Switzerland

This place... 2 pieces of advise...!

1. Check out whether there are any public holidays near your intended period of travel.

2. Do not go there on a Sunday..! 

If you fail to notice this 2 things, you might just end up doign nothing when you are there. This is a good place for retirement only when you have lots of available cash to spend. We went to Basel and Zurich, and I can say that the country is really rich. I counted more Ferraris than the no of Nissans on the road. So, what do you think abt this..

Transport to and from this country is expensive. An air tick from Rome to this place cost about 80 euros while a ticket from Basel to Amsterdam cost 110 euros. There is no way you can avoid this amount when travelling to Switzerland. Just look at the no of budget airlines taht fly to Switz and you will agree... 

Shopping is good here, regardless whether you are looking for cheap or expensive things here, they have it all. Just remember to bring more money to spend. Ermmm, when we went there, we didn't brought any CHF with us. We used our Singapore ATM cards to draw cash here, may have some charges (S$5 each time I think), but its very convenient.

The streets are clean and is very peaceful here. No worries even if you are travelling alone at night here. We stayed in Basel and all you need is just a ticket for trams to get around here. When in Zurich, we simply used our legs to walk. That whole place can be reached by walking. 

Some will find that Switz is boring, to a certain extent, I will agree. But it also depends on whether you can find things to shop. Amazign watches kept me occupied the entire afternoon here. 

Basel

Zurich

Italy, Woohhooooo

If I can only travel to just 1 country for my entire exchange, I will choose Italy. The whole country is just so amazing. At the same time, this is also the country that set your budget back by the biggest extent. A 6 day trip to Italy from Maastricht costs  approximately 1,000 euros (excluding shopping and hostel), but the value from the fun and adventure definetly exceed this figure..!

We took a flight from Brussels and landed at Milan Bergamo airport. From the airport, we have to take a bus shuttle to get to the cantral station. Tickets for the bus shuttle can be purchased from the counters at the airport. Tickets cost around 6 euros each if you get the packaged ones (3 tickets per pack) and the journey may take between half hour or up to 1.5 hour, depending on the traffic conditions.

When alighting at the central station, get a 10-trips multiple ticket from the subway station for about 9 euros. This ticket will allow you to take 10 trips on the subway and trams, perfect if you intend to spend 3 or 4 days in Milan. Food, pizza, pasta and gelato is a must must must try...! After you tried that, you will find that the other pizzas out there are not worth mentioning. Gelato have so many flavours that you will have trouble thinking which one to begin with. 

Milan

Be prepared to feed the train ticket machine with lots of money if you intend to travel within Italy by train. A 2nd class return trip to Venice will cost at least 60 euros while return ticket to Modena cost around 40 euros. But thats the best way to get around Italy assuming that you do not miss your train.

Venice

Modena

I also went to Rome and the air ticket from Bergamo to Rome cost 70 euros (Single way). Lots of tourist spots there and a wonderful place to take pictures. You may want to invest in a good camera before coming on the exchange trip. Otherwise you may end up just like us, unable to capture the full view of the places and scenery. 

Rome

Rome

Rome

Night scenes in Rome is just so beautiful and its just so worth it to wait for the sky to turn dark before we come out for ohoto shots again.. Woohhooo..

Travel tips to London

I had a shock when I realise that some of the airports in Europe, especially those budget ones, do not operate 24 hours. They will close at about 2.30am and open at about 6am again when the 1st flight takes off at 8.30am. In this case, travellers have to take care not to arrive at the airport at 3 or 4 in the morning or else you will be standing in the cold for that few hours..! and its really COLD..!!

There are some things that we should look out for when planning a travel.

No 1.

Booking air-tickets early do save you quite a sum of money. Check out the promo tickets and you may sometimes find a ticket to your destination for just 1 or 2 euros. I bought my London tickets pretty late and so I paid close to 100 for a return trip. 

No 2.

Avoid flights that are like 7 or 8am in the morning. Usually, they may be 10 euros cheaper than the ones in the evening. But saving that 10euros will also mean that your 

holiday gets cut by a day..! For sure this is not worth it. I don wanna regret why didn't I spend another day in London..? Or else I could have bought that thing that I wanted to.. Blah Blah Blah...

No 3.

Camping at the airport in London 

Camping at the airport if you have to. If you had booked a flight that is 7am in the morning (London, Stansted), you most likely have to camp at the airport so that you can check-in at about 5am. For this, you will really appreciate if you had a sleeping bag along with you. When you see that the seats for resting in the airport are suddenly available for you to rest, it means that everyone else are getting ready to check-in and thats why they are leving their seats. The advise is for you to join in the queue as there might be just 1 counter in operation at the airport and the process is going to take long.

