Hello from The Hague, Netherlands! It has been nearly three weeks since I left Louisville and it has all been a blur. Before I came, I read the other blog entries on The Hague to get an idea of what to expect. I am glad that I did as it has been a huge help. I will tailor my blog posts so that it will give you an idea of what to expect about life in The Hague and abroad through my experiences. It does not take much time to get settled down in The Hague. It is an extremely diverse and international city. I definitely did not expect it to be that way. Almost everyone speaks English and you will see that many of the people are students or young professionals. I am here with another UofL student, AJ Bucci, and we were lucky enough to find an apartment in the city center. The city center is where all of the restaurants, bars/clubs, and stores are located. We bought bikes, which is the primary form of transportation in and around the city. AJ talks about it in his blog post, but biking is a huge part of Dutch life. They have special roads and traffic lights dedicated to bikes only. They even have these rails on stairs for you to use in case you have a bike with you. For us, walking to school or the train station takes about 20 minutes. But with the bike, it is less than half that time. I am not going to lie to you, before I came to the Netherlands; I was expecting to conquer Europe one country at a time. It is definitely easier said than done. It can be tough to plan trips around school but the key is to travel as much as you can as early as possible, before you get deep into classes. A good rule to follow is every other week for travelling out of the country. And you have to plan early to get good deals on planes and trains. Also, don’t be afraid to be the first one to make travel plans. Other people will follow once they see someone else do it. So far, the weather has been pretty good. Good enough to where we were able to make it to the beach one day. That was pretty nice. But everyone is telling us to enjoy it while we can before it gets worse. The classes have been very interesting so far. Group work and presentations are a common theme among all classes. You will get to meet people from all over the world here. In a single group, you could have someone from Russia, Thailand, Mexico, and Slovakia. It has been a great experience so far. I’ll be back to update you on more from The Hague, in the meantime if you have any questions you can send me an email or leave a comment.

Chiraag Bhimani