Time to travel around!

Tomorrow, the last day of my exchange in Bergen will start. I am done with all my exams and course paper and this means that it is time for travelling around! Last weekend a friend of me visited me and I showed her the best places of Bergen. Unfortunately, the weather was quite bad. It was raining, storming and it was quite dark and foggy during the whole day. Thus, typical weather for Bergen… As a result, we visited almost every coffee bar we faced. We talked about everything and had a lot of fun together. The last days I spent a lot of time at the university in order to finish my last paper and now I am done with all my courses. In other words, time to travel around!

Since I have still three weeks left before going home I planned to travel around in Norway. Together with two German friends we will go skiing for one week at one of the largest ski areas in the country. Currently, skiing in Norway is not that popular but the interest is growing over the last years. After one week, we will continue our journey to Oslo, where we stay for three nights in order to relax and enjoy the Christmas atmosphere in the capital. After this, we will fly to the northern part of Norway, to a city which is called Tromsø. Tromsø is one of the biggest cities in the north and is situated above the arctic circle. We will stay here for a couple of days and continue the trip by taking the well-known post boat, the Hurtigruten, to the Lofoten. The Hurtigruten drives all year long along the west coast of Norway. It starts in Bergen and ends in Kirkenes (close to Sweden) and this whole trip takes 12 days in total. The Lofoten is an archipelago which is situated along the west coast and is known for its wonderful nature, sharp mountains, fjords, lakes, snow and much more exciting environment. In addition, there is a chance to see the northern lights, though you should be lucky to watch them. So fingers crossed. After a couple of days, we will travel back to Bergen, pick up our luggage and on the 22^nd of December I will fly back to the Netherlands.

These days I am busy to say goodbye to everybody I met, enjoy the last parties and collect all stuff I need to take for the trip. I am really looking forward to it! Afterwards, I will post my last blog in which I will tell you about all experiences during the trip.

Finally, if you have any questions about Bergen and or Norway, feel free to ask me. The best option is to send me an e-mail or contact me via Facebook as I don’t check the responses on this blog frequently.

parents of Jasper

After a weekend with seeing some movies, and Dutch television which we always download here I relaxed a bit. The teacher of organisational economics told us that our presentation was moved to Thursday instead of Monday so we would only have the second part of the review test.

It was already Monday the 21st of November, because the teacher talked again too long and we had also 2 presentations, so the second part of the review test was again moved. A bit annoying since now I have to learn it for the third time and I was already so nervous for it.

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!).

Christmas Lights!

Kick off of the visits - marathon!

This weekend the first visitors after my parents arrived: my dear friends Marianne and Suzanne! After them, people will keep coming.

My sweet friend Lotte in the beginning of the December, then my brother and his friend for New Year's Eve and finally my cousin to spend my last weekend here with me! Until now, it was a good start of the visitors marathon =D but let me first tell you what else I did in the past two weeks:

Tuesday, 15th of November 2011 - Corvinus Egyetem, Budapest
At this very moment, I am waiting for my friend Mona to arrive. She studies in California, has lived the whole of her life before that in Hong Kong, but is of Indian origin. That last part is exactly where it gets most interesting for me ;) I loooooooove Indian food and she has made me some! So, I hope she will be here soon!
Yesterday, I went to the market hall with Annie do to shopping for our extensive cooking for the language course girls. She is used to 'cooking' with the micro wave back home, so she had some really great ideas, but just needed some assistance on the actual preparing. Especially, I was there to calm her down about hygienic differences between the United States and Hungary.. hihi.

Also, we got hooked on skating! I do not know why, but I used to sincerely hate skating, which is considered to be really weird by all the others here.. "You are Dutch? Why did you not like skating?" Well, I do now! The mystery is still not solved, but that does not matter. I Love Skating! Until now, we skated on a court up on the West End Mall, but hopefully the beautiful and romantic one in city park will soon be open!

