Holidays a-coming...

🎜🎶🎜Holidays are coming, holidays are coming... 'tis the season... 🎜🎶🎜

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Walking riverside, from the university to the city center, at dusk - to catch the sun.

Action Planning: Feijenoord

Dispatch: Urban Planning (UP) Lecture

Moderator, ya'll...

I must have been bored shitless because somehow I found myself volunteering to moderate the debate between working groups - this lecture's (on Urban Planning: Theories, Planning & Practice; still under UGPPP) ancillary workshop.

Boot(ed) up

These boots are made for walking...

I'm a tsinelas (flipflops) person. The perks of living in an island. And doing development work.

Policy Analysis

Forbes Davidson

For his lecture Urban Policy: Form, Function and Fashion, a policy analysis exercise foll.

Prezi

Must-have: Museumkaart

Received this promptly in the mail, a week after ordering it online.

This is a definite must-have. For only €59.90, the Dutch Museum Card  gives the cardholder a year of free (mostly all; add-on of minimal € collected by some museums) access to about 400 museums in the Netherlands. (I have Farrah to thank for the tip.)

Dinner at Alma Lusa

Hipster feels...

After the UT exam and Paris, we felt like celebrating.

My bike got stolen.

My bike lock, what's left of it.

And that's that. (It was parked just right outside our dorm building, you know.) Ah well...

UGPPP³, here we go.

UGPPP Coordinator Carley Pennink does not like late-comers. I mean, who does? But (hot tip) she actually takes notice.

And we are on to course number two. Urban Governance, Policy, Planning and Public Private Partnerships aka UGPPP but actually UGPPPPP or maybe UGPPP³ (5 ECTS). If it sounds a handful, it's probably because it is. (Or not, you know, academia and its propensity in making "everything less simple".)

UT Exam Day!

Waiting outside the exam room -- nervous smiles all around!

After days of literally cramming in hundreds of pages of urban theories and academic gobbledygook, we finally dumped those back into 2 pages (mind the space limit!) of speedily (mind the time!) squiggled (mind your penmanship!) technical (mind your jargons!) abstractions (mind your mind!) of our UT Cliff's notes.

Fisheye'd

NOT a must-have: 9mm f/8 fisheye body cap lens for my OMD EM-10.

I've been wanting to buy this fisheye body cap lens from Olympus... 

11th Hour Exam Tips

Carolina and our other mentor, Veronica. Veronica is an IHS UMD alum, so she's been here, done that -- and had a tip or two to share.

Veronica is real -- and she gave us great last minute tips for the exams! Grazie!

Celebrating kalag-kalag

My simple altar particularly offered to my grandparents.

I've been wanting to host something since we got here. 

Today, I bought a blender.

Avocado smoothie, anyone?

Because, why not?

Dinner (Again) at Kuya Noriel's & Ate Bing's

Dinner at Kuya Noriel's & Ate Bing's!

Another dinner invite from Ate Bing.

UT Last Stretch

Back to the grind...

GLUT was fun but it's back to the lecture hall for us.

Just beat it

...with a little help from a Monster (or two)

On top of studying for the UT exam next week, I've a deadline to beat. I actually had to take a 2-day study break to finally finish this school DRRM guide book project (research, writing, layout, and illustration) leftover from my last engagement. But it's all good. I got it.

I live, I learn, I sketchnote.

Mindmap, daw? Pwes! (Burger & Meijers, 2012)

IHS is cute. They actually want us to learn.

Post-GLUT Beer and Chow!

10 Asians and 1 South American!

GLUT's done - we deserve beer...

GLUT aka Game of Thrones (Real Estate Edition)

Negotiations, conversations, hesitations, assassinations... (err, wrong game)

The 2nd part (yes, that quick, first part's done) of the UT course took us to a weirdly fantastical (complete with paper money and prop crown) fictional urban world of land grabbers and meddling institutions of power (slant: mine).

I am now a Netherlands Resident.

It's official - my Dutch Residence ID says so.

Jinxd me is over today -- I got my residence ID without a glitch!

No coffeemaker, no problem!

Because coffee is life.

I didn't think I could afford a coffeemaker machine, and still yet to find a cheap percolator and/or a French press, I made an improvised coffee dripper/ pour-over stand from plastic milk bottles.

Meetup with Farrah & Peter

What do you know, Boholanas in Rotterdam!

After about two weeks in Rotterdam, I, finally, met up with Farrah and Peter.

[Study Session 1+2] We are the Explorers!

We are the Explorers! (L-R: Me, Rozita from India, Meivis from Albania, Ruth from Ghana, Snow from China, and Angelina from Tanzania)

For our first study session (last Tuesday) all of Working Group (WG) 5 gathered in one room, but each smaller study group huddled at different tables to discuss the assigned article separately. There will be session where WG5 will discuss in plenary with Carolina or any of the mentors, and times where we were to discuss among our study groups independently. To streamline our discussion flow, guide questions have been given beforehand by our mentor Carolina. Our group coordinator, Meivis, (or as we've decided, the facilitator of the day, a role which shall be rotated between us) will then report back to Carolina our key discussion points.

