Travelling

It's been already four weeks since I left Switzerland and came here to Rotterdam for my exchange term. Apart from getting used to the city, studying during the day, partying during the night, sleeping at unsual hours I was also travelling around on the past three weekends.
After two weeks of getting accustomed to Rotterdam, a bunch of exchange students wanted to go to Carnival in another city. First we came up with the plan to travel to Köln, but as it was too expensive for some of us we dropped this plan although few exchangers were already there. Instead we went to Maastricht where we spent the early afternoon watching the parade, then went to lunch in a Pizzeria before enjoying the party on the streets of the city. As we had the impression that we wouldn't be able to party the whole night because we didn't see any clubs, we decided to head back with the last train from Maastricht towards Eindhoven where we switched to another train to Rotterdam, where we finally arrived at around 3am. As I left my bike home I had the pleasure to walk back home for half an hour.
The week after our Maastricht trip, my dutch buddy Iris suggested to go for a dinner with all here international buddies. The plan developped further and further and in the end we decided to head to Den Haag for a day. It was one of few very beautiful and not too cold days here in Netherlands. We therefore decided to head to Scheveningen and go to the beach where we had some fun taking jumping pictures and enjoying just the nice weather. After walking a bit around in the city centre we finally went to dinner which was more a hilarious than a delicious experience. But even this couldn't change our mood and it provided us of course with some new material for jokes. After dinner and a desert we headed back to Rotterdam where very few party animals went out till four o' clock in ther morning. After only a couple of hours of sleep, a group of exchange students met again and had some relaxed sunday lunch before visiting Delfshaven (the only part which wasn't bombed during WWII) and the Euromast. Later on we went together to dinner before stopping at the obligatory happy hour in Concordia, the typical students pub for exchangers.
This weekend finally, some friends and I planned to go to Bruxelles. As usual several people backed out and we ended up being only 5. After visiting the royal palace, the Grand Place, Cathédrale Saint-Michel and the Manneken Pis we went for the first time to Delirium, which is the pub holding the Guiness Book World Record with over 2'000 different beers. After only one of them we went to restaurant Chez Leon for dinner before heading back to Delirium for some other beers, where we celebrated the beginning of the 30th birthday of one of the exchange students. Already at around 2am we headed to a hotel where all five of us squeezed in a single and a double-bed room. On sunday we visited then the Museum of fine Art and the European Quarter where we witnessed the auto-corso due to the independence of Kosovo. Our last stop finally was Parc Leopold where we spent some time relaxing and enjoying the sun before heading back to get our luggage and head home to Rotterdam.

Carnival in Maastricht

Beach in Scheveningen (Den Haag)

Rotterdam and the Maas

The beginning of the famous harbour in R'dam

Grand Place in Bruxelles

Back to the core business

After writing about my first impressions and some stories about the social life here, I'll dedicate this post to the reason why I'm actually here - my studies. Studying here at Erasmus Universiteit doesn't feel totally different compared to my previous experiences in Switzerland, but still it's somehow different.
First of all, the studies here are of course affected by the fact that I'm on exchange. My (and as well those of other exchange students) are not the same like they were back home. It's not only about the studies but as well about visiting place, enjoying oneself, going out, meeting friends. Therefore I don't feel as dedicated to my studies as I was some months ago. Nevertheless, we all try to find the right balance between having fun and studying seriously. Although it's sometimes hard to be motivated I believe that we all manage to get on the right track.
Secondly, the approach of teaching is slightly different here. You concentrate yourself on less courses but those are more intense, time consuming and of course important after all because you'll get 10 credits for a master elective and not 3 to 6 like in Switzerland. The result of this is, that we're having around 12h classes per week, assignments to do in 2 days and projects for several weeks plus exam and all those in around 7 weeks and for only one class. And as we're only about 17 students in my class, participation and interaction is more important.
Another thing you can notice here is, that there's no bell ringing all the times. This means that's it's pretty much up to the professor and the classe when and how often they're taking a break. My lecture starts at 9am and usually lasts until 1130/1200 with only one break of 15min. In Switzerland you would have at least three breaks of 15min in this time. And - important to know - there's no academic quarter here. If it says 0900 on the timetable, it is actually 0900 and not 0915. I'm glad that I thought about that point already before the term started and took that into account on my first day of lectures...
As we get 10 credits for one elective I'm only having two courses during my exchange - the first started in the end of january and will last until mid-march and the second class will be from end of march till mid-may. As the course I intended to take for the second block was cancelled I had to choose a new topic, which means I'm now in a course called "Marketing, Technology and Innovation" and will afterwards participate in "Event and Tourism Marketing". Sofar, the topic of my course is pretty interesting. We're discussing topics like how new technologies and markets evolve, how you can use new technologies for marketing purposes etc. Along with lectures we're having to big projects. The first is Google Online Marketing Challenge where student teams around the globe compete against eachother. We're have to plan an AdWords Strategy on Google for a real-life company we had to find and will run our campaign for three weeks. The second project is a Product Development Concept where we have to come up with a concept for creating new products...