Buckingham Palace

London is generally a great place to travel, with so many things to see an

d play. Whoohhooo... A 3 day travel pass will allow you to have unlimited trips in all the subway (tubes) for free and its just a great way to get around London.

Do remember to try the fish and chips in London, they taste excellent..! For those who are on budget, a Marks and Spencer meal will fit your needs. Sandwhich with chips and drinks will just cost you 2 pounds. Cakes from London are also nice, not to mention the tea from there as well. Whittard tea, if I am not wrong, is so good that we all took a few cans each. Do look for this brand of tea when you are there and don't miss it.

Horse Guards

Tower Bridge

Holland Train Pass

We decided to invest in a Holland Train Pass recently, at a price of 55 euros. This pass will entitle us to a 40% discount on all train rides within Holland. So, for example, a train ride to Amsterdam will cost about 30 euros, but after the discount, we just pay 18 euros. The pass holder is allowed to take 3 other passengers along with him during the travel and all 3 friends will also get the 40% discount. We shared the pass and just one of us (preferably the one that travels most frequently) will be the pass holder. Work out your maths and you will realise that just 1 trip to Amsterdam will help yourecover your investment.

So... Exchange students who are intending to come to Holland next semester, do keep a look-put for this pass. In fact, you should buy this pass the moment you land in Amsterdam airport. Just ask the counter staff for the Holland Train Pass and they will assist you.

With this pass, taking a plane ride from airports in Holland becomes more affordable. Nearby airports include Eindhoven and Brussels's Charleroi and Brussels International. If lets say you wanna go London, you can only choose Eindhoven and the train pass will proves its value when getting the tickets. You just pay 9 euros instead of 15 to get to Eindhoven. There is actually an airport in Maastricht, but that only gets you to Pisa, Italy and the travel dates are rather limited. So, the airport is as good as nothing.

Cooking days

Ermmm.. When we firt reach this place, our meals look really crappy. I remember my first meal in Maastricht is just boiled pasta, with no sauce or anything. Thats because we arrived on a Sunday when all shops are closed and we don't have anything else in our bags that can be eaten. But even so, initial cooking period followed a concept of 'keep it simple, min the mess in my kitchen', so the food that we have is always very simple, nothing exciting. 

As time goes by, we started to experiment different things, like hamurgers, chicken rice, laksa, 'bak kut tea' and even teriyaki beef and  sushi recently. It jus take some practice and I am sure all of us can do it, just that whether you wanna do it or not. Some recipe may sound difficult, but can be quite simple when you actually get down to it. 

I think sushi is the most exciting one that we can have. A few friends just sit down at the table and start making their own sushi. Some will have sushi that really look lik

e sushi, while others may have theirs that look like a ball or 'popiah' with rice. You can also compete on who can make the best looking roll and whos got the biggest roll, blah blah blah, adding more fun to the dinner.

These are some of the fun food that we like to make in Maastricht. We have our favourite beef soup in the 1st picture and the burger in the next one. Personally, I like the burger better. Too bad, we seldom make fries because you gotta waste quite alot oil each time you fry, and I don't really like the idea of recycling the oil.

Studying in Maastricht University

Before starting school in Maastricht, my impression of exchange is that students do not have to study much and will make it through the exams peacefully. But looking at the passing criteria, I have to make some adjustments to my concept. To pass a course here in Maastricht, you have to get at least 5.5 out of 10 in the final exam. Besides that, students are only allowed to miss 1-2 classes at most in the block, otherwise, a penalty will be imposed and an assignment will have to be submitted by tat student. For sure, you will not want to end up doing that assignment. Participation grades count as well here and people are generally more participative than in Singapore. Speak up or else 0.25 grade will be deducted from your final grades.

The most significant point of this grading system is that students cannot plan their holiday trips as if they are really on a 6 month holiday in Europe. Watch out for class attenedance is a must and make sure you meet the passing criteria.

The school uses the smae blackboard system as NTU, therefore, we do not have much of a problem getting all the information that we need.

Fresh Markets

Maastricht do have fresh markets operating on every Wednesdays and Sundays. The market will be held at the market street, near the river, and stall owners' trucks will be park along the street. We can find a variety of meat here at the market, not to mention the veg and bread, cheese and all the other stuff that you may want to buy. A specialty here is horse meat, which we have no idea how to cook even till today. But there is the intention for us to try this out before returning back to Singapore.

Stalls like this one here will be set up along the market street and will sell all the fresh meat and vegetables. Cooked food like chicken wings are also available here and is a favourite hang-out for myself when I have the time. 

When on exchange in Mastricht, this fresh market is a must try. It is not just great in variety, but also a lower cost than the supermarkets. Oh yes, this is where I manage to get my fish filets to make fish and chips. Some of the stall owners are even willing to tell you how to prepare the meat, but of course, look for them regarding this when they are less busy. 

