First week in Buenos Aires

Hola a todos!

I am writing my first blog while I am already an "intercambio" student for more than 6 weeks. In the coming blogs I will try to give an impression of the exchange life which includes: studying in a foreign language, traveling through stunning nature, and living in one of the biggest city in the world while "exchanging" with people from all over the world.

Although it has already been a while, I will start from the beginning: Why did I choose to go to Buenos Aires? The answer to this question is actually very simple: I wanted to learn Spanish and I wanted to leave Europe. Since Buenos Aires is the biggest, most interesting, and most safe Spanish speaking city, outside of Spain, I decided to apply. Fortunately my fantastic exchange coordinator, Linda, accepted my application and that's where it all started.

II

Hi again! In this entry I will talk some more about the accommodation in Stockholm, the senior buddy program and some information on how the educational part of this semester is put together.

The room I’m currently living in is assigned to me by the university. When I was signing my contract at the University housing office, they told me that I was a very lucky guy; apparently there are a lot of foreign students that weren’t assigned accommodation for the semester! They had/have to find rooms by themselves, something that isn’t easy as a foreigner in a completely unknown city. Also Stockholm is already having a big shortage in student accommodation. Consequential, there are a lot of foreign students that are currently living in youth hostels or staying with friends, hoping to find a room soon. This is extremely expensive, especially in Stockholm! So I was very glad to find out I was one of the lucky few that got an accommodation!

Holiday in Spain

This time I will not be starting with ‘difficult’ Spanish sentences so that I surely do not scare potential readers, but with something else. It cannot go unnoticed that, for me, it seems that Spaniards are enjoying life much more than Dutchies do. Work is something that definitely does not come first place, but good food and drinks and having fun with family and friends is. I really enjoy this Spanish way of living and I adapt to quite well I have to say. Having dinner at 10 pm is quite normal nowadays, which would be a ridiculous thing to do in the Netherlands. But enough of this, let me start my hell of a week …

The day after my arrival, Kelly and I went out for some good shopping in the numerous small streets of Madrid. Gran Via and Plaza del Sol are the well-known touristic shopping places. Shop after shop after shop with the same crappy touristic Madrid stuff. I cannot imagine why anybody would ever buy that.
We soon noticed that prices of shops that are also in Holland, like Zara en H&M, are sometimes a lot lower. So this meant even more shopping fun and we both treated ourselves quite good. Furthermore, we arranged our new Spanish telephone numbers. We did it at Orange, which looked cheap, but we compared it afterwards and we found out that Yoigo actually is the cheapest.
And that day we ate at 9.30, so as you can see we are quite used to the late time of having dinner.

To escape from the heat, we decided to have a nice refreshing swim at one of the public pools here in Madrid on Wednesday. We searched on the internet and that the one at Case de Campo looked the best and so we took the metro to there. It was a fantastic swimming resort, having three pools and some sunning areas to relax. We definitely had a great time there, though the water was really, really cold.

Thursday was our cultural day. We looked in our Lonely Planet and found a nice city walk along some cultural highlights. We started our tour at Plaza Oriente, which is the square next to the royal palace, Palacio Real. The square and the palace were breathtakingly beautiful. The palace looks really immense when you stand near to it. It is way bigger that Paleis op de Dam in Amsterdam. We wanted to go inside to get a grasp of how royalty lives, but the price of 5 euros was too much for us. We are still students, even if we are living in a foreign country. Later we found out that on Wednesdays the palace is for free for inhabitants of the EU, so we will definitely visit it at a later time.
We walked on to Jardines de Sabatini, which are the palaces gardens. Maintained very nice, they gave us a good overview of the size of Madrid. Then we walked on to Parque de la Montaña and Plaza de España were we enjoyed some relaxing time, which we needed in this heat.
One cannot visit Madrid and then not go to Museo del Prado. Because we are students, we could enter for free, which is of course really nice. I had already been there in January, so for me it was not that exciting any more. Kelly also thought the same so we were outside in 15 minutes.
Finishing our day with a pitiful failed tortilla de patatas, we decided to get some well-deserved sleep.

