I’m Going DownUnder!

These past few weeks have been so exciting and at the same time so scary and stressful.

Currently I’m a second year student at the School of International Facility Management (IFM) at the Hanze University. Since the course is international, my class is multinational as well; people in my class are from all over the world (Aruba, St Martin, Bulgaria, Nigeria etc). The cultural differences may create many miscommunications but also makes the study so very interesting and instructive!

The third year of IFM is going abroad, 5 months on internship in any country you like and 5 months studying at a partner school of the Hanze. The Hanze University has 5 partners schools; in Austria (Kufstein), Finland (Jyvaskyla), US (Arizona), China (Macau), and Australia (Canberra).

Before the first of March we had to hand in our 3 favourites with motivation letters, copy of our grades and other stuff, then one week later we would hear where Hanze had decided to place us. You saw the people in my class (definitely including me) getting more nervous every day.

Anyway I’m placed in Canberra, and I’m so excited about it! I’ll be going with a friend also called Janneke, and she is definitely much fun. The term will start halfway February next year, but we will probably fly to Sydney (which is relatively close) 2 weeks before school starts to do some great sight seeing. Then we will be living on campus of the Australian International Hotel School, in Canberra for 3 months. After that we’ll still have 4 months before our fourth year will start to do some seriously good travelling.

If everything goes according plan, a really good friend of mine, Piia, will be doing her internship in Sydney at the same time, so hopefully she’ll have time to travel with us. I can totally see us driving in our flower power hippie van, wandering around, going from beach to beach, surfing everyday…. :D

I also want to go bungee jumping and snowboarding (fingers crossed that Johan can come for a couple of weeks then as well) in New Zealand. And if possible I want to visit Indonesia, Thailand, and China, too!! But looking at the time limitation we have, that will probably be something for another trip.

Ow goss, there are so many great places to discover in this world….

Snowboarding in Harrachov

I've got the snowboard under my feet
I can fly so high, I can fall so deep “Guano Apes, Lords of the Boards”

February 17^th me, my family (parents, brother and sister) and Johan went, for a great week skiing and snowboarding in Harrachov (Czech Republic).

Harrachov is a small though very popular ski resort situated in the border of Krkonose Mountains (Giant M.) and Jizerske Mountains with plenty of good restaurants, hotels and bars. We stayed at the Sport Hotel which is perfectly located next to the elevator up to the slopes!

When we arrived it had been snowing the whole week so the snow was perfect, (Johan and I went off the slope the second day, which was really difficult but so beautiful being the first one boarding in that powder snow). But when we were in Harrachov the weather was so nice, with the sun shining every day, we actually had one day that it was 10°C!

The first time I went snowboarding was two years ago in Austria, where I took snowboard classes. The thing with taking classes is that you are mostly sitting and waiting for the teacher having time for you. I didn’t like it that much and spent more time relaxing in the sun than boarding.

This time it was a whole different story, every morning we got up at 7 and were on the slopes from 8 am till the elevators closed at 4 pm. First because I wanted to impress Johan, who is an advanced snowboarder, but when the boarding went so surprisingly well and it turned out to be much fun, I got addicted to it as well.

So because of the great snow, nice weather, good located hotel, much fun we had and good snowboarding this week couldn’t have been better!