sobota 15. září 2012

Final conclusion - The Best Student City in the World !

   Finally, after a very very very long time, I found some time to add a little bit more to my blog and decided to make a small final conclusion of this famous Erasmus stay in Belgium.
   As you can read in my previous posts, there is no question that I had a great time. To sum up Erasmus as such, I would use a sentence that every student which has experienced it on own hook  agrees: Erasmus gives you a lot, but also takes you a lot...Being on Erasmus is a rare thing. You cannot do it again. And it would lose the rareness anyway. From my point of view one could say: what started with Erasmus, ended with Erasmus as well. Erasmus is a gorgeous experience. Maybe you wouldn't even believe how much fun you have. You make plenty of friends, you learn new stuff, you make lots of crazy things (like on Halloween you put a real pumpkin on your head and go partying), you learn to do new things, you learn how to take responsibility for yourself. Of course you improve your language skills, make many trips with lots of amazing experiences.

    The problem is, once you get back home, everything is gone. Forever. You have a lot of memories, but in fact all these memories just stir up weird feelings when browsing your photos. It's nice to have friends anywhere around the world but, honestly, it's very probable that many of them you won't ever meet again. But still, you can keep in touch and who knows :-) Okay okay, enough sad notes. It's just the worst part of Erasmus but still......it's absolutely worth it!

pondělí 10. září 2012

Plenty of funny experiences

   In fact, I have plenty of funny moments to share. Do you remember I said you get lots of experiences and experience from Erasmus? I have experienced many moments, I have been in many new and sometimes strange situations, very often full of adrenaline. However, that's what definitely belongs to Erasmus....doesn't it? So I'm gonna tell you some adventures.

Catching a plane

   This is a crazy story, with a happy ending of course, how else. I was back home. I mean, since I had a break between the semesters, before the second semester started I came to the Czech Republic for one week to visit my friends, parents etc. This was in the period of a harshly freezing weather. One day morning I was going by train to Brno, where I was supposed to take a plane to Eindhoven. Sure you can't come to the airport at the last moment but you should always be there sooner. Just in case. And I was supposed to be as well.
   The journey by train to Brno was okay. Till one moment. Till we stopped in a village, like 30 km far from Brno. I was just listening to my mp3 player, staring out from the window, as usual. But all of a sudden, we are standing, waiting for something. Ten minutes....okay this is still fine. Twenty minutes..., 30 minutes....Well, this is not fine anymore at all. Starting to be nervous, the ticket inspector got to our coupé and said we were not continuing further by train, because the railway track was cracked, so we had to take a bus that would take us all to the next train station where the rail track was okay again. At that moment it was completely clear I couldn't have caught the plane. But what could I have done? I tried to contact all potential friends and relatives or anybody who could be eventually able to give me a lift to the airport. But the problem was - I was stuck in some village, not even close to the main station in Brno. Okay, I'm gonna cut it short a little....When I accepted the situation that I was never going to get to Ghent, all of a sudden I happened to hear a girl in the train calling to Wizzair airlines about the delay. I started to follow this girl along with her friend, so we could panic together. We kept asking the ticket controller or the station dispatcher about the length of delay but it was absolutely clear that we couldn't have made it. We tried to use the last option and were about to hitch-hike even though there was only a highway close. At that moment, none of us knew why, a women with a car appeared. The girls I was panicking with stopped that car with that women. I don't know whether that women was an angel or something, but anyways, she was kind and she drove us to the airport.....yes we made it.