Shopping time again! Yeah, me gusta! Because it is so cheap here, I could afford to buy again some new clothes. By the end of the day I unfortunately had to realize that this shopping spree had taken all of my budget for the day so we decided to have some churros con chocolate at Chocolatería de San Ginés, one of the best chocolatiers in town. They were absolutely delicious, definitely worth the try.
That evening we felt like having some pizza, so we decided to clean the oven on beforehand because it looked quite dirty. But we didn’t read the instructions of the oven-cleaning stuff well, which said you could use the oven for two hours. We turned it one and thus it started smoking after ten minutes. We said to ourselves, now what? So we decided to meet our new neighbour for the first time and ask him if he could bake our pizzas. And guess what, he did. We immediately liked him. This was a nice finish of this busy day.

Saturday we again went to Parque de la Montaña to visit Debod Temple, which is an Eqyptian temple in the middle of Madrid. When you approach it, you immediately see that it is not in its ‘normal surroundings’. There is no entrance fee, so we went inside for a visit. We thought it was stunning, because we had never seen something like this before. The hieroglyphs inside the temple were extraordinary. There was also a model which showed other temples that were moved outside of Egypt to other cities around the globe. There is even one in Leiden!
Later on the evening, a Dutch couple visited our apartment to check out the last free room. They are from Nijmegen, but not studying at an university, so we found out that people studying HBO are also accepted at universities here in Spain. A couple of days later they turned out to be our new roomies! That is really cool, not having to speak Spanish and English all day.

Another must do is visit El Rastro, which is every sunday. That is a gigantic market in the La Latina area of the city. Small street, a lot of stalls and shops and a lot of people made this impressive to see. We strolled around for about two hours, viewing all kinds of touristic nonsense, but also some traditional and local products.
Having enough of all those people, we fled to Parque del Retiro were we could rest our feet and enjoy the fantastic weather. We bought lunch and a bottle of wine on the way so we enjoyed the rest of the afternoon there. This is definitely the Spanish way of living!



Today, we visited Toledo, the former capital of Spain. I had already been there with my study association Asset | FIRST International in January, but seeing it in August is something totally different. Much hotter than in January, we had seen it quite soon, because for every touristic attraction you have to pay entrance fees. We did not feel like paying those, so we enjoyed to view from the fortress over the valley below it, which was beautiful, as you can see from the picture below.
So, loyal followers, now you have an indication of how great life can be. I have only one thing to say:

Madrid is awesome!

The adventures of Kelly in Madrid part 2.

It is now one week ago that we arrived in Madrid. We get more and more used to the Spanish way of life. “tjilp tjilp tjilp” this is a traffic light in Madrid. Instead of a woodpecker noise in like in the Netherlands “trrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr” they prefer a sparrow over here.
As we learned at Tilburg University in the Spanish classes that we have to say “hasta luego” when you say goodbye, people in Madrid say something like “hasta logo”.
When they ask you “que tal” they don’t really want to know how you are going but just ask it out of honesty and the only thing you have to say is “que tal” back to them.

First month in Singapore

Hello everybody,

Let me first introduce myself to you. I am Anouk de Jong, a third year IBA student at Tilburg University.... but not really in Tilburg at this moment. Currently I'm in Singapore for my exchange. Why did I chose for Singapore? Well for various reasons, for students interested in business, Asia is at this moment ofcourse the place to be. They are really upcoming in the world market and I hoped the courses in university here will give me some ideas which I would never be able to learn in an European country. Another reason is the culture of Asia, I expected it to be different from European culture and that I would learn a lot here also for my personality. Then ofcourse there is the weather, which is perfect over here! Last, but not least, the location of Singapore, in the middle of South-East Asia offers perfect travel opportunities. Well, in my opinion enough reasons to go to Singapore.

Buenos Aires

Hola! I am Kathinka de Veer and this semester I have the one-in-a-life-time-opportunity to enjoy 'the student life' in Buenos Aires, the largest spanish speaking city in the world! I fell in love with this city because of the wonderful stories I heard. The stories are true: The city is huge(!), but if you are living here it feels like a cozy village at the coast (don't think Buenos Aires has beaches though;)). To me, Buenos Aires is also the perfect opportunity to learn speak and understand Spanish. You will never learn another language as fluently as when you are living in a country where the language is spoken. South America is on the other side of the world, which might be scary for some, but which for certain means a lot of new experiences and getting to know a whole different lifestyle/mentality. Believe me, its the most precious experience in life!

