While abroad, souvenir shopping is a must.

Meeting the locals always makes a trip abroad a more enriching experience. Luckily, in this dialogue we get the chance to meet with local people multiple times a week. Our program relies heavily on meetings and presentations from various municipalities around the Netherlands. We’ve had the chance to meet with city planners, transportation experts, bus drivers, private firm planners, and more! Most of our meetings involve a walking or biking tour so we get the chance to ask our own questions to the people we’re meeting and have the opportunity for them to show us their city. Additionally, one of the professors at our host university, TU Delft, has multiple guest lectures and often sits in on our classes. We were also invited to have dinner and watch a bike race at another guest lecturer’s house-a yearly tradition. We were able to meet his extended family and spend some time with them while enjoying a fun town-wide event.

While abroad, souvenir shopping is a must. I’ve gotten quite a few different things for friends and family back home but the thing I’ve bought the most of is CHEESE! We were recently able to go to the Gouda weekly cheese market which was a really fun thing to experience as they go through a whole auction process of huge 24lb cheese wheels in the beginning. They have a lot of different types of cheese, but the majority is (of course) Gouda. I definitely have some cheese-lovers in my life so I stocked up! While souvenir shopping is fun, it’s easy to go over board so I’ve been careful to stick to a budget during this trip. The euro has been easy to adjust to and it helps that the rate is pretty great right now (about 1.1 dollars for every euro). Because we have a lot of days that are similarly structured it was helpful for me to develop different budgets for different types of day. Long bike ride all day with a short break for lunch? Smaller budget. Lecture day with a long lunch spent at the weekly market in town? Bigger budget. I know other people on my trip have budgeted week-by-week and at the beginning of every week they take out the amount of euros they budgeted and that’s all they have to work with. The most important thing is to be aware of what you’re spending, find a system that works for you, and stick to it!

Until next time, doei!