The beginning of an end

Hello everyone,
My final exams at SMU are around the corner. The first, and the worst, is already on Wednesday. I can’t say that I have been stressing about it too much. Actually, the fact of me being totally calm and relax about the finals is pretty weird. Of course I am spending hours in the library reading about hedge funds and interest rates, but I still find a lot of time to enjoy myself at some parties. I guess we, exchange students, have no choice. All of us are leaving right after the finals to do some traveling around South-East Asia, so now are the last moments to throw some “good-bye parties”. It is pretty funny, because in “My Events” on Facebook there are at least 4 invitations for “last party of the exchange”. All of them are in the week of finals. I guess you must be wondering why no one takes the exams seriously over here.
Well, I would not say no one does. The library is open 24/7 right now and it’s constantly full of the Asian students who basically moved in here. People eat, sleep and do all the basic activities in the library. That is one extreme. The second one is the exchange students who are partying all the time. The exams at SMU are, on average, worth only 30% of the grade. In that case, we do not see the reason to kill ourselves for extra 0.01 of the grade. Furthermore, most of the exchanges do not really care about the grade. For them it is only the matter of pass and fail. And from what we have heard it is extremely unlikely for a person to fail. It seems that the person may fail a subject only if he or she forgets to show up at the exam. It definitely sounds pretty good, especially if one takes into account that it is not so unusual to have a passing rate of 50% at UvT. Unfortunately my grades do count, but I have heard that the grades are being up-scaled so most of the students who are going for an exchange end up raising their average. So yes, another reason why tonight I am attending a Belgium Party instead of pulling an all-nighter in the library ;)

My exchange is coming to an end. It is over in exactly 10 days, therefore most likely this is my last post on this blog. I do hope you guys enjoyed reading it and if you have any questions about going for an exchange program or living in South-East Asia or traveling around here – feel free to ask. You can find me on fb or just send me an e-mail (j.o.stachowska@uvt.nl). I will do my best to help you.

See you around in Tilburg in a couple of months!

time, don't fly away!!

Hello,
I am only 3 weeks away from the final exams at SMU. 2 weeks of studying, 1 week of exams and then… well earned vacation :) I am not going back to Europe until a couple days before Christmas, so I have around 20 days to do my last traveling around South East Asia. It was a very hard choice, but finally I made up my mind: Cambodia and Laos: here I come.
I already bought the tickets for Bangkok. I want to stay there a couple of days and from there, together with my good friends, Suzanne from Canada and Katrien from Belgium, we were supposed to take buses all the way to Cambodia. It seems that the plans need to be changed a bit. The monsoon season behaves very widely this year: the earthquakes and volcano eruptions in Jakarta, floods in Thailand, typhoons are happening all the time. I have no idea how the plans will look like in a couple of weeks, but I can say one thing for sure: the rain will not stop me from my last travels:)
I guess I still owe you a story describing how I survived the Full Moon Party. I have to admit that I was a little bit scared of attending it after I have heard all the stories describing what might happen during the party. I guess the stories weren’t unjustified, but I am convinced that a person who has a bit of common sense is pretty safe. By common sense I mean staying away from drugs (I’ve heard that people bought a very cheap weed and then got reported to the police by the seller for having drugs on them. Weed in Thailand is definitely not a good idea – the prisons are not too foreign friendly and the fines are pretty high), excessive amount of alcohol (that, on the other hand, was not easy – the booz was sold only in the buckets. I’ve never seen anything like that!), not passing out on the beach (that unfortunately was much more common than I expected) and having someone you know around you. I had no problem whatsoever with the last one since so many of the exchange students from SMU were there.
Let me do some advertising over here: if you ever have a chance to go to Full Moon party – do it! It was the best party I have been to in Asia. The dancing on the beach with other 5000 people around you, with the full moon shining above your head, waiting for the sunrise at 7 am is definitely magical and unforgettable.
I definitely have much more stories to tell about the Full Moon but I am afraid that my school blog is not the best place to share them ;)
I attach some of the pictures of the Thai beaches. Unfortunately I have none from the Full Moon – taking any valuables was unadvisable, so none of us had a camera at the party.
Thinking about the end of the exchange makes me pretty depressed. I do miss Europe and all my friends, but this semester has been magical. People who are considering whether to go for an exchange: DO IT!! People considering where to go for an exchange: choose Singapore and you will not regret it!