Dublin

Heeey everybody!

Let me introduce myself first, I am Monique, 20 years old and I study International Business Administration. Therefore, It was a logical choice to go abroad. I decided to go Dublin for a number of reasons;
1. I would like to go to Europe, because I always find that mysteries can also be found close to home. 2. I wanted to go to a city where I have never been before. 3. Trinity College looks amazing!

어서오세요! (welcome!)

Hello everyone, I hope that in this blog I can show you some things I have been doing and will be doing the coming semester which I will be spending at Yonsei university in Seoul, the capital of South Korea.

At the moment it is midnight in Seoul, and I am in the university dorm. I arrived in Seoul the 23rd of August. We were picked up by members from one of the many global student clubs, which had organised transportation for us from the Incheon international airport to the Yonsei university campus.

When we arrived at the dorm, we were all placed randomly, in shared rooms. Who would be my room-mate was going to be a surprise. After finding the correct room, I was happy to see that I had been placed in a room with a Korean girl, Yegi.

Having already met the other student from Tilburg university who also attends Yonsei, Vera, at the airport, we decided to have dinner together.
That was a mistake.

Neither of us speak Korean, I can read the alphabet, but have little to no knowledge about the Korean food. I knew that many dishes here are very spicy, but we were starving, and we needed to eat something. So the first restaurant we could spot that had a giant menu outside with pictures of the food (easy, so you can just point) we went in. My Korean friends had often told me to eat bibimbap, because it was a traditional Korean dish, and according to them, very delicious. So we ordered two servings.
Bibimbab (비빔밥) literally translates into 'mixed rice'. It is served in a big stone bowl, with several types of vegetables, egg and hot pepper paste on top of a layer of rice. Meat can be added as well, however, ours didn't have any. You are supposed to mix all of it together using your chopsticks before you eat it, so we did.
We didn't really get to the eating part though, since the dish was, as we could've expected, very very spicy. I had to put my chopsticks down after three bites, since I couldn't take any more.
We exchanged looks, quickly paid the owner of the place, and left.

By now I have found that you should be very careful with what you order here. Just to be safe, I'm going to stick with Korean people for the first couple of days, so I can find out which dishes are safe for us foreigners to eat. I want to try everything eventually, but I need time to get used to the different spices used in the food.


The weather here at the moment is very humid and hot. During the day it reaches up to 32 degrees Celcius. Travelling across campus is therefore a really hard job. Aside from it being amazingly large, it's also very hilly. Every building has air-conditioning here, making it a lot more comfortable inside than outside at the moment.


The first few days here have been packed with introduction activities which were meant to help us adapt to the Korean way of life in an easy way, as well as giving us the proper information for the academic part of our exchange. The day had academic information sessions, which were alternated with games, a taekwondo (태권도) performance and meeting the student clubs which would help the international students.

In the evening, we met our mentor group, or 'cell' which is a group led by a few Korean 'mentors' who will do their best to show their cell the best of Korea, to take them to restaurants, show them around Seoul, and of course to answer general questions.

There is so much left to say about these first few days I have experienced here, but I will save those things for another blog.

Thank you for reading!

Preparations

As I sit here at Schiphol in the early morning, waiting for my first flight of the day to arrive, I feel it’s a perfect time to write my first blog. In this blog I’ll go into my preparations and application, and the issues which arose during the months before my departure.

Prezados,

Welcome. Via this medium I will try to let you know about my adventures and findings during my period as exchange student in Rio de Janeiro the coming five months. As a student International Economics and Finance at Tilburg University I chose to spent this semester as undergraduate student at Fundação Getulio Vargas in Rio de Janeiro. Why Rio? Why Brazil? In this first blog I will explain my choices, introduce you to the magnificent city and describe my first two weeks as a Gringo in the city of Cariocas.