Most students from Singapore have no much experience in cooking, so am I. But the moment you reach this place, you will start to learn. And for me, I think its a nice

 thing to do, in fact I like cooking..! Nice to see that the final product turns out to be nice, instead of just edible. For those who insists that they cannot cook for whatever reasons, you will either have to find a room-mate that can cook or you eat out everyday (which cost about 10 euros for a basic meal).

By the way, this market closes at about 12 in the afternoon, so do wake up early and make a trip if you want the fresh stuff..!

Living in Maastricht

For those of you who are intending to come on exchage to Europe, especially Maastricht, you will find this post useful. 

Shopping in Maastricht is rather different from shopping in Singapore, especially regarding the opening hours. Shops close at about 6pm (local time) here and do not open for business on Sundays (except for the 1st Sunday of the month). This is the basic difference between Maastricht and Singapore. As we are so used to shopping after the sky turns dark back home, we have to adjust ourselves to get everything that we want or need before 6pm. Since they do not operate on Sundays and the whole street do feel like Chinese New Year period in Singapore, we have to stock up food and other stuff on fridays to avoid starving on Sundays.

Other differences include the 'Bring your own shoppign bag' and th

e refund policy here. When visiting the supermarket here, which we do frequently, buying a plastic bag from the supermarket will cost you approximately 15 euro cents and they might not ba able to hold the heavy weight of the stuff that we purchase. So the style here is for us to bring a backpack to the supermarket when we shop, doing our part for the environment. 

Refund policy is pretty open here. If you buy a product that you do not like, simply bring the product and the receipt back to the shop and you may get a refund. Unlike Singapore, the shops aare 'OK' top such customers, but don't do it too often..!

This is a shot of what happen to us the 1st time when we went to the supermarket.

We had quite a few situations happening at that time.

1. No bags

2. Bought too much stuff that we can't carry home

3. Obviously not used to the cold weather yet

When we first reach

After a 13 hours flight from Singapore, we finally arrived at Amsterdam on the 1st of Feb. The weather was cold and we had luggages to bring along. A train ride from Amsterdam to Maastricht (where we will be staying for the next 5 months) will take approximately 3hours and the tickets cost 30 euros. For some reasons, we couldn't take a train directly from the station in the airport, and had to take a bus ride to some other train station to catch our train to Maastricht. As we walked to the bus stop, we could feel the extreme temperature and wind blowing against us.

Having stayed in Singapore for most of our lives, all 6 of us were freezing in the cold and finally decided that we should just stay in the airport building till the bus arrives. A tip for such travel in future is to collect the bus travel schedule and wait in heated places till the bus arrival time, since their bus timings are rather accurate (surprisingly, we do not have the kind of situation that we have to wait half hour for a  bus and suddenly 2 or 3 buses come at the same time here). 

As expected, being our 1st journey here in Netherlands, we simply enjoyed ourselves in the 1 hour bus ride to the train station. Farms and industrial parks may be found along the way and the feeling of excitment resides in us. We learnt something new at the train station when the conductor inform us that the train to Maastricht will be split into 2 parts at Utrecht station, where the 1st half will go to Maastricht while the 2nd half will go to some other places. By theway, something never fail to happen to me everytime I travel on a train. I am always arriving at the train station just 1 or 2 minutes before the train departs and have to carry all my things and run to catch the train.

3 hours on the train was a get to know each other session, with topics like "where are we going to travel to during the school holidays" or "what modules are you going to clear at this place". Upon arrival at Maastricht station, the disembarkment threw us into the cold weather again. We decided to take a picture at the train station before leaving for our hostel. We used the timer function on the camera for this shot and as some of you may expect, our hands were shivering when we are pressing the camera buttons. After we see the camera flash-light come on, everyone just grabbed their things and run into the train station again, hidding from the cold again. 

While waiting for a cab to take us from the train station to the hostel, we saw something dropping from the sky, it was begining to snow. Being the typical Singaporean who never see snow for a long long time, all of us started to take pictures! 

Whooohhooo... Europe Travel is so Fun...!

Helloooo friends

I am still enjoying myself in Europe and have travelled to several of my dream destinations. I will post stories about all of my travel adventures in Europe in the upcoming period. Up to now, I still don't have the intention of returning to Singapore yet and honestly speaking, " I do not miss Singapore, at all ". I wonder how can anyone on exchange in Europe feel like returning home soon when there are so many things that they can play with over here. Weekend trips no longer have to be going to JB to pump petrol or Sentosa for a game of vollyball. We are talking about a day trip to Brussels or Amsterdam, and a long weekend excursion to Paris or Frankfurt.. Which I was like "Whoohhoooo, going on tour again..!"

I have quite a few destinations to discover before having to return. Hang in there, while the posts come right up.