Food, drinks and the payment disaster

It's time again for some educational input in here. In a previous post I already mentioned the excessive use of bicycles here. Now I would like to tell some other stuff in order to bring the country a bit closer.

Food&Drinks
Nederlands is not very famous for it's cuisine I guess. When we went out we rather picked a "foreign" restaurant. We went to maroccon or indian place, some even to sushi. But what is typically dutch in my eyes? First of all, lunch is not important to them. They eat sandwhiches or simply broodje met kaas (bread with cheese). A hot meal for lunch is very rare. But what I perceived is, that they eat a lot of smaller things here and there during the whole day. I read about that in a guide about NL and experienced it especially during integration trip where we had small things during the whole day but only a cold lunch. The only thing sofar which I discovered and like a lot are stroopwafels. These are small waffels filled with syrup out of caramel, very delicious but you have to watch that you don't eat too much of them :)
Drinks are not so different than back home. A lot of beers like Heineken, Amstel, Brand or Dommelsch, then wine or water. According to Dutchs, Sodas like Cola or Fanta are not so common but you can buy them everywhere. Apart from that Dutchs like to drink Coffee and Tea. Just make sure you don't go to a Coffeeshop for a coffee :)
Just to note here, coffeeshops are the places where they sell marijuana products. To straighten a prejudice: Although everyone thinks so, consumption of weed, marijuana etc. is NOT legal here. The dutch policy is, that they tolerate it in coffeeshops and at home in order to keep it out of the street and fight against hard drugs. If you're on the street a possesion of max. 5g is tolerated and not more. According to our dutch friends, this policy has led to a low drug abuse rate in Nederlands.

Paying in NL - A complete mess
Nederland is usually perceived as multicultural, open-minded and thus a good place for internationals to live. But if you see the payment system you could come to another conclusion. First of all, they have tons of different cards - everyone must have like a huge wallet to carry all of them. In the end though, everything leads to a dutch bank account, which, of course you can only open if you will be customer for more than a year. The two major ways of payment here are pin (regular bank card - but only dutch cards work) and chipknip (the chip on your banking card). Chipknip is supposed to be for small payments so you can upload cash on the chip and then pay with that. And of course you can only upload your chipknip directly from your dutch bank account. Or, you buy a pre-paid card. You pay 22.50 and get 20 cash on it - thats how they make money here :) To make the living for internationals even more complicated, they probably agreed to refuse credit card, cause you almost can't pay anywhere with creditcard - only pin and chipknip. And at university we were told that there exist even more cards for the same purpose but in different buildings. To show you how ridiculous this whole thing is, I give you the example of printing at university:
To be able to print you need a card (obviously) with a magnetic strip. Bank card and credit card don't work. To put money on your printing card you have to pay - but you can't pay in cash! Either pin or chipknip. Which leaves you more or less only the possibility to buy a pre-paid chipknip to the price already mentioned. The chipknip, obviously, you can't buy with credit card - only with chipknip, bank card or cash. Sooo, in the end, you usually go to an ATM, get money with your card, pay charges there. Then you buy a chipknip, where you pay charges again. The chipknip you can then use to get money on the printing card and now you're able to print your documents!

Ok, that's it sofar. Stay tuned for the next post, which will be probably about studying at RSM...