Maintaining Tourist Status

Hi everyone!

These two weeks have been full of some ups and downs for me. Luckily, I found the solution on how to avoid the downs and only feeling high up in the sky all the time =)

It is not that easy to really integrate in the Hungarian society. There is mostly, as I expected, contact with other international students and together you really create an 'Erasmus Society'. Personally, I do not mind about this. I love that I learn about dozens of other cultures anyway and I am lucky some of my courses at uni really focus on the elements of Hungarian/ Central European society!

I have been living in Hungary for 2.5 months now and it has been a hell of ride. So many experiences, so many things to do and things to see.. However, if you do not pay attention, things might start to get normal at some point. You might start to get used to all these amazing people and sights around you and might not even notice anymore that you live in another country. I personally try to remind myself of how special this all is as much as possible, especially since I have the tendency to adjust to things really quickly. In general that I consider that to be a really good quality, but on the downside it sometimes means that things become too much of a routine to me and if there is one thing that does not fit me... So, my intentions for the coming months: Maintaining Tourist Status =) Visiting other countries, making a list of tourist stuff to do in Budapest itself, going out for dinner and taking a lot of pictures! It works!

Back to Business

After ten fantastic days of acclimatization, enjoying the city and going out a lot, it was time to find an apartment and getting ready for Peking University. On Sunday during my long search for five minutes, a message popped up on the Facebook page of our exchange (yes we have Facebook here, thanks to the VPN of Tilburg University :). The message was from a small cute Norwegian girl, who looked for a flat mate. Exactly in the area I wanted to live in, between the university and the lively student area Wudaokou. One phone call, a taxi ride of €2,30 and forty minutes later, I had an apartment!!! Yes lucky bastard, were the words of many people who had been looking for an apartment like this for many days.
Two days after that was the introduction and the registration on the campus of Peking University, which they call “Beda” here. The campus is huge and beautiful, with its big lake, small bridges and old Chinese style buildings.

The main building of our business school: Guanghua School of Management is, on top of that, the fanciest one of all. Registration and the campus tour where not impressive, however

Singapore food

As I promised some blogs ago I would tell you more about the food and drinks in Singapore. Food is next to study or work the most important thing in the life of a Singaporean. You see and smell food everywhere and you can buy food on every single corner of the street. In Tilburg I prepare my food always by myself or with my roommates, here I did that only once. This has two reasons, it is more expensive to do groceries and prepare dinner yourself than to buy it somewhere and the food here is so amazingly good!!! The most common place to eat is in a food court, which is a collection of food stalls from different countries. You can choose Thai, Indian, Korean, seafood, Indonesian, Vietnamese, Japanese or Western food. I have to admit I love almost all the food, but in my opinion Korean is the best. Although, seafood is also very very good. 

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.

my parents are here

Hello everybody, last time I told you my best friend was here. I will continue my blog from here. Sunday we ate our lunch in a very nice bar, its called 100 monteditos. If you are once in Madrid you have to go here for sure. For just 1 euro you can get a little bread. This ones are really small, more like a tapas with for example smoked salmon and tortilla. Next you can get a pull with 0,5 litre of beer for just 1 euro or some soda. We had a nice lunch there and it is always crowed.

Northern light and more

I would like to start with something surprising: last Monday I saw the northern lights and I was really overwhelmed by this appearance! During the day it was very nice weather in Bergen. The sky was clear, blue and the sun was shining. Since we thought this should be the last sunny day we decided to have a barbecue. As usual everybody took some food and this resulted in an extensive dinner from the most nasty German sausages to the best Spanish tapas. It was a wonderful evening and those are, especially at the end of October, quite rare in Bergen. After dinner, around 10 o’clock, a part of the group went home, but I decided to stay together with a Russian girl and an Austrian guy. While talking about culture differences, habits, and our experiences, we watched the stars. In the meantime, it was midnight and gradually it was getting colder. Then something weird happened. The sky became much lighter and it looked like we could see each other better. A green light appeared slowly, became stronger, and moved relatively fast. The light was mostly green, but sometimes there were also blue and red parts in it. We couldn’t believe it, but it was the northern light! The polar light, which everyone hopes to see in the northern part of Scandinavia during the winter months. It was Monday, October 24^th (actually is was Tuesday early in the morning), we were located in Bergen (in the southern part of Scandinavia) and the appearance of the northern light was a fact. It seemed like a dream, but it was real!

The Spanish life

Hey all!

It is time to give you an update again! Of course I studied, cleaned the house etc, but I don’t think you are very much interested in that. That’s why I quickly go on with one of my favorite hobbies: football. On Monday September 19 I finally had my first futsal training. Indeed: futsal. In the Netherlands I play ‘normal’ football, but that was not possible this semester at my university. Therefore, I decided to try to be selected for the futsal team. I was very curious about how many girls would come and how well they could play. I enjoyed the training very much, because it was three weeks ago that I played soccer for the last time. The girls played well and were very nice too. After three trainings, the trainer told me I was selected! In the Netherlands, I am very used to the concept of having a drink after matches and trainings. I was wondering whether this was usual in Spain too. Well, yes, the Spanish girls know this element very well! I really enjoy having a drink with this team!

Except for playing football myself, I also enjoy watching football matches. And of course, Real Madrid’s stadium Santiago Bernabéu is one of the best places to do this. I managed to arrange tickets for the match Real Madrid – Ajax (for the Champions League)! Tuesday September 27, I went there with 4 other girls and we had a lot of fun. I really enjoyed the tricks of Ronaldo and Kaká…

Spanish Culture

After two months living in Madrid I will tell you something about my experiences with the Spanish culture. The first weeks on University were hard for me. Unlike in the Netherlands the difference between teacher and students is much bigger. For example when you are quite sure the teacher is making a mistake and you try to tell him he can become very grumpy.
In the Netherlands we are used to have your own opinion here it is better to follow the opinion of your teacher.

