Market Day in Haarlem

Today was market day in Haarlem, so I went to check it out, to see if I could find a broom for my apartment. The outdoor market had just about everything you could think of to eat, like fresh bread, dutch pastries, fruit, cheese, and meat pies. You can buy flowers, jewelry, kitchen utensils, paintings, shampoo, watches...the list goes on.




Sadly, I did not find my broom. My apartment really needs a good clean...


Here is the outside of the student apartments. If you look to the left, you'll see some familiar flags in the window.


This is inside my room. I'm glad they included mini fridges in all the rooms. For a kitchen, I share with about 6 other people or so in our common room. It has a full kitchen with a TV and sofas. There's been more than a few parties there already.



This week of classes seemed to go by quite fast. I'm finding the structure of teaching here really different than at Malaspina. From my perspective, the teaching method itself seems a bit unorganized, but then the professors expect our group work to be extremely organized. For example, we had to create an 'action plan' in our group, to outline all of our projects and group responsibilities for the first period. Some of our projects include creating a research proposal for a community in the Netherlands, as well as another proposal for a community in South Africa. We'll also be participating in a festival of our choice, and we have to provide some sort of information to people at this festival about community-based tourism. We can be as creative as we like about how we do this.


In our group, I'm the secretary so I'm always in charge of keeping minutes of our meetings. Once I've formatted the minutes, then they are posted on an online program called Blackboard, which is the same idea as Moodle at Malaspina. It's where students submit their work, and also were the professors post any updates or readings.

So another week down, I wonder what next week will bring.

(Happy valentines day, by the way. I'm still recovering from the valentine's pub crawl we had last night, which was organized by the school)