were truly welcome, no one would feel the need to spray-paint signs of compassion on the wall”

However, perhaps the greatest cultural difference is that the inhabitants of Fulda are also undeniably more socially conservative than the self-assuredly liberal intellectual Cambridge bubble. I’m often met with looks of thinly-veiled horror when I give my address - I live next to social houses for refugees. Outside, ‘you’re welcome’ is painted on the wall. But actions speak louder than words and if refugees were truly welcome, no one would feel the need to spray-paint signs of compassion on the wall. It would simply be obvious by the way Fuldaens would interact with new arrivals. Instead, working with refugees in a German school, I often hear from pupils that they don’t feel accepted here. They can’t make German friends and no one wants to rent them a flat.

Volunteering, ‘voluntourism’ and visions for the future

These last eight months have reminded me that life outside Cambridge does, indeed, exist and that my love-hate relationship to that city is no different than to this city. I might go grocery shopping twice a day in Fulda, but in Cambridge I often do the same, simply because I always forget something in the rush. When it comes down to it, both are now places that I like, and dislike, to call my home. Yet, as the end of my year abroad looms, a familiar nostalgia to the one I feel for Cambridge also wafts through the Fuldaen air. This is a city where you can walk down the street at your own pace, because there is no need to rush to a supervision or hurry to the library. The atmosphere here is special because everyone in a city like this takes the same laid-back attitude to life. I can read for pleasure, or more realistically, watch Netflix guilt-free. Alternatively, I can hang out with friends for an entire evening without the unwelcome sensation of panic overcoming me and dragging me back to an incomplete or overdue essay