My trip to Istanbul

When I finished high school, I went on a trip to Istanbul, historically known as Constantinople and Byzantium, the most crowded city in Turkey. I went with my classmates, especially with one of my best friends. 

I had been to many places by plane, but this flight was the longest flight I've had in my entire life because we were on the plane for six hours. In spite of had been to different places by plane, I get very nervous at the takeoff and at the landing in every single flight, and I think that it would be like this for the rest of my life!

When we arrived at the airport, we felt a little bit disconcerned because everybody was staring at us... maybe because we were a huge group of teenagers, our way of dressing, our haristyle... 

The first day was quite good. We visited many places and monuments: hagia Sophia, Topkapi palace, The Basilica Cisterm (the largest underground cistern)... but Hagia Sophia was the place that impressed me the most. Once it was a church, later a mosque and now a museum at the Turkish Republic. This museum has a very strict rule: woman must wear clothes that didn't let people (especially man) see certain parts of their body, such as chest, shoulders, legs... even sometimes woman had to cover their hair before entering. It suprised me as well the way muslim pray: they have five prayers each day that take place at very specific times, they have to cover their bodies, raise their hands and move up and down praying at the same time. I have to say that in every church that we went smelled like cheese, because they pray barefoot.

With the pass of the days, we felt more and more uncomfortable because everybody was staring at us because of the way we dressed. For them, seeing woman without veil was something unusual, but for us it was really shocking seeing woman covered from head to feet with a black dress. We could just watch their eyes.

The food was awful for me. I hate kebab and spicy food, so the supermarket and some fast food restaurtants were my favourites allies. Due to this, something that impressed me as well was that turkish man offer woman to have a cup of tea as someone that in our country asks for your number or your Facebook, so you have to be careful if you say yas to an offer like this.

I enjoyed very much this trip and I highly recommend it, but watch out this little things if you want to go!

My erasmus experience

I want to talk about my erasmus in Coimbra. It was the best experience in my life. 

When you go abroad you don't think about how much people you're going to meet there and fortunately those people change your mind. I was lucky because I met a lot of people and most of them were very different to me so I learnt other ways or life. They know how to seize the time and how being happy with others. In my opinion, this experience helps to you to open mind and see how you should change.

The city of Coimbra is amazing because a lot of students live there so you can go out every day if you want. But it isn’t the most important thing, I believe that when some person go there thinks that he or she would talk with everybody, not only when they have other interests. Also you can meet people from over the world, in mi case, my best friends were Spanish but I talked with Polish, German, French people... It’s interesting to compare how you behave and how other people behaves in the same occasion. 

I need to mention some of my favourite places there. There is a bar which is called Cabido, its waiters are nice and they put all the music we want like University song or something like that.

I used to go to a café called Luna which is located in Praça da Republica, the city centