Introduction week

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After almost one week in Palma the introduction week for the Erasmus students started on September 7th. I'll describe the activities day by day!



Monday & Tuesday

On Monday morning Yoran and I had an appointment at the local government in Palma with our landlord to get our Residents Card. With that card we can use the public transport with a 50%!d(MISSING)iscount. It's quite some paperwork but luckily we had our landlord preparing everything for us :-)

On Monday and Tuesday we had introductions at the university. It was the first time at the Universidad de las Islas Baleares so at first we had to find the right building. The campus is really big so we had some issues finding it. As Yoran and I were not the only ones who were a little later, the introduction started a little later so everyone was there.

On Monday they just gave us a general introduction about the UIB and we had to introduce ourselves. With more then 120 exchange students this took a little while... Most funny introduction was by one of the Chinese girls when she ended her short introduction with: 'Oh, y soy soltera', which means: I'm single ;-)

Monday evening we gathered at a local pub with all the students to have some tapas and drinks and ofcourse to get to know the group. That evening we met some other Dutch guys from Groningen and an English guy. The beer tasted very good that first evening! This was all organised by the Erasmus Student Network, a small organisation of students who arrange a whole load of activities for all the exchange students.

On Tuesday we got all information about the registration at the UIB which sounded pretty complicated since we still had to choose our subjects. For the Erasmus grant we'd already chose them but all the courses have their own planning so we had to change some courses so there weren't any conflicts for our timetable. Finding out all this took some time... The coordinator for exchange students we had to go to the administration office, there they told us we had to go back to the International Office and there they told us that we had to get in touch with our Tutor at the UIB (we didn't even know we had one...). Luckily we found him that afternoon so we knew how to get this all fixed.

Tuesday evening everyone met at Plaza de España (Central Square of Palma) in order to go to on a little pub-tour trough Palma, I got to meet more of the international students and I could already tell that the group up to that point was very nice and easy going.



Wednesday

What's to say about wednesday.... We were supposed to go sightseeing with all the students in Palma but I'm sure almost no-one was there since Tuesday evening got pretty late and the hangovers were pretty bad on Wednesday morning.... So we ended up going to the beach and relax there for a bit! Let's move on to Thursday!



Thursday

Excursion day! At 9.30 everyone met at Plaza de España for a trip to Valldemossa and Soller. The wheater was so nice that we went from pub to pub to have a cup of coffee because it was raining all day. Not really what I'd expected when I went of to study on Mallorca... Anyway the day was still nice and we know some spots to see when the wheater's better :-) All in all it was a good day and now we can laugh at the fact that we used our beachtowels as umberella's...



Friday

It stopped raining, so to the beach we went! We got some Dutch girls who we met, and Fred (the English guy) with his girlfriend, to come to our place to go to the beach! Our English roommate Will also joined us for a great afternoon in Playa de Palma!

In the evening the Erasmus Student Network arranged a diner with... free beer!! As we were with around 80 people we'd imagined that the food wouldn't be that good, which it wasn't. I tried some typical Spanish disches but it was horrible, luckily the beer made up for that! After the diner we went home because we had another daytrip the next day.



Saturday

As always everyone gatherd at Plaza de España for a (this time sunny!) daytrip to Formentor and Pollentia. Pollentia is a very old city North-East on Mallorca. It was very nice wondering through the streets there. After two hours we got back into the coaches and we took off to Formentor. On the way we stopped by an amazing viewpoint (photo's attached to this blogpost). We ended up at a lovely beach near Formentor were we laid down for three hours. After that we went back to Palma around 18.00.

In the evening we had a great houseparty at the appartment of two Erasmus students. They invited nearly everyone of the exchange students so you can imagine the mess in the appartment after everyone left. (Read: got sent away by the police at 4.30 in the morning). No one was amazed by the fact that the police came, however everyone was amazed by the fact that they arrived only at 4.30.



Sunday

After the houseparty Yoran and I woke up quite late so we spent the rest of the afternoon at the beach, preparing us for our first classes at the UIB!

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