Thursday, 17th of November - Liszt Ferenc Ter, Budapest

Yesterday, we had a really nice dinner with the girls from Corvinus. Some of them I had not seen properly in a while, because of all the travelling. It was really nice to catch up with them. Also, we got to talk about family relations and it makes me realize everytime how lucky I am with mine =) Most of the others have nice families too, but I really appreciate the bond we have together, even more now that I am away for so long. That is why I am really excited for my brother to come see Budapest at the end of December!

Sunday, 20th of November - Liszt Ferenc Ter, Budapest

Some interesting events the last couple of days! First, on Friday we decided to go to the non-existing museum of contemporary architecture. It is always so nice here in Hungary, to find all these wonderful, exciting and mind-blowing non-existing places...
At night, me and Emma went to have chocolate fondue with Anita, one of the organizers of our language course. However, our favourite chocolate bar Noir was closed. Instead of it being a disappointment, it was a very delightful change of scenery! Anita took us to a place called 'Sugar' and for those of you who know me a little better: that sounded like music to my ears! I have a real sweet tooth and this was heaven! I ate a cake in the shape of an Hamburger, some maccaroons and a strawberry shake. Sweet dinner is totally underestimated ;) The reason of our meeting was me interviewing Anita for my History project. I talked with her about the life of her mother under the Kádár regime. It was really horrible, since Anita's grandfather had participated in the 1956 revolution and was therefore hated by János Kádár. Her mother could not go to university and every year in October, the anniversary of the revolution, her father was taken away again and treated really bad. It was a really impressive story..!!
Yesterday, me and Emma finally went to the forrest up on the Buda hills. It was good to breath in some fresh air again and I am definitely gonna go to our forrest more often when I am back in the Netherlands! After some studying, we went to Ben's place to make and eat pizza's. However, since our ovens are not the newest ones ever.. well, it was a good effort ;) Probably it was good we did not eat too much, since at night it was time to put on our bikini's! Bath party in Gellert Spa! We were extremely enthusiastic about it. Especially, since I was expecting something like SpringBreak in Tilburg (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A-9HUJLHMuo) It was a little disappointing. The bath was beautiful, the architecture was amazing.. but the water was just too cold. Only the really drunk people were dancing in the main party bath, while the others were crammed in the small 36 degrees pool..
Today was all about studying, more ice-skating and finally: Indian food! In the beginning of the week it had not worked out with meeting Mona (phone batteries dying, no credit..), so tonight she made me some lovely Dahl. I believe I am even going to dream about it tonight!

Tuesday, 22nd of November - Liszt Ferenc Ter, Budapest

Yesterday, I went to the Christmas Market with Annie. She had spend some days in Germany, so I was really curious how she liked it. I also went clothing shopping with her, because she wanted some good guidelines on how to shop. "Do not buy an item that does not fit with at least 2 or 3 other things in your closet." "If you are on a low budget, invest in tops instead of pants since it is a much more obvious change of outfit." "You NEED at least one good blazer." etc. etc. Glad I was able to help her out

again! =)

At night, Ashley had a very good idea: cheap cocktails and karaoke at Morrisons' Opera! Perfect! Only thing was that it took me about four hours and twelve cups of tea this morning to get my voice

working again. It was repared just in time for my History presentation, which went very well. Several students came up to me after class saying how impressed they were to hear my story. Always really nice to hear!

Tonight, I am going to Mona's birthday dinner and tomorrow night I will be going to Vera's! I can already tell you now that it will be loads of fun!!

Thursday, 24th of November - Liszt Ferenc Ter, Budapest

I was right! Both birthdays were great. Lovely meal, lovely people and lovely party afterwards! Now, I am just a couple of minutes away from departing to the airport.. Mar and Suus are in Budapest!!!!!

