The first hostel was not very good, so we decided to switch to another hostel. On the other side of the river out of the touristic part. There we met some other people and went out for dinner.
That is not as easy as it sounds, as you have to negotiate about anything :) There is a lot of competition among the restaurants along the galata bridge. Every restaurant has one or two guys to talk the people into the restaurants. Sometimes it can be anoying, but if you can talk a bit you can haggle your way around to get a cheap meal. Especially when you are with a big group.
Among us there was an australian guy who has been to India, where he learned to talk and haggle quite well. So after a lot of negotiating we included two bottles of wine and got into the restaurant. Once in you will be shown fish to choose from:
After all the dealing you can get to eat. I must say the fish was pretty damn nice. The best fish I have ever had I guess. The view was also pretty great because we were under a bridge. You could see the boats moving right up front.
After that we got back to the hostel and had a small party.
The second day I got connected to a Nihan, a girl who lives in Istanbul. Meryem, a turkish friend I met in Lisbon took care of that. That was so cool, we went to see places together with her. That was pretty nice. We did a lot yesterday. Here are some pictures.
Enough time spent typing this :) Not enough time at the moment.
After a very good combined goodbye party of Marielle and me it was time to say goodbye to everyone. :( That is too bad, but everything has an end. On the other hand Facebook is still up of course.
After a final coffee at the airport with my closest friends, I left Lisbon. I flew through Heathrow, which is really enormous.
After waiting for three hours (one hour delay) I could finally board my plane. I took the metro to Aksaray, and took a cab to the hostel which was way overpriced of course.
Now I will leave to see more of Istanbul. It’s huge.
Btw: It’s cold. It is pretty damn cold. And it’s snowing.
Happy 2010!
On February 2nd I will fly to Istanbul. This afternoon I went to the airport and compared some tickets from the different airlines. Quite a lot of difference in prices, sometimes it was like 500 euros more expensive !
I decided to fly with British Airways, via London. The price was ok, but I cannot understand why they ask 20 euro “service-fee”. Bastards. They only had to select my flight and give me the ticket…
I will leave Lisbon in the morning and arrive in Istanbul in the evening.
I also went to the medical center, but there they told me that I had to go a place nearer to my home and have to see a doctor first. They gave me the address and a phone number, so that won’t be a problem.
I managed to fill in all the papers to get to Eskisehir… Final preparations include getting an airplane ticket, a good new backpack and some vaccinations. (Oh yes, and adapting this website… )
Recently I bought a Lonely Planet travel guide to Turkey, which I have heard good things about. It contains some very nice pictures, hopefully I can visit most places when I’m there. I got connected with another student from the same education (Jeroen Panjer), who is also going to study at the same university and department. We are planning to stay in Istanbul for around one week to take a look at the BIG city. (The chapter of Istanbul is the biggest in the guide :P)
To keep it a little bit interesting are here some recent pictures:
This last picture is of the “international dinner” where we all made some food. I do not remember the name of everything, but it was all very nice !
I finally got some time to get the videos online. The quality is quite bad, but its just to give you an impression how the show was.
Rammlied (Opening) :
Ich tu dir weh:
A couple of days ago I got the news that I could go to Turkey to study from February. Another Dutch student told me that he has been there and really liked to be there.
I only get this change once, so why not take it? Now I am arranging all the stuff to go there. Forms, forms, and even more forms. That does not really matter, once I get there I don’t have to think of that anymore :)
I will be studying PR and advertising which is not related to my current direction at all. I want to keep my horizon as broad as possible, and do lots of different things to have knowledge about many things in the big word “Communication”. I already picked my subjects (which are in english) last week.
The International office of my school said they got an email from the Turkish University saying that I was welcome there.
So this weekend I went to Coimbra to have the adventure weekend. It was very kind of my boss that it was not a problem to leave friday a little early. I packed my stuff and went to the meeting point in Alameda. We had to wait a little bit for some people to show up but eventually we got out of Lisbon. After an our and a half or something we went to a gas station to get the sad news the bus was broke. We had to wait for a replacement bus which would have to come in an hour or so.
That was not a very big problem: we had a little soccer ball, some cards and the organization brought some bottles of wine. We were waiting and waiting, the bus took very long to arrive. After three (!) hours the bus finally arrived and we could continue our trip. Because of the waiting the time we had for the sightseeing was quite shortened, so we went pretty fast for dinner. After eating in Coimbra we went to the hostel where we sat down a bit and went to bed. The next morning we had to get up at half past eight…
The next morning after breakfast we got in the bus and headed for the location of the orienteering. The group was split in half, one half did paintballing / orienteering in the morning and the other in the afternoon. After a short briefing we formed groups and headed for the first point on the card. There were six points spread out in the surroundings of the little town vila nova. We had to get a stamp from each of them. Some points included activities which were climbing and rappelling. It was all quite fun to do. We got all the points and got back to the bus. ( o yes, lemons grow here)
So the next thing was the paintballing. I have never done paintballing in the woods earlier, so I did not know what to expect. Now I can say it is way more fun than indoor because of the fact that you have vegetation so you can’t see very clearly. It is also softer to dive on to take some cover. The games went pretty well, and everybody liked it very much. It was such a success, they are planning to organize it another time but then in Lisbon. After the activities we went back to the hostel to take a shower. When everybody was done we went to a restaurant around the corner. It was a pretty bad restaurant. We had to wait quite long for our food, and at last we ran out of food so fast half of the table could not get a second piece of meat. Even the batatas were bad. It did not ruin the evening though.
After the food we gathered in the hostel and went to a local club. Nice party!
So after arriving pretty late / early in the hostel we slept a bit and woke up again. We went to get the wetsuits (for which we gave the measurements earlier) and went to a hill. From that hill we did the rappel to the other side of the river (through some trees). There we ate something and got ready for the canoing. Unfortunately we all took our shoes off to not get them wet… The canoes were around 600 metres away from the place we lunched. The way to there was covered in gravel/stones. It was hurt like hell.
Canoing was fun though, we got in someboats and pedalled through some fast floating currents and some steady water. A big part of the river was covered with erasmus students in little boats.
When we were done canoing we got out of the water and saw that we had a long way to go to get back to the bus… We saw the stones again… Suddenly they said we could take place in the jeep of the company in which could bring us to the bus. The jeep was covered with people, not only inside but also on the sides, back and roof. It is a pity I don’t have a picture of that. :)
EDIT: YES I DO! :D Thanks Benjamin !
So after that we got back in the bus which got us back in Lisbon. Everybody said goodbye to everyone and came to the conclusion we had to something like this again in the future. It was really fun!
So yesterday I went to the Rammstein Concert. Here are pictures and video of the evening.
I also made some videos, but for now they are too big to put them on the internet. I will look at them when I have some time. The first line of lyrics of the song gives you a good hint:
“Wer wartet mit Besonnenheit
der wird belohnt zur rechten Zeit ” :)
Benzin:
Sonne:
Crowdsurfing with the rubber boat:
They gave a great show, and I wasn’t expecting anything less. Lot’s of fireworks, and of course the good strong music. This won’t be the last time I saw them I guess.
