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Hey!

As of this week, the first exams are part of the past! The first exam I´ve had was the international marketing exam. I didn´t expect it to be extremely hard, and luckily I was right. It was very straight forward, and I expect a very nice grade. But as the professor said: it is not about the exam, it is about the learning process and the course! Even though many teachers like to think their course works like this, in this case it actually was the case.

Next up was the hometake exam for History of the welfare state. Even though we had to write 4200 words (which equals around 9 pages), it only consisted of 3 questions, and we had 1 week to finish it. Sounds like a piece of cake, doesn’t it? But this turned out to be a big challenge. The questions were very hard, and it took all of my creativity and endurance to finish this one. We were only allowed to use the literature of the course, but considering this was 3 books and around 20 papers, it was more than enough! Time will tell if my efforts will be rewarded with a good grade!

My new courses have also started. Yes, plural! There were 2 courses that took my interest, so I decided to try the same tactic I tried last part of the semester. The courses are Human Resource management and Business 2 Business management and marketing. Both again consist of exercises, presentations and papers. So it will again be a lot of work, but hopefully it will be satisfying. A good thing is that for the most part, the courses do not have mandatory lectures, and the teachers seem very nice as well. This gives me some more space in my schedule, which is not to be underestimated considering all the trips that are coming up this month!

I’ve been pretty busy with the exams, so beside that not too much exciting has happened. I’ve been out a lot to drink some coffee with friends. Also, occasionally we went to a nice pub to have a nice evening. This weekend however, we are going to Riga! It is supposed to be a very nice city, and the prices will probably also be a lot lower than here. I also finished our reservations for the weektrip to Lapland in December! This is going to be a very active trip, with activities such as dog sledging, snow mobiling, Ice climbing and more! It is definitely going to be awesome!

Last Saturday I also went to Marks place with Johannes to jam a little bit, and maybe record some music. As I am quite a fanatic of recording and playing myself, it is fascinating to see how other people record and fix their stuff. We fooled around a bit in the beginning, but after a while we got some quite nice melodies going. Also, Mark has an amp and an electric guitar here, and since I do not have that privilege, it always feels good to have one in my hands again! Because it was already getting quite late, we gave it a rest around 00:30, and went to a nice pub to discuss our further plans. It is definitely going to be continued!

Also, I’ve noticed that people in Sweden are into all kinds of music. Whereas most people in the Netherlands are into pop music and the dance scene, with Swedes almost everything is popular. There are a lot of alternative pubs in the city, but there are also clubs, opera houses, jazz clubs and more. Stockholm also has concerts in the´Ericsson Globe´, as mentioned in one of my previous blogs. Everywhere in the streets you’ll hear street musicians showing their skills. In the main shopping area there are several huge cd and Lp retailers. These are a dying breed in the Netherlands (Which is a shame, by the way!), but it is quite alive here. I’ve spend several hours in one of the biggest cd shops just looking around at their offer. It´s very refreshing to hear some Arcade fire, instead of the regular music heard in shops!