Christmas

This week Kelly and I would go to Porto, how exciting!

First however some classes had to be attended. Monday was a quite normal day, except for the fact that our lovely Organizational Economics teacher announced a review test for next Thursday, one of the day we would be in Porto. That was a bit of a disappointment, but that test would only count for 4% of the final grade, so it could be worse.

5th december!

It’s the day before Sinterklaas, exciting …
To celebrate that, Kelly and I went out for dinner to Vivares 37 again, because it offers very good value for money. Three courses including bread and drinks for 13 euros!

Parents gone again ...

This week were the last days that my parents were here, so I would enjoy those days very much!

Monday the 28th I first had classes, but afterwards I went to spend to afternoon with my parents. They visited the ‘new’ part of Madrid that morning, which is between Nuevos Ministerios and Chamartín.

¡Mis padres!

Already the 21st of November: time flies when you are having fun. This is the week that my parents are visiting me, yay! This means that I have to be tour guide (again!), but for my parents it is nice to see all the places you have been bragging about the last couple months. First however, some school work has to be finished and some classes have to be attended.

Seville!

Hola gente! This week something quite exciting is about to happen: I will visit Seville! First however, some classes had to be attended and some homework has to be made.

Halloween

Hola todos! I am starting this blog with a holiday that is not really celebrated in the Netherlands, namely: Halloween. In Madrid, it is very common to totally dress up and have lots of fun during that day. We even got a day from university; I was surprised by that fact, but hey I could not complain. So Kelly and I decided to go to 100 Montaditos, our favourite place to have lunch. Cheap small sandwiches and half a litre beer for 1 euro, what else does a guy want? And also that day was the ‘last’ day with nice weather: the sun was shining, temperatures were 22+ degrees. Still lovely this time of year (November!).

Coldplay!

I will continue my blog where I left of last time: Kelly’s best friend, Jennifer, was here for her last day, but we had classes, so she decided to join us. Not that she really liked to get up a 7 a.m., but she had no other choice or she would be in our apartment all alone. Our teacher did not even look up when we were sitting front row; he probably assumed that she was one of his students who never comes to class. Jennifer enjoyed the class so much that she fell asleep after a few minutes.

Spanish culture

After living about 2 months in Madrid now, I can tell my loyal readers something about the cultural differences with the Netherlands.

First of all, the university. To be honest, it is not what I expected from a university. I would compare it more to high school because of the small classes, homework and the numerous cases and review tests. That was something I really had to get used to, because at Tilburg University there most of the time is only a final exam. So during the semester you do not have to do the cases, assignments and review tests we have to make now. When I think about that however, it might be a better way to get a higher grade for the final exam as you already have got some partial exams and midterms.

Friend time!

Summarizing last blog: Valencia was awesome! We arrived at our casa in Madrid around 1.30 a.m., so that was pretty late when you realize that we supposed to have classes the next morning at 9. So we decided to skip university all together that day and focus somewhat on our homework.
Later that day something way nicer was about to happen. Xander, a friend of mine from Holland would arrive at Barajas Airport. He arrived in the afternoon, so I went with him to his hostel in Calle Fuencarral, which is in the heart of Madrid. A great location to start exploring the city! After dropping of his stuff, we went to Parque Retiro to enjoy the ‘ever-shining’ sun.
In the evening Kelly made some delicious Spanish tapas for us. My friend cannot say that that that was not a warm welcome.

Vamos a la Playa ohohohoho

Madrid, what a city! It really starts to feel like home. Every time the university is finished it really feels like going home; something I did not expect in the beginning. It is how it is supposed to be.

Like every week there are some classes to attend. Sounds kinda boring, but they are actually getting better and better. Making homework is not always something I am looking forward to, but with this method totally different from the one at Tilburg University, you do understand the subject matter more quickly. I can so far only conclude that this only means that I have a real Christmas holiday. The first 3 days of the week went by very quickly.

Tinto!

Fans, readers, followers, another update from Madrid! Again packed full of adventures, so start reading …

On Monday I have my usual classes, which are often too early to give yourself the feeling that you are actually learning something. It are the most interesting subjects of the five, so I try to be a good student and participate as well as possible. The professor at Strategic Management was as unclear as always, so we did not know what we actually had to study for today’s review test.

Fun activities

Hi there, again an update from sunny Spain. The weather is still unbelievably great, in contrast to the Netherlands … Too bad we have to be in class during the week, but the activities and the weekend definitely make up for that.

Monday we had, as usual, our classes. This time everything went much more smooth. The beamer was working ,which was quite a victory, because now we could actually read what the professors had to say. Their ‘Spanglish’ is sometimes very hilarious and some support is therefore very convenient.

First classes ...

After having two weeks of fun and the feeling like you are on holiday, it was time to start the real life called university. The good thing about it is that you build up a daily rhythm, but the bad thing is that I have to get up at 7 a.m. every day, except for Friday, which is my weekly day of and thus a great start of a long, well-deserved weekend.

Madrid is awesome!

Before I start talking about my first days at Carlos III, I will tell some nice activities, some of them organized by ESN, which is also active at Tilburg University.

Tuesday 30 August we went to visit the new Parque Rio, which was opened last year and designed by students from the Netherlands. When we arrived there, we could not miss the designer bridge, which was quite an amazing structure ...

It was really cool to see an area where you can walk and relax without the hastiness of the big city.
On internet there was written that there was also a ‘beach’, so we really wanted to go and relax there. The beach part of Parque Rio were just some water fountains where you could jump through to refresh, but Kelly and I rented two chairs and a parasol and enjoyed the day with doing nothing and gaining a nice tan. Well, we got not only a tan, but also some burning spots, which really hurt. It was a nice day however.

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!

¡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 …