Every student in Holland gets this opportunity, not many of them take it. My name is Sandra, just an ordinary girl from the Netherlands who chose to open up her mind and see how things can differ in a total different part of the world. India, the place where I am right now as an exchange student, the place where I already studied for two and an half months and where I will be staying for another month.  

Manipal is the place where I live right now, when I first got here it was all so overwhelming. With the school bus I went from Mangalore airport to Manipal and I can still remember what my first thoughts where "goodbye adventure, it was a nice opportunity, but I won't survive this trip". I hold on tight, but still got dashed from one side of the bench to the other. The traffic is amazing, there are no rules or at least no one can remember them from their driving lessons. It's funny to say, two and an half months later my mind totally changed, I even get inpatient when a rickshaw driver is being careful. When you aren't driving like crazy here, you would never get somewhere.

Now-a-days Manipal feels like my home base, not overwhelming at all but just a relatively quiet place. The need to discover more gets even bigger because of that, it's becoming a place to return to after every new experience. The place to settle down again.  Almost three weeks ago I decided not to travel during the weekends anymore, not that I didn't want to, I just had to think of my attendance. Because I planned something big, I wanted to travel in Tamil Nadu for one week and I was figuring out where I wanted to go. I was so excited because this would be the first time I was traveling alone in India; it seemed to be a nice challenge. When I told my Indian friends about this, they didn't like this challenge at all. They told me it was not safe to go by myself.

I already experienced that Indians are really protective, everyone wants to help. This is the first big difference I noticed between India and my own country. In Holland you can walk at the streets for hours without anyone saying something to you, especially in big cities. I decided to listen to the advice to bring someone, only she had the disadvantage that I already planned the whole trip. The plan was to fly to Chennai and book at a foreign train office, railway tickets for three different routes.  The railway station in Chennai had a great office for foreign tourists, there was a huge queue that we could pass and go to an office. Someone helped us immediately.

Article Posted By : prajwal316  On March 17, 2013lView All Articles

Article Source :

http://www.veethi.com/articles/my-experience-as-a-dutch-student-article-1782.htm

Keywords :
travel , town , Dutch Student