Exams finished, Merry Christmas!

After a week of intense studying my exams are finished. Friday was my last exam in Strategic Management, hopefully I did well. After the exam we submitted our last assignment for before Christmas, now it's time for Holidays! Friday I booked my ticket back to Holland for Monday, without telling my mother (my father and sister knew about it). So I am spending Christmas at home :).

Therefore Saturday I went shopping in the City Centre and Bullring shopping mall to get my family some presents. Shopping took a little longer than expected and all together I spent about 4 hours walking and looking for some nice gifts, but I found some! When I came back home after shopping I read in the news about terrible frost and blizzards in Holland... making me a little worried about my flight being cancelled.

A little nervous, Sunday morning I checked weather and flights again, and Sunday's flight for Amsterdam was cancelled! Furthermore there was a weather-alarm in Holland, huge troubles on the roads, railways and airports... that didn't look good. Luckily things were better on Monday, with Amsterdam's flight being right on schedule according to Birmingham Airport's website.

Monday, after having a pizza at my place, I went to the airport together with Vikesh, hoping there would not be any surprises. I had checked in online, so didn't had to go to the check-in counter. After some waiting I went to the gate for boarding. At the gate all cabin baggage was checked on size and wait! Literally, every bag for a totally filled airplane. Unbelievable, it took so long. When it was my turn they had a nice surprise:"you can only carry-on 1 bag Sir...", I was having a carry on bag and a laptop, which is even allowed with RyanAir! Not with BmiBaby though... Check-in my small bag with some presents for my family would cost me 30 pound, about the same amount as the value of the presents.

However, I was able to squeeze my laptop bag in my rucksack, squeezing all my presents and stuff. My rucksack became incredibly large, and everybody could see it wouldn't fit within the carry-on baggage size thing. But luckily they tolerated my larger bag, I had some difficulties putting them in the overhead storage though, but with some hard pushing and squeezing an almost breaking the cover I succeeded!

After the 1 hour flight I arrived around 6.30PM at Schiphol airport. The nicest surprise was yet to come... the railway services. After buying my ticket to Eindhoven, which is normally a 1.5 hour direct intercity, I noticed there were no trains going to Eindhoven. The only trains leaving were regional trains stopping at all stations, actually due to the weather everywhere in Holland only the regional stop-trains were going. Therefore I first had to take the train to Amsterdam Central Station, which took me about half an hour. At Amsterdam I could take the slow train to Utrecht... this took me again 1 hour. At Utrecht it was freezing cold, but I was very happy to see there was a train scheduled to Eindhoven only 3 minutes after my arrival! Not... the train was cancelled, and I had to wait for another half hour to get the train to Den Bosch. Normally the route Utrecht - Den Bosch takes you about 30 minutes... today 1 hour. On the way to Den Bosch I asked my father whether he could pick me up at Den Bosch station... I was really done with the train at that moment. Arrived at Den Bosch I had 2 large coffees and after about half an hour my father picked me up. On the road home I was amazed by the ammount of snow fallin in Holland, the whole landscape is covered under a 20 centimeter thick cover of white snow. A white Christmas :D!

Finally arrived home my mother was already taking a nap in front of the television. When I came in she stared at me for a second or 3... after she amazed said: "What are you doing here???" She had no idea at all I was coming :). A nice Christmas surprise. Another nice surprise yesterday was that my girlfriend Koy could pick-up her Student-Visa from the UK-embassy in Bangkok! She'll be joining me in Birmingham for an English Language Program in 1 or 2 weeks.


A MERRY CHRISTMAS TO EVERYONE, AND A HEALTHY AND PROSPEROUS NEW YEAR!

Fire Alarms and TATA Crucible

Last week the whole tower was twice waken up early because of fire alarms. Wednesday morning at 5 AM was the first one, everybody had to leave the building and gather in front of the building. Of course there was no real fire, but that didn’t stop the security from personally checking each and every room in the building to make sure everybody left! It took until 6:30 AM, one and a half hours, until we could go back in. Not a particular nice wake-up call… Friday morning we had a similar story, at 7.15 AM the fire alarms went off again. Of course, again, there was no fire but we had to wait again for 1 hour before we could go back in.

This week we also got our exam timetables. I have got 4 exams from the 14th of December until the 18th of December, and then it’s time for holidays. Last Sunday I went with Jaffar to London, my first time in London! We participated in TATA’s Crucible campus quiz, a quiz between UK’s universities in which the winner can win 4000 pounds and a place in the finals in India. Unfortunately I and Jaffar didn’t make it into the finals, but we surely performed quite well in the quiz and even got a certificate which says we are excellent (as did everybody else get…).

On the way to the venue we got to see something of London from the bus, including the (not so) Big Ben. Before the quiz and during the breaks we were offered lots of sandwiches, snacks, coffee and tea. The quiz took until about 8 PM, before we could get back on the coach to Birmingham. The trip back to Birmingham took much longer than expected. A Chinese girl was suffering from traveling sickness and got a panic attack, which made the bus driver stop and her friends even called an ambulance. We have been waiting for the ambulance for 1.5 hours before it arrived; of course the girl was already doing fine after 1.5 hours. I can’t even believe the ambulance turned up for a girl with traveling sickness…

Friday is my first boxing match in Birmingham. 7 boys , including me, from my club are fighting this evening.