Writing about Start from Christoph Ungemach’s weblog

A new member of the warwick blogs community just posted for the first time, and got me thinking (again).

A translation of what he says for those who can’t speak german:

Following an information meeting about e-Learning, I have been convinced to start a weblog. For international students especially, this is an opportunity to describe what’s going on; to give friends and family an insight into life here on campus.

Apologies if my german is a little rusty.

But this made me realise how much I take the ability to stay in touch with people all over the world for granted.

• More or less everybody I know uses email, and many of them use some kind of online chat thing.


• Thanks to fierce competition in the international calls marketplace, I can talk by phone to people in most countries for little more than it costs to call within the UK.


• Ryanair¹ and friends have made short trips abroad a real possibility.

And I think about how much harder things must have been, even when I started uni. The internet was yet to explode onto the mainstream, international calls were expensive, and airfare (within europe anyway) cost on average £200, compared to about £50 that I seem to end up paying with Ryanair. And that was when money was still worth something :-)

Several of my friends have done erasmus programmes, both brits travelling abroad and foreigners I’ve met here. All have relied on the internet to stay in touch, and then used cheap calling cards for occasional phone calls.

I guess it’s a gain to be able to stay in touch so easily, but I wonder if it’s harder to fully immerse yourself in a new culture when you are so easily connected to home?

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¹I hate flying Ryanair, with a passion. Given any alternative, I’d rather fly with a real airline. The Airline Network is particularly good for finding reasonably priced fares on real airlines.