Last Updated on March 3, 2020 by AIFS Abroad
We caught up with AIFS Study Abroad alumni, Daniel and Liz, who met each other during the Spring 2018 semester in Berlin, Germany. They’ve been together since the May of last year, bridging the gap between Ohio and Massachusetts with lots of FaceTime and a visit every few months. Here’s their story:
Liz: We initially became friends simply due to the fact that our homestays [in Berlin] were so close together! We connected over our taste of music and our shared sense of humor. We lived along the same main road, and took the same bus to the same S-bahn station to go anywhere in Berlin. So we saw each other most mornings on the way to class, and often ended up going out and coming home together on nights out.
We were friends, but we didn’t become really close until Daniel and another friend of ours invited me to go on spring break with them. We had an amazing nine days traveling through Rome, the Amalfi Coast, and Barcelona. After coming home to Berlin, we started spending a lot more time together.
Daniel: After my host dad invited Liz over for dinner one evening, I started to cook dinners for Liz every Wednesday since she had a late class. We spent Wednesday evenings eating good food, dancing in the kitchen, and staying up way too late watching Netflix. Once spring began to arrive in Berlin, we would take walks around Schlachtensee, the lake near our neighborhood, at least twice a week. We explored and continued to fall in love with Berlin, getting our favorite foods, currywurst and döner, after classes and going to concerts and flea markets. Once the semester was coming to an end, it was an easy decision to continue our relationship back in the United States despite our distance.
We both had an incredible four months abroad. We love Berlin and the people we met there, and we hope to go back sooner rather than later. It’s pretty amazing that we happened to meet each other and that we have the once-in-a-lifetime experience of studying abroad as something we share as a couple.
Liz is currently a junior studying music production at Ohio University. Daniel is a senior majoring in history at University of Massachusetts-Lowell.