While applying for a destination of exchange I knew I wanted to choose a country that not only had my interest in terms of beautiful places, good weather and kind people. There are also countries in the world that have my interest as to their increasingly development and their amazing economic performance in times of worldwide recessions and nearly bankruptcies of (former) developed countries. Brazil is one of these countries. I will spare you the boring and complicated delineation, but Brazil last year managed to show a growth of almost 8% of GDP where the EU and USA could hardly get 3%, two years after the global financial crisis of 2007.

How are these major developments possible in a country that tends to have a more communistic than capitalistic regime? How is Brazil, and especially Rio de Janeiro able to manage the two biggest sport events in the world in nearly two years? Questions for a country that most people know of being corrupt, dealing with high level of criminality and having the largest drug traffic in the world.

Let’s go back to my story. On Thursday the 21th of July I left Schiphol for a 30 hours taking trip to Rio de Janeiro. Beforehand, I managed to rent a room in a well located apartment together with two Brazilian guys at the beach of Botafogo. So with Christ the Redeemer looking up to me I arrived on Friday afternoon in a 34°C heat (not bad for a winter day) at my apartment, of course without my luggage. I immediately realized that the Portuguese courses I took in Tilburg would not be very helpful, since Portuguese in Portugal is really different than that from the Brazilians. The first week my roommates showed me the several well-known beaches and the impressive nightlife of Rio de Janeiro. Three years ago I already went here for a holiday so I could avoid the touristic attractions.

As said, it is currently winter here so the second week my lectures already started. After some introduction with the other exchange students (90% from Portugal, some Latin Americans and a few French) classes started. Luckily the first two weeks we could freely join all courses to find the most interesting ones. Eventually I changed all my preliminary chosen subjects. Classes here are really different than at Tilburg University. Smaller groups, more intervention with the students and starting at 7.30am will need some adjustment from my side. However, it is no problem to come one or two hours too late, you will still get the “bom dia” from the professor. At 1pm everybody joins the restaurant to get rice, feijão (black beans) and a large piece of meat. After that most students go to their work. Due to the increasing economy Brazilian businesses have to deal with a serious lack of well educated people, so a lot of students have part-time, well payed jobs. Other classmates install at the library to study. We go to the beach.

The first two weeks went on like this. Monday till Thursday lectures and trying to understand the most important parts of what the professors tells. After that the weekend starts with surfing classes at Ipanema praia, playing futbol in Flamengo, samba party’s in Lapa and much more fun. Next blog I will speak more about that and try to learn you more about the fantastic Brazilian culture. Valeu!

¡Hola desde España!

¡Hola todos! ¿Qué tal? Estoy bien.

Reading this, some of you might not understand what is written here. The correct translation for these sentences is: Hi everybody! How are you? I am fine. Some people might say that this is not really hard to understand and I can only agree. Being in Spain for a few days now is however something completely different. Making yourself clear is much more complicated than only using these basic sentences. Sometimes you are completely misunderstood and that can be hard. But enough of this, I will start the adventure …

Hej!