Monday, 28th of November - Liszt Ferenc Ter, Budapest

What a great weekend! The girls were really glad I had not changed much: When I arrived on the airport (20 minutes late, because Hungarian trains sometimes just decide to just stand still for no particular reason), I decided to sneak up on them and jump on their shoulders. Of course, I should not have done that. The floor was slippery and I fell flat on my back in the middle of the airport.. so typical! =P It was really mixed seeing them again. On the one hand it felt like it had been ages that I had seen them, but on the other it seemed so normal having them around again.
After visiting my flat, meeting Geran and putting their stuff down, we went for lunch in the Hummus Bar. All kinds of stories were exchanged and we could not stop talking. Later, we went for sight seeing on Buda hill. It was a pity that there was so much fog. Budapest mostly has clear blue skies, but it was not meant for us this weekend. In the evening, we went to the guys' flat to have Thanksgiving Dinner with the people from the language course. It was really nice to see my friends have such a good time with some of the people that are really important to me here. Later, we went to Szimpla, which sort of blew their minds. They had not expected this style of bar and needed some adjustment time to it, but eventually really liked it!

The next day, the only thing we actually did was shopping 0=) Our mission was shoes. Shoes, shoes, shoes. As always, when you are on a clear mission, you do not find anything. No shoes. What we did find were crowns for the evening. The guys' had organised a flat party with the theme 'United States, the most/least awesome country in the world', so we decided to dress up as Misses. Suus was Miss Minnesota, since that is where the most natural blondes live. I was Miss Illinois, since apparently I have a Chicago accent, and Marianne was Miss Colorado, because she is very fond of skiing. Altough Landon did not like our/my choice for Colorado, it was still a great party. People dressed up as cheerleaders, cowboys and some girls wearing a self made fatsuit; perfect! Around one o'clock we left to go to the second episode of the Balkan Beats Party at the A38 boat. The girls loved it just as much as I did the first time. Also, we ran into a big delegation for Tilburg University visiting one of the other Dutchies.. It's a small world after all!

On saturday morning, we went to the House of Terror on Andrássy Utca. In this building, the Arrow Cross Party has been imprisoning, torturing and killing many people during fascist and communist regimes of the twentieth century. It is now a very impressive museum. After this, we went to see St. Stephen's Basilica and have dinner in my favorite káveház. Then, it was time for my birthday present to the both of them: Széchenyi Bath! It was really beautiful to now see it at sunset and in the dark. Also, because it was around zero degrees outside, the warm pools were so extremely satisfying. I am really glad that the girls loved it as well. After dinner at For Sale, we ended up in our flat. Not partying, but talking until late in the night =) So lovely to have had them around.. It was a great weekend. The goodbye was not the part I preferred at all, but I will see them in about 3.5 weeks! Love you girls, see you soon!

And now normal life has started again. Well, normal: studying, studying, studying. Finals are coming up! So loads of things to do!

Love, xx

Only 3 weeks left!

Hey there everyone:)

It's been a while that a wrote to you! I am sorry for that. But it has been busy and when I had some time, I was tired. And everybody knows you should not write tired, because that is no fun!

I have been doing so much! but mostly when you are here for a while and made most of the trips, you just get to normal life, which is awesome!

I really got into the rugby team, making new friends. This was a really good idea since I now met Irish people, because otherwise you kind of stay stuck in your international friends. Which is also really nice, but the combination is really nice.

I also got to celebrate Halloween! which is ofcourse as american as it can be, but it was really nice to dress up and to have a good party. Since it was celebrated for real. So everybody was dressed up. Not scary though, but also that was often tried.

I also went a weekend away to Cork and apart from just visiting the city Cork, we also travelled around a bit to see a lot of the county Cork! We saw blarney castle, the town of middleton, where the orignal jameson distellery is located. and we saw Queens Town and Cobh from where the Titanic left. This is on the seaside (ofcourse) and the wether was so amazing that from the pictures we could have been in Greece:)

In this three weeks, we have a lot of friends visiting, our essays and assignments to finish and to slowly arrange our departure. If my finances would have allowed I would have stayed some weeks longer to travel, but unfortunately they don't and thats ok, because I saw everything I wanted to see and the two things that I missed: edinburg and Londen.. are reachable any time!

So I better enjoy my time I have left! Which I ofourse shall! and I hope to sent one more blog!