The journey from Queen's Day 

  Do you know this famous feast in the Netherlands? Queens' Day - all Dutch people "celebrating" the ex-queen's birthday? It's absolutely the most famous feast in the country. So how could I miss this if I was so close. Yes, I wanted to experience also this, so I took my orange Holland T-shirt, which I had actually bought when I was in the Netherlands for the first time, and set out for the Netherlands.
   The way there was actually good because I went for free (21€ saved) but not to make it long, I'm going to drop the quite boring part about the journey by train.
   Well, there is not that much behind this story - plenty of people in orange, overcrowded those small and super narrow Amsterdam streets, but okay it was new for me, it was okay.
    The point is that I was perhaps the only guy not staying over the night. Yes, probably the best of the Queens' Day was about to happen, but anyway, I was going back to Ghent the same day. And here it comes. I had to leave Amsterdam quite early because I needed to catch the last train to Antwerp and to Ghent also. Or...I would probably have had to camp somewhere at a station or something over the night. I don't know why but the journey back was unbelievably long. I couldn't wait to be home, take shower and go to bed.
     Everything had been going well till we stopped in Roosendaal. To be in the picture, there was like 15 minutes to change the train in Antwerp to get to Ghent that night. And actually there was a "safety" - one more very last train, a super slow train, with which it would still have been possible to get to Ghent... you know, if something...But the problem was that we were 30 minutes delayed because we had to wait for another train. It was absolutely clear there was no time anymore to change the last train. Well, I already saw myself in the bed but now I started to try to see myself at a train station, a bus stop or eventually a hostel. I don't know if this could happen in my country, maybe, but I can't imagine. I'm gonna reveal you - I got home that night though.
   The journey continued like this - After we started up again, a ticket controller was going through the train asking the travelers who was going to Ghent. When we arrived to Antwerp, where we were initially supposed to change for the last train to Ghent, as a surprise there was still a train waiting for us. Thank God! The final group of stressed out people said. The problem was that that last train waiting or specially equipped for us was going only to Sint-Niklaas, which was in fact still like 40 km far from Ghent. So we went to Ghent but had no idea what would be going on afterwards. And what happend when a buch of like 20 people remained stuck at the station? We were told taxis would be ordered for us. And it did happen! I had to wait for a taxi for another hour because they didn't have enough taxis for so many people, that's what they said, but what is the most important - I got home eventually!

First Hitch-hiking 

    I guess this is for me the craziest experience of Erasmus ever :-D And as the icing on the cake, it happened the very last day of my stay in Belgium. As I said, for the last day of my amazing Erasmus, there was a plan. And how else the end of Erasmus could be ended than by making the last trip.
   So this last Sunday, along with my friend and at the same time ex-housemate from the first Erasmus semester, I went to Dinant and on the way back we wanted to pass by also Namur. And this actually happened. After a short excursion to Dinant we set out for the way back to Ghent but we also stopped in Namur. For the point of the story I must tell, since this was the last day and also the last trip, we also filled up the last free row in our Go Pass ticket. Maybe it's also useful to tell what the Go Pass was. If you travel by train a lot, you can save some money by buying so called GoPass. It's actually a train ticket for any 10 rides, which costs 50€ and you can go wherever you want. It means that one journey costs 5€ then and that is very cheap for Belgium. So, we used the last possible ride for the way back with a stop in Namur. But now we are getting to that funny thing! We explored Namur, its historical center, the Citadel and so on, and in the evening we decided to go back to Ghent finally because I needed to pack up, clean up the room and do all that unpleasant stuff...you know what I mean...when you don't want to go home but have to and...yeah, this situation.
     So...we're going back to the train station till I tried to check and take out the GoPass. Yes, I tried, because the GoPass wasn't in my pocket anymore! I always stick everything in my pocket (you know I'm a man :-P) but that was actually the first time I had lost something (tissues don't count).  It was just a ticket you would say, indeed. But it was our only ticket to get home! Yes, we could have bought another one, even though it was really expensive for a classical ticket, but we would have had to have still some money left. My last 5€ along with 10€ of my friend was not enough for the ride even for one of us. Soo...what does it mean? It means that we were stuck in Namur, 100 km far from Ghent, without a ticket, without money at 7 pm basically a few hours before coming back home. I mean the home in the Czech Republic.
    So the first step we took to solve the confounded situation was to try to look for the lost GoPass on the way we had been going all the day. But in fact it was just...you know. ...looking for a needle in a bottle of hay. So sure we didn't find it but we had to get back anyway. Well, I'm going to the point. Because you can't earn 40€ within a couple of hours, the last chance how we were able to get to Ghent was to try to hitch-hike. There is one thing needed to be said - I had never done it before. Maybe becase there was no reason to do it and maybe because it is ..well it's maybe quite dangerous in my home country. But there was no option, so we found a piece of paper and wrote Gent on the one side and Brussels on the other side and started going a little bit further from the center of Namur.
    We stood at some exit point going out of the city, holding the piece of paper. I was very nervous, mad, or how to describe it, and afraid of not getting back finally. And here is what happened. It took some time though, but to my surprise, some cars started to stop and then, finally, one driver took us with him several kilometers, somewhere beyond the city. It was a help anyhow, because now we were standing at a better place, exactly at a highway entrance. There was a better chance that somebody would stop. And so it was. We didn't wait for so long and a very kind woman pulled over and we started to shout. Till we found out she was going only to Brussels. But still we were again a little bit closer to Ghent.
    Another problem was, she just threw us out of the car before Brussels, somewhere on the highway. Fortunately, it didn't take so long and a next car stopped and it seemed we could finally be saved. But it turned out that we weren't yet. The guy in the car was just going a different direction so we just moved over a few kilometers. At this point, those moments were ever the worst because it started getting dark and we were stuck in the land of nobody, not even in Brussels and still far from Ghent....
    I started to think about one more option - get somehow to the center of Brussels and gather the rest of our Euros for a train to Ghent. The only problem was, we were far far from the city center so we had to solve a dilemma whether to keep hitch-hiking on that side or to try it on the way to the center. We decided to go on stopping cars and hope some human being would save us. We waited more than a half an hour and then we finally convinced two nice women to take us at least to a petrol station behind Brussels. When we get there I was confident that we would get home. I believed already. And eventually we did get back home! This spot was a good place for hitch-hiking - at the petrol station, near the highway going through Ghent. So we got a lift up to the house where we lived.
    Now it's just a funny story, I always laugh when I remember these moments from Belgium, but I will tell you guys...the helpless feeling, you don't have money but you are 100 km far from your home and you need to get back.....then you get a promising lift just to get a small bit closer and then you are standing again with a tag and hope that some of  the passing drivers will stop and take you up....Do not wish to experience it!

