How come?

OK, I'm still in the bus but this is going to be a somewhat different story. Time to recollect why I am here now. It all started off with the basic plan of going somewhere abroad. My wish was some country that speaks Spanish and so I started a first look around.
The options with Erasmus are not that great at our university since we are managed by the geographers who simply do something completely different and so have cooperations that don't really help a lot and the Professor in Charge at the Geography department seems to be rather rarely available. So one option is going to Paris and not going to the Sorbonne with which is our official cooperation but doing it like Tina and Luz and going to some other university there. That is what I had almost accepted as the best plan.

In southern America Erasmus doesn't work since it's an European programme. There I might have been able to find some place via some older cooperation partners of our institute or so but that would have involved quite some asking around and not really knowing how good those universities are. Especially since Paris has really good ones.

When we had our Seismology Field-trip to the Tuscany I met with Conny and Niko who were planning to visit Nick sometime soon and told me of the opportunity of being an intern with Nick. In the beginning I thought of staying for one or two months during spring break but that wouldn't have worked out on Nick's side. When I asked Prof. Hort what he thought of it, he had the idea of installing a Doppler radar system on the volcano. In this way a cooperation between Prof. Hort and Nick started and my new plan was to stay for half a year. When it was time to buy the tickets for the flight I talked about my plans a lot with several friends and saw that it was easily possible to get tickets for a stay of a whole year and so the planned time in Colima doubled again. This also is the maximum amount of time for which I can apply for extra funds from my scholarship.

The plan for the radar system is concrete by now and Prof. Hort is applying for funds from the German federal government (DFG/BMZ) for creating a permanent station and funding for a Ph. D. thesis for Lea who suffered my presence in her office during the last year while writing her diploma thesis. Thanks for the patience!

I think this is the basic Idea how it all happened.