Goodbye Singapore

At this moment the end is so close that I don’t want to think about it anymore. It feels surreal to leave the city I have loved to live in for the last four months. Leaving home is one thing, but it is even harder to leave now and say goodbye to everything. The main difference is that when you leave home, you know you will come back and see everybody again and do the same things. I will never have this experience in Singapore again with this people. It has been an amazing experience, I’ve learned so so many, about myself, about different cultures, about people from other countries, I improved my English, my knowledge on business has increased and I also learned from the hard times. I’m going to miss so many things; the food, the freshly squeezed juices, the free drinks on Wednesday, the sun, the views from the rooftop bars, the drunk Asian people, even the days in the library, all the motivated locals, the subwaydays on Wednesday, the possibility to buy everything you want within only a few mrt-stops, the beach, the tropical rain showers, the diversity of people in the street, the temples, speaking English all the time, eating drunken dim sum, booking trips, going on trips in the weekend, don’t cook at all, spending useless hours on Facebook, the annoying class participation, the beach so close.. but the thing I’m definitely going to miss the most are my exchange friends, we created one big happy family in which everybody is welcome. I made some true friends, which I will definitely visit as soon as possible. This people made this experience amazing for me, it was so nice to share all the experiences, to party with them, to have girl-talk with them, to live with the best flatmates ever, who were always there to have dinner, to keep an eye on me, to download movies for me. to go on trips with or to get drunk. All the people come with the same open-minded attitude, motivated and of course willing to have loads of fun. It will be hard to say goodbye to them and I’m definitely gonna miss them a lot! I’m really thankful for being able to have had this experience and share it with all this amazing people.

Luckily for me it is not the end! Wednesday my two months of travelling will start. I’m going to Laos (with 4 friends), Cambodia (on my own), Thailand (with many friends), NYE in Singapore and then I will start a two-weeks volunteer job in Vietnam, which I’m very excited about!! For now, see you another time Singapore!!!!

Family visit

Heipä!

Last week my parents, sister and brother came to Turku to visit me. The day they arrived they immediately came to my place where I served them homemade karjalanpiirakka that was left from our Finnish dinner. They liked it a lot. Afterwards we went to their cottage on an island and almost in the middle of nowhere. There cottage was great. It was a very old villa which was kept original as much as possible. The furniture in the rooms was old and in each room there was still an original stove. Besides there was a lot of decorative stuff that was very old and made the atmosphere in the cottage very nice. A modern thing was the electric heating which was very nice because it was quite cold during the days they were here.

The next day we went to Helsinki. I had already been there one day but this time I saw many different things. I also knew the way through the city centre a bit, so I could guide them to the most beautiful place. Unfortunately we did not have enough time to visit Suomenlinna, a sea fortress at the seashore of Helsinki. But I will go there tomorrow on my own, it should be one of the most interesting places to visit in Helsinki.

Episode 7: October

¡Hola!

I have realized that I am a little bit behind with telling you all my stories and experiences here, so this blog will be about October and next blog will describe my nice month of November! Well, in short October was a very special month because I had a bad experience as well as some “peaks”. Let’s start with the worst and end with the nice things!

One Monday evening I felt very tired, but I thought this was normal because I had a exhausting football training the night before, after which I slept few hours and then I went to school and played another football match. I decided to go to bed early and then everything would be fine the next day. Well, it turned out to be different. I will not go into detail, but I was ill for eight days. I suffered from diarrhea, nausea, fever, abdominal cramps, etc. On Friday morning I decided to see a doctor. It appeared that there was one who had consulting hours at my university! It was a little bit difficult to understand all medical terms in Spanish and therefore the doctor sometimes used gestures to inform me, which was often very funny. After 8 days in total, three different medicines and two more trips to the doctor, I was healthy again and went to Morocco! Read my previous blog if you would like to know more about his travel!

Well, of course the rest of the month was great again! I visited Salamanca, played my first football matches and was quite often not at home during the evenings/nights… What I did? I went to club Pacha for example. And we had another dinner scheduled; with my friends here, we try to have dinners with food from our different cultures every two weeks or so. This time, it was my Swiss friend’s turn to cook. She made three dishes and it was amazingly delicious! I will never forget these dinners with the six of us, I enjoy it very very much!!! Furthermore, I went to the “cocktail street”. Actually it is called Calle de la Reina, but the Spanish came up with this other name, simply because there are so many cocktail bars in this street. Another day, my two Turkish flat mates celebrated the birthday of one of them. It was interesting to experience the way a birthday was celebrated in the Turkish culture. It included Turkish music, Turkish food and even Turkish dances!