When Spanish people give an answer on a teacher’s question the will always start their answer with ; Maybe … because you cannot be as sure of your answer as the teacher. One day the average grade of an exam was around 2 or 3 , the teacher asked us how it could be possible that nobody understood the exam. I told him that the questions were a bit unclear so I did not understand what he was asking for. The whole group of Spanish people looked at me in shock because they thought I was very rude by telling him what I was really thinking. However after me some Spanish people were carefully supporting me by admitting my point.

Sinchon

This blog will be a little different.
I here present you a video for you to enjoy, about the area 'Sinchon' which is the area that is mostly visited by students from our university, Yonsei. All of the bigger universities have these designated "area's" which are usually named after the uni it belongs to. For example, Ehwa, the womens university close to us, has "Ehdae". Hongshik, another university close to us, has "Hongdae".
Hope you guys like it!

The first period of exams has finished and I think I did quite well. My written answers in portuguese will probably not be perfect but luckily the professors are really cooperating. After the exams, I really enjoyed my spare time, because beginning lectures on 1th of August took all my holiday.

After three months living in Rio de Janeiro I thought it would be a good Idea to travel around to see some other wonderful places in Brazil. First, I went to visit my family in their sitio near Petrópolis. After three hours driving in respectively a bus and a car, we finally arrived at their house. No roads, no neighboors and no cellphone signal means that you are probably in the middle of nowhere. However, we really enjoyed the nature and climbed up a yet unvisited mountain.

My second trip was

planned to São Paulo. As one the largest cities in the world it is hardly possible to find your way in the complex system of subways, trains and junctions. We stayed at a house of my French fellow student´s friend, visited some musea and discovered the exciting nightlife of the city.

Crazy study, great life!

Can’t believe already one month past since my last post. Almost every day I told myself I should write something, but it just ended in doing tons of assignments. I even started to think of myself as Queen’s students instead of an exchanger. Exchange life should be much easier, right?

I do think I should spend a little time talking about study life here. I admit, that Queens’ students are being “intense”, especially commerce students. I’ve heard about this tense study atmosphere in the North America for a long time, but the fact is that, when I see by myself, I was still shocked. I went to Stauffer Library, the largest one on campus (4 floors) on SUNDAY (it’s Sunday! Not even Saturday) to get some of my stuff back from my friend. Well, as what I had experienced in Tilburg, library on Sunday is almost empty, though there might still be some hard-working students. But what I saw here is that, it’s not simply that there are students, the whole library is FULL!!! You can not even find a place to sit! 

Lisboa, Lisbona, Lissabon, Lisbon...

It's holiday in Europe, the tourist level in Lisbon is rising again. I see traveller guides in 10 different languages, I start getting sick of tourists:p. They are always asking me the way, standing in the way and they are not going away. But all the tourists think I'm Portuguese and that pleases me.

Portugal in fire:

Nowadays Portugal is not doing well. Every day when I'm walking downtown I see huge demonstrations. I see a lot of people suffering, pickpockets in my supermarket and huge amount of homeless people. But the country stands also literally in fire.

Life at NHH, in Bergen and Norway

As far as I can remember, last time I wrote in particular about travelling in Norway. I travelled a lot around the country in both August and September and that has been a good choice. Now, about three weeks later, I can proof this for sure. The last weeks it is getting colder and colder, it is raining and blowing even more, and in some places which are not far away from Bergen, is it even snowing.

Next to this, from the last weeks on it is becoming busier with presentations and deadlines for assignments. I would really recommend to travel around during the first months if you are planning to go on exchange during the fall semester. But if I am honest, in June and July Norway is at its best. About three years ago I made a round trip through the southern part of the country (in July) and that was amazing! I saw the most beautiful sceneries, enjoyed the wonderful nature and luckily de sky was blue most of the time. This trip was one of the reasons that I wanted to go back to Norway for an exchange. As I have already mentioned in one of my previous blogs, the best option in Norway is to discover the country by car as then you are able to go wherever you want and you will reach the most magnificent places.

Unfortunately, this time I won’t be able to tell you something more about trips in Norway. The last weeks I really had to study and work on my assignments as I hadn’t spent much time on this before. But of course, this is also an important part of my exchange. Last week I finished the assignment for Purchasing Strategy & Supply Chain Management, presented it in class and now I only have to pass the final exam. For another course, called Social Media Marketing Research, I also have to do a research project and present it afterwards. But this is one of my most interesting courses since it is applied on practical business issues. It is about the role of social media in business which is considered as one of the most important things with regard to doing business in the future. My third course, Quantitative Risk Management, is a hard one. It is a kind of combination between finance, statistics and mathematics. Finally, I attend the Norwegian language course. It is nice to learn this language as you are able to understand things in and around the whole country. Furthermore, is quite similar to Dutch and German, so therefore I don’t need to put a lot of effort in it.

It's all in the Mix

It's all in the Mix

My second post might be a little late, but that makes it not less interesting. I will continue where I ended my first post.

The first two nights of my stay in Beijing I booked a hotel, which (when I got there) did not have a window. This seems quite common here. After checking in and some "lost in translation" I wandered around outside in one of the many "hutongs" (small alleys) surrounding the hotel. A maze of small shops/homes and genuine Beijing life, in one word: Fantastic!!! Every corner suprised me and it still