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.

Halloween and American Way of Life

Hi everyone!

Last Monday (October 31) was the day of Halloween! All the houses in the city were covered with pumpkins, ghosts, gravestones, skeletons etc. Some people even built a ‘Haunted House’ in front of their own house, which they use on the evening of Halloween. During my Halloween-dinner, the doorbell was ringing all the time. Children dressed up in very sweet costumes (one boy was dressed up as Obama!) asked me ‘Trick or Treat?’ and I gave them candy haha! For the Halloween-dinner we prepared filled pumpkin. The preparation of the pumpkin starts in the morning with getting out the content of the pumpkin and then filling it with vegetables, meat and potatoes. The filled pumpkin has to bake in the oven for the entire day. Furthermore, the student-Halloween parties found place the weekend before Halloween. Everyone wears a (scary) costume and it is quite similar to Carnaval in the Netherlands.

halloween

Hello people, here I am again with my weekly blog.
It’s already Halloween, a party they actually celebrate here and we got a day of for it. I went whit Jasper to the 100 monteditos to have a nice lunch. It was very hot again today and it could be maybe the last real hot day. Wearing a t-shirt drinking a Kas-limon and eating a delicious little bread with smoked salmon and scrimps with the sun in my face I felt myself really lucky! That night we went out for dinner with our Spanish friends and also our Russian friend came with us. We went to bocadillo de calamaris where we got a bread for 2,70 with calamaris. We went to La Latina a nice neighbourhood of Madrid were we bought a drink from the chino sellers which you can find everywhere. After we went to our apartment were also some other Spanish friends came so we were with a big group. It was such a very very nice evening! They learned me the Spanish and Latin-America dances. They also told us a lot about Spain and their youth. One friend of mine has a seconds house in Benidorm and invited us to go with him there for a weekend which will be so excited. Also his dad has his own hotel and every year he gives a big party there and he invited us for that party as well. Our Spanish friends are really so, so nice!

Singa after three months!

All the group projects are due the coming weeks, we have only one week of lectures left and the finals finish in 20 days….. AAAAH the Singapore experience is coming to an end!!!! How crazy is this, as I can remember arriving as the day of yesterday. Everything about Singapore seemed exciting and perfect, well now we know better ;). My parents and brother visited me last week and they pointed out the cultural differences to me again, while for me this all got normal and I’m used to it. We spend 5 days in Bali and 6 days in Singapore and it was good to show them all the places I’m spending my time here.

It’s hard to get a real impression of Singaporean people as they have very different personalities, but especially act differently in different contexts. In school I found out that there is a huge difference between the students in my marketing/business classes and my sociology class. In marketing and business they are not that keen on working with exchange students, they are competitive and go for their own success. In sociology class I made some true friends, we have lunch together, we talk about various topics and I get the feeling they actually do fun things next to their study and CV boosting activities. This is quite rare here in SMU!

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.

Finnish life and culture

I have lived in Finland for more than two months already and although I have mainly been hanging around with other exchange students you see a lot of the culture. Finnish culture is Western European and is in many aspects not very different from the Dutch culture. Still some things are remarkable and can be a little bit difficult to get used to. Let me reflect in this blog on the cultural differences I have experienced so far.

Short blog: Everything is going its course

It has once again been quite a while since my last blog. Since the last blog I’ve gotten the results of my midterms which have all gone very well; all my grades were above the average of the classes so I am very satisfied with my academic results.

Highlands

Long time no see, well actually no hear!! I’m sorry for letting you wait for this blog. The last couple of weeks were quite busy. My tutorials started, which means a lot of reading and group work! And last week my parents and little sis were here to visit me for 5 days! 

Sinterklaas!

They arrived on Tuesday 25^th of October in the afternoon. It was great seeing them again! We got a taxi from the airport to the hotel. The taxi driver asked us from which part in the Netherlands we were. We responded with Roermond in the South. “You’re kiddin’ me!! I go every year to Marina Oolderhuuske on holiday with my family and friends!” (Marina Oolderhuuske is a resort near Roermond.) “You’re the first people I’ve met from Roermond here in Glasgow!” Well, he was the first Glaswegian who even knows about the existing of Roermond! So the first meeting with Glasgow was a great one for my parents and sister. In the evening they gave me lots of presents, early Sinterklaas. The next day we explored Glasgow and I showed them my flat and they met a couple of my roommates. Unfortunately they got to experience Scottish weather! It rained a lot in the afternoon, but when we got to the West End it stopped and I’ve showed them another sunny side of Glasgow.

IX

Hey!

For the first time here I´ve visited another city than Stockholm in Sweden. There was a trip to Uppsala! This is a typical student city, where around 50% of the population is students. We got a guided tour there, where among other things we saw the very nice old university, but nevertheless this was kind of boring. So we decided to part ways with the group to check out the little town on our own. We found out that there was a guitar festival that day, and after an hour of wandering around we finally found it! There was a little fair, a lot of classical guitars and some case shows. Afterwards we went to the various student unions that are established in Uppsala. It was quite similar to the student union bars in Tilburg or any other Dutch student cities. Afterwards there was a big student party. It was a welcome change from Stockholm, but after 1 day I longed back to my current hometown again!

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.