If you’re heading out to Germany for your year away, whether you’re Erasmus studying, working a cool internship or going down a volunteering route, you should look into practicing skills, passions and random activities in your spare time. Why? Because you’ll have way more spare time now then you will come 4th year, or, shudder, upon graduating when CVs, interviews and grown-up jobs will take over your life. Here’s our definitive list of the cool and quirky, from hip Berlin to dreamy Dortmund, happening Frankfurt and more...

1. Was mach’n?
Nothing prepares you for the German they speak in Austria.  Having spent my year abroad in Tirol, I now joke I speak Tirolean rather than German because they are two entirely different languages.  The first time someone opens their mouth and exclaims “isch mia wurscht” you will wonder where the hell you are and why on earth you chose to come here and you probably won’t figure out the answer to that question until you’re sitting in your first language class back at university and you can understand everything that people say in Hoch Deutsch but they have no understanding of your dialect whatsoever.  Understanding Austrian German is a huge advantage for the future and it’s something you just cannot pick up from a textbook.