The first days

“Travelling - It leaves you speechless, then turns you into a storyteller.” - IBN BATTUTA

*Bangor
*House
*School
*Modules
*Upcoming weeks

Welcome to “The land of 4 seasons in a day”. According to the locals during the summer they sometimes experience snow in the morning and in the afternoon a 20 degrees Celsius sunny day, but always carry a raincoat with you. Till now, we only experienced snow in the morning and NO RAIN! :-)

- Well, let me introduce my housemates and our house. One of them is a Spanish guy, who has been here for a while now and is here to study the English language. The British girl who has been living here for 4 years, has a really strong accent.. and every time we question ourselves with: “que?!”, but she is also nice. Then we have Shirley: my Dutch class and housemate! Happy times, nothing to declare!

- There is one perfect word to describe our house: cold. I don’t know what it is, but this house is like a fridge. In the morning when I get into the kitchen, I can see myself breathing… I sleep with 1 duvet and 2 fleece blankets and not to forget, a warm water bottle

- My school is almost like the Harry Potter University (see picture 1), and yes, they even practice ‘Quidditch'. Yes, they run around the field after balls with brooms between their legs! Bangor is the second best in the whole UK/Wales in this sport. Unfortunately, we will not have any lectures in the main building, but we will use the Harry Potter library as much as possible just to get the feeling. It is also very quiet there, the perfect place to study for the exams.

- Tuesday we had a introduction to the information needed to get started at the school. Followed by module registration and a tour around the campus. The modules that I will be following: Marine Physiology and Behavior, Marine Processes and Systems, Marine Conservation and Exploitation and, as an extra, I might choose for Marine Biotechnology and even follow classes of Basic Spanish/Japanese.

- For the upcoming days and weeks, Shirley and I will be studying for the exams that we still need to take that are part of our modules from the Netherlands. So all our days are full with studying till next week Wednesday. But, we will have a trip to Liverpool on Saturday, 31st of January!! It is organised by the school itself and probably a lot of international students will be joining, so I am looking forward to that. There are other Dutch students here from Radboud, Nijmegen. Some Australians, Chinese but a lot of Americans!!