Hello everyone! Welcome to my First blog entry! Let me introduce myself: My name is Robin Mooren, 20 years old and I normally study business economics in Tilburg. However, I’ve always been interested in going abroad someday for a semester and now the time has finally come; currently I’m living in Stockholm, Sweden!
The main reason for me to go to Stockholm was that they have an excellent University. Stockholm University has earned a spot at several top 100 universities of the world lists frequently. Furthermore, they could offer me courses that were not in my curricular bachelor program in Tilburg, but were an addition to my study. I’ve also always had a thing for Scandinavian countries, and Sweden in particular. So Stockholm was quite an obvious choice for me.
Let’s begin at the beginning: It is very hard to pack for half a year! I was allowed a 20kg suitcase and 10kgs of hand luggage. When you hear this, you might think that’s more than sufficient to pack loads of stuff. However, that’s not quite true! You’ll be at your maximum packing weight in no time, with barely the things you ought to be necessary. So you should really think about what the necessities are for your trip, and about which things you'd rather leave behind. But maybe I’m just a bad packer!
When I finally got my luggage together, the day of my departure had almost come. I’ve flown from Charleroi, near Brussels, because it had the most convenient arrival times. However when you arrive at Stockholm Skavsta, you have to take a bus to the central station of Stockholm. This took approximately 80 minutes, which is almost as long as your flying time. But look at it on the bright side; At least you can see some of Sweden’s beautiful nature.
The first impression of the city is mind blowing; Stockholm is an amazingly beautiful city, with lots of incredible buildings and architecture, and lots of water. After this moment of astonishment I went to the university campus to meet with my senior buddy (more about that later), and to sign my contract for my room. Stockholm has a very convenient public transport system with a great metro, which will take you almost everywhere in the city in no time. The moment I arrived I was helped immediately to the housing office for the contract, and after meeting up with my buddy and arranging some other stuff, I went to my room.
We have been assigned Buddies to help us out, to get to know the neighborhood and to meet other people. It is very similar to the buddy program in Tilburg. You also get assigned a buddy, and he/she will have several people to guide. My buddy was very friendly and helped me take care of all the things I needed to do at the university. They also arrange all kinds of activities for your buddy group; I will elaborate more on that in the upcoming blogs.
I did not really experience a culture shock or anything like that. I guess Swedish people and culture are quite similar to the Netherlands. The Swedish are pretty reserved and they take care of everything themselves, but are always prepared to help you out if you need it. I don’t think I will encounter anything extremely bizarre or strange with regard to culture, or at least not from the Swedish Citizens!
So these were my first experiences here in Stockholm! I hope you enjoyed reading them and ‘till the next blog!

Első héten Magyarországon!

Sziastok! Welcome to my blog about Erasmus Exchange in Budapest, Hungary! =D

My name is Marit de Looijer, 20 years old and a 4th year student of Business Studies. There were multiple reasons why I chose Budapest as the destination of my big adventure. First of all, I wanted to see more sides of Europe, since I have experienced only the western and southern part so far. Secondly, I wanted it to be a country which was in such a location that it could bring all nationalities together, so I could learn about a lot of different cultures at the same time. And thirdly, I have heard so many good stories about this upcoming city, that I just wanted to be a part of it!

First day in Spain

24-8-2011 0.53 am

It was the 21st of August 2011, my last night in the Netherlands for this year. I just realised myself how long I will stay in Madrid. I decided to spent my last night next to my mum. At 5.30 am my alarm clock rang. I just ate a bit and then I had to say goodbye to my dog. It is my own dog so it was hard for me. Then we left to Eindhoven Airport. I could check in my baggage immediately so I had to wait an hour before I could go to the passport check. After an hour the most difficult part so far was there, I had to say goodbye to my parents and brother. It was really hard. I took my flight together with Jasper. When we arrived at Madrid Airport it went really fast. We picked up our suitcases in 10 minutes, really fast when you compare this to Schiphol. We already arranged our room before we went to Madrid so we knew we had to take the metro to Lista. We found out they do not accepted Dutch bank card so fortunately Jasper had some cash. In about half an hour we arrived at our new address; Calle de Don Ramon de la Cruz 88, in the middle of Salamanca, the most elegance district of Madrid. The house was like a hotel or something. A big entrance hall with some ponds in. We got our keys and turned out our suitcases. After we went to the supermarket where we found out that in Spain they do not eat a slice of bread with some Nutella on it so we bought some eggs, bread, jam and ham. After we went out for dinner in the city centre. There were a lot of people from over the whole world because of the JMJ 2011. at 9.00 pm we took place at a restaurant. We took the daily menu and first got a plate paella. It was so dry and tasteless so I didn't like it at all. I hadn't finished my first dish yet but the waiter already brought the second plate. I told him I didn't want it yet and he became a bit grumpy and tried it again when I was still eating my tasteless paella. When I finally got my fish, this was even worse than the paella, we paid for the drinks and left the restaurant. We took some KFC sh*t to our room and after we fell asleep. Not really the dinner where we hoped for but its a good first story.
Today we went for shopping and bought a lot for just so little money. Also we arranged our telephone cards. We have orange know and just pay 3,50 every week for internet and 50 texts a week. After we went to the Retiro park to rest a bit. Tonight we ate at 9.30, as you can see it is really easy to get used to the Spanish way of living . It is so hot that I don't want to eat early.
It is still a bit strange that I will be here for 5 months instead of two weeks but I think I will get used to this idea.