středa 9. května 2012

Trips - The Important Part of Erasmus

I realized that the posts about one of the best things of my Belgian adventure are still missing, so I should fix it right now. Six moths is a time long enough to make some trips so I also tried not to waste any opportunity to travel and I have made a lot of nice trips with lots of experience. It is known that Ghent, thanks to the great position it has, is a very good point where to start travelling. No wonder that during my Belgian mission I have managed to visit 4 capital cities, namely Amsterdam, Luxembourg, even Paris and naturally Brussels.

Paris


I would expect the biggest "wooow" for Paris from many people. Yes, Paris is a very nice city, I can agree. We spent there the whole weekend, but still it was not enough. There is a big problem behind. I started to call this city The City of Waiting and Deja Vu. The reason is that if you want to visit Paris, you have to take into account that you have to wait. Everywhere! Yes, even for the toilet! And moreover, in the season, holiday period and such, then it is even worse. And why is it the City of Deja Vu? I know already why the word came from France. During that weekend I felt a few times like I was in the situation in which I had been before...hmm strange, again a queue, again the same people....
    Anyway, we made 674 steps to get to the top of the Eiffel tower, saw the sunset and night Paris (absolutely amazing!!!) and I spent the most money in McDonald's ever. We made a boat trip, saw Louvre (I was waiting outside with the feeling Mona Lisa is just a painting) and Notre Dame (unfortunately also only from outside). It was a nice time :-)