The last thing I would like to inform you about is that my sister and best friend visited me from October 25 till October 27. It was absolutely great to see family or friends after 2 months! I showed them my Spanish life and we enjoyed it together.

No anecdote this time, because it is a quite long blog already, but I do share with you a picture of course! It is the façade of the University of Salamanca with a lot of tourists in front of it who try to find “the frog”. The story behind this is that if you are able to find the frog without the help of a guide or anyone, it will bring you luck…

¡Adios!

XI

Two things come to mind when I think of the last two weeks; My weekend trip to Riga and a road trip to Copenhagen and Malmö. Let’s start with the first one, shall we?

After we finally found a good weekend to go to Riga, Mark, Urban, Mridul and I booked the tickets and arranged everything. Ironically, when we arrived at the airport after a 80 minute drive, we had a 3 hour delay on our flight of 50 minutes. So we ended up waiting on the airport, to eventually have to go to another airport with busses. This was kind of a letdown, since we only had 1.5 days in Riga, so time was running short. However, eventually we got on the plane and arrived in Riga!

When we arrived, we called a cab to get us to our Hostel. This was one of the most life threatening taxi rides I’ve ever had! Apparently, Latvian folks don’t take traffic rules to seriously. So while we were driving half on the middle of the road, half on the trolley car way, there were several occasions where we almost had a collision. Luckily, we arrived at the hostel alive!

After checking in and putting our stuff into place, we decided to find a nice place to eat. After all, it had been a long time since we started our journey, and airport food usually is not exactly top cuisine! The first thing we noticed is that the price level in Riga is a lot more pleasant than in Stockholm. Finally we could go out and eat for prices lower than the Swedish supermarkets, and have a beer that’s 20% the price of a beer in Stockholm! Giving a round is suddenly a lot more fun haha! So after we had a 3 euro dinner (desert included), we went back to the hostel. That night we explored the night life of Riga, and it was quite nice!

The day after we began with a 3 hour tour through the city. It was a good way to see what the must-see’s in Riga are, but frankly I was not very impressed. I thought the city was kind of a melting pot of different styles, and therefore somehow lacked cohesiveness. I might have set my expectations too high, since I had heard it was an extraordinary city, but nevertheless I was not impressed much.

After this, we did something I would have never guessed I would ever do: gun shooting! Through our hostel it was possible to sign up for this. We had to go by a cab to an old war bunker, right outside of town. Apparently safety is not considered an issue in Riga, because the only protection we got in there was ear protection. First we got to shoot with a glock, which is basically a standard pistol. After this, the fun started; we got to shoot with an AK47 and a shotgun! It was a fantastic thrill to shoot with these massive guns, and the kickback was huge! A true adrenalin rush!

In the evening we were extremely tired, so we just went to some bars to conclude the weekend. The day after we had to get up pretty early to check out and return to Stockholm again. It was a nice weekend!

After a week of working my ass of to keep up with my courses, including 4 presentations, it was already time for the next big thing: a road trip! We were with 10 guys from 9 nationalities (of course, the French are the ones that break the cycle), and we rented 2 cars to drive from Stockholm to Copenhagen, a quick stop in Malmö and then back via Gothenburg.

Of course the fun started in the car, with singing (read; screaming) along the songs on the radio, driving a little (or way) too fast on the almost empty highways and making way to many pit stops to grab some food or drinks. After approximately 8 hours we arrived in Copenhagen in the evening. After grabbing some dinner, we went to check out the nightlife of Copenhagen!

The day after we got op quite early to check out the city. Copenhagen is quite stunning, with lots of historical buildings and churches. Of course we also went and see the mermaid statue, which was as little as the legends tell us. Looking around the city took us the entire day, so in the evening we were quite tired. Nevertheless we went out, and we checked out some parts where we hadn’t been the day before.

