The Library

It is a cosy room with shelves filled with books, a subdued reading light and a bench laid out with soft pillows. It is a welcoming atmosphere. That’s why everybody likes the library on our ship and there are often people talking until late in the night. In these rounds the best conversations arise.

It is a place to have quite conversations, to spend late nights with talking. There are some of us, who spent a lot of time sitting in the library talking, listening to music, writing diary or being half asleep. These people even got a name, they are called “Bibmenschen”. The word comes from the German word “Bibliothek”, which means library and the last part of the word is “Menschen”, which means humans. We call them like that, because they spent a lot of their time in there, often more than half of the night. I’m not sure if it´s healthy to stay awake that long, but they don’t seem to have a problem with that.

Now I´m sitting in the library writing this English blog. Julian sitting opposite to me playing guitar and Amelie singing with him Mama Mia. So as one can see it is also a room to make music. Sometimes it is filled with people singing and playing instruments. As I was writing this sentence Julian and Amelie got the e-piano and Mika joined us. Now Amelie is playing “comptine d´un autre été” on the piano and it is a quiet melancholic mood.

I think the library could be seen as the heart of our community. It is the place where the most interesting talks take place. Almost every night there is a group, who sits there and talks about news from our ship or from the outside.

During the day it is a place where we not only have fun together, but also help each other. This is practised for example in the “Freiarbeit”. That is a time where we catch up on school work we haven’t understood or teach ourselves’ things we are interested in. If we don’t understand things, we can just ask friends, because there is always somebody who´s good in the subject someone else needs help with. This is a great, but also challenging thing about this ship, because the others are our classmates, friends and family at the same time. The teachers installed a folder with material of our lessons and worksheets. We can study every subject we like or things we need to know for the school at home. Here we don’t have homework, because instead we have the “Freiarbeit”, which means as much as free work. I think it is way better than homework, because we can study the things that we need to deepen.