Amsterdam


Amsterdam - what to say to that?......ehm....it's amazing! If you have never been there before, you definitely have to go there! If you are thinking about your next trip, go for Amsterdam. This is probably the best city I've visited (well....okay, I think Prague is still the winner). I really love it. I think it's so interesting because Amsterdam is different, weird, controversial, cosmopolitan as you like. But still very nice. To be honest, on the other hand, I wouldn't live there. For this purpose there are many reasons why not to do that.
   Amsterdam, in fact, is an overcrowded city, with a lots of tourists, which is not such a problem. As I already said it is also controversial, and controversial is the right word. As everybody knows, Amsterdam as the capital of the Netherlands is so famous for its benevolent approach to many debatable issues. Yes, you can encounter a lot of famous coffee shops, you will surely not miss Red Light District with all those nice girls wearing very nice clothes showing everything (almost) in the windows. (author's remark: 10 minutes for 40€ :-D). But at the same time, you encounter also very strange people, a lot of drug heads, dealers, mafiosos, perverts, psychopaths and other kinds of aliens. And crazy bikers :-D It is very dangerous.
   Anyway, Amsterdam has a lot to offer. Typical houses near the channels, sometimes looking like about to fall down, typical houses on the channels - houseboats (sometimes looking like about to sink down :-D)

Cologne (Köln)


   A very strange English name for this city. I rather use the German expression. So we've also been to Köln (Cologne if you want) which is situated not far from the borders. We went there in the winter right before Christmas to see the famous
Weihnachtsmarkt. Yeah, those markets were pretty nice. We drank Glühwein, kept the cups as a memory and enjoyed the real Christmas atmosphere. But on the other hand, this city just didn't wowed me. But perhaps many people liked it. I think it's because it's very similar to the cities or towns in the Czech Republic. There is nothing new for me and seems quite boring then. It's just a big city for me. It should be added that, unfortunately, we missed probably the most beautiful spot of Cologne - the romantic view from the Hohenzollern Bridge.

Brussels


The biggest disappoitment of all is definitely Brussels. Maybe it's not the worst city of Belgium, because especially in the Walooon part you can find quite a few ugly ones, but.....I don't find it nice at all Well, everybody has to visit it, because this is the core of Europe and there is not much more than say - I have been there, I've been to Brussels. But at least for me, nothing special and very worth seeing. Well...okay, if you go there, go to the historical center. That's nice, that's typically Belgian. But otherwise this city is a concrete jungle, full of high buildings, skyscrapers, homeless people and high unemployment rate. I have visited all the "famous" places like Atomium, which is quite nice and I would say it's worth visiting once but the entrance fee is not the cheapest. I have also seen the "Manneken Pis", which I actually encountered for the first time just by chance (because that famous guy is so small and hidden that you don't even know). In the end, I also looked into internals of the Europan Parliament, but...well....it was quite boring. But anyway, it is the European Parliament, you have to go there.

  There is, of course, much more. I have written here only about the places which usually allures people the most. I would strongly recommend to make a trip to Luxembourg. It's a pretty nice city, small but very nice. I liked it. If you want to see and experience something different (something different for Belgium), then you can go to the Walloon part of the country and pass by Dinant or Namur, for instance. They are different because there you can see also some hills!

pondělí 19. března 2012

2nd Semester - extending my Erasmus adventure

Yes, the topic says everything. I have survived the first semester (to wit, I have successfully passed all the exams). Moreover, I'm staying in Ghent also for the next semester! Yipee! I should say. Yes, of course I'm happy. Just......I also realized what all I have to solve and how many things I have to sacrifice at the expense of the prolongation of Erasmus. I had to postpone my final exams to September so I won't have the final exams with my schoolmates, among others. And...my thesis, I have to write it here, in Ghent, anyway. So this semester I'm going to be very busy with all that stuff for school. But...as long as it is worth it...okay, let's have a look at it from the better side :-)
    By the way, I've moved to a different place for this semester. The location is great! It's at the park, very closed to the centre, but mainly it is very very closed to my school, central station and Overpoort (once more this is the busiest street at night). Furthermore, I have a rented bike now so everything is closed suddenly. But I miss my friends here, who I had a great time with. Okay this is not the better side, so...it's time to get to know new people and make new friends:-)
   The winter is definitely gone, we can see the Sun more often here, so I'm starting to spend more time outside. I have a bike now therefore I have already explored also new places outside Ghent.
Let's see how the second, summer Erasmus semester looks like...

Well, next days are going to be very busy, i.a. because I'm expecting also my first visitors to come to see Ghent finally, so I don't know when I will find some time to add something to my blog again....I will try it some time....