On Sunday it was already time to leave again and say goodbye to Copenhagen! Our departure time was a little later than expected (getting 10 people ready at an early time is an impossible mission), and unfortunately our visit to Malmö had to suffer because of this. This was really a quick stop of around 3 hours, but we did get to see a big museum with all kinds of random stuff. Including working equipment from the stone ages, some fashion dresses and genetically manipulated animals.

A long drive to Gothenburg followed, where we got to see some of the beautiful countryside of Sweden. We arrived at Gothenburg again quite late, so no one of us had the power to do much that evening. All the hostels were booked, so we had to sleep in the car, which was also quite the experience. When it was getting cold in the night (Which it does, believe me), we drove around the city to get the car warmed up again. Around 5 am we got hopelessly lost however, which led to a 45 minute drive through Gothenburg! Eventually we found our beautiful parking lot, and we could go back to sleep again.

The day after we visited Gothenburg thoroughly, and I really enjoyed the city. It has a typical Swedish atmosphere which is also present in Stockholm and Malmö. I would recommend everyone to also visit these cities! After this visit it was time to return to Stockholm again. The surroundings between Gothenburg and Stockholm are even more impressive than what we saw before, and again we had great fun playing around with the cars. This road trip was an unforgettable experience!

San Francisco and more

Hi!!

Tomorrow it is Thanksgiving, this means two days off and some time to write my blog. Just want to tell you some things I did in the last two weeks.

First, I went to the Safeco-stadium in Seattle downtown. This Safeco-stadium is an American Football stadium and it is the home of the Seattle Mariners. This trip was organized by the Woman in Business club, and we got a tour guided by the head of marketing of the Safeco-stadium. It was really interesting and we got a lot of resume-tips (which are more focused on leadership in the US). Besides, the last weeks I spent more time in a big building on campus, called the IMA. It is a huge sports building, you can do every sport you want and there is also a sauna. Students at the UW are really fanatic in doing sports; they go to the IMA every day. I also went shopping, which is nice to do here! The University Village (close to the UW) offers a broad range of shops, Seattle downtown even more and if you want to spend the entire day you can go to a shopping mall. Furthermore I went a couple of times to the College Inn, this is a bar close to the university and a lot of international students go there on Wednesday Night. Another thing that is organized for international students is the Wednesday Lunch, it is a free lunch at the university and it is a good opportunity to chat with everyone.

Safeco Stadium:

Campus at night:

Last: a little bit about the trip I made last weekend: I went to San Francisco, an amazing city! If you ever go there, I highly recommend a cycling trip to the Golden Gate Bridge J!

San Francisco:

[PHOTO BLOG] Seoul Lantern Festival 2011

From the 4th of November until the 20th, the Seoul Lantern Festival took place. It's a very popular event, with an enormous amount of gorgeous lanterns which are put into Cheonggyecheon stream. The types range from historical buildings to superheroes to fairytales and many more. I'll let the pictures do the talking from now on.

What still freaks me out

I know it has been really long since I last wrote a blog, and I think it is about time for a new one.

We have been asked (already some time ago, but I am still going to write about it) to write about how we feel about our host country now. There were 4 phases an exchange student was said to go through: the honeymoon phase; the negotiation phase; the adjustment phase; the mastery phase.

Guy Fawkes

Almost a month has passed since my last blog. I can summarize this period in one word: assignments! Lots of assignments! Nonetheless, I still make time to have fun. Starting with Halloween. I wasn’t planning on going out with Halloween, because of my many assignments but I couldn’t resist the temptation of experiencing Halloween in Glasgow. Since my decision to go was last minute I had to improvise a costume. I’m quite a beauty freak so with a bit of makeup and some nailpolish which featured as blood I became a vampire. A friend of mine was so nice to pick up some fangs on her way to our flat at Sainsbury’s. The fangs were horrible, but what do you expect for only 1 pound? They did look good on the pictures though. I thought the Glaswegians were crazy and this night really proved it.