First (Academic) Week

Jan Fransen, the IHS Head of Education & Training, is the Urban Theories (UT) course coordinator.

The first lecture day was quite uneventful, a taste of things to come...

Learning Academic (English) Writing

Evening class.

On top of our UT classes, we also needed to take nights classes in Academic Writing. And with another smaller group of classmates from WG5. 

Today, I bought a bike.

One of those is mine. Picked up in Oostplein, parked in Blaak.

Argel introduced us to these buy and sell Rotterdam pages in Facebook, I instantly got hooked and three days into it, I found myself in a meetup appointment to check out a used bike over at the Oostplein Metro station.

Friday Night Lights

Oye como va mi ritmo!

To cap off orientation week, of course, a party! At where else --

Photos: Sharon's Quickfire Tutorials

The orientation at the IHS library

I've not been listening, I don't know what Sharon's exact role/title is at IHS but she's been giving us the tutorials on how to use the library (borrowing of books, et al), the Blackboard aka BB, the EMS/CMS/ virtual learning environment used by IHS and I suppose the rest of the EUR (how to login, navigate through it, connect our EUR email to our personal email accounts, and most importantly, how to submit assignments and what-not), Refworks (the embedded BB plagiarism checker), IHS own internal virtual library, setting up of the eduroam VPN, etc. -- and all in different venues, too.

Meeting our Working Group + Mentor(s)

Miss Carolina (will never get used to calling people in authority with their first names), our mentor.

We've all been pre-assigned to a Working Group, a way of breaking up our class of 130-150++ (the max includes the UT short course group) to more manageable clusters for separate study sessions and post-lecture workshops.

First meal (I cooked)!

I only had chips aka French fries aka patat for lunch earlier, so this basically felt and tasted like a feast!

So... for my very first home-cooked errrm dorm-room-cooked meal -- et voila! -- sliced ham and over done omelette on rice and synthetic (because Ulalam!) blood stew on the side. Welcome to a year of food experiments and leftover feasts!

Meet (Joe) Blaak (Street) Market

The open market at Blaak is said to be the largest street market in Rotterdam.

It's a Tuesday. Market day at Blaak. Let out early from Ruud's quick campus tour, Argel, who's been here before a few years back for the 3-month basic course, smartly informed us about Blaak, that he was going and let the bunch of us join in - yey!

Photos: Rotterdam Harbour Tour

Nothing says "ik ben hier!" (I'm here) like cruising through Niewe Maas River and seeing most all of Rotterdam's icons -- the good and the bad -- all at once.

This was perhaps the most fun thing in the orientation week sked - the Rotterdam Harbour Tour.

Photos: Ruud's Mini Campus Tour

Blockheads! (#UPslang)

Ruud (IHS Student Support & Facilities) gave us a super short tour to some of the important (to us bunch) places  around campus.

My room stinks but it's all good.

Exorcisin' ghosts...

So for a moment there, I thought that I was gonna be homeless here in Rotterdam.

Sunday, we were picked up at the airport by rather 'shy-ish' EUR undergrads (they're volunteers, I think, so, thank you!). We were handed individual envelopes that contained a Metro/NS card, a Rotterdam map and keys to our dorm rooms. I got the latter two sans the keys. And the envelope read "own housing" - shaaayt.

Pinoy Dinner

Dried danggit!

Barely two days out of the Philippines, we're already craving for home-cooked Pinoy food. And what better way to satisfy that than tagging along to a Filipino family's for dinner!

First Day High: We are #UMD13

The UMD13 Pinoy Team (sans Jec and Viggo)!

Opening day was, uhm, to say the least, perfunctory.

EUR: First Look

That's our building! IHS is at the 14th floor.

We walked around the empty (coz Sunday!) campus to look for Mandeville Building, where IHS is located, so we'd not lose time looking for it for the Opening Program the next morning.

Touchdown, Schiphol!

Look, Ma, I'm in Schiphol.

I'm here. In The Netherlands. Un-fucking-believable. Groggy from 17± hours of flying (and just the whole surreal run-up to this, you know), I'm mentally pinching, nay, slapping myself -- inhaling and exhaling: this is real, this is not a dream, this is real, this is not a dream, this is real, this is not a dream. I'm being dramatic, yes -- I'm after all not a kid anymore (and I'm a believer of 'emo' expiration dates) -- but only because I'm putting this down in writing. I'm cool, I was cool about it, in real life, really, I was. (This being the first post of my blog spin-off, let it be said that this is basically this online journal's theme: my reflections here, are real sure, but they do not necessarily reflect my actions in real life. For one, I don't talk this much -- out loud -- out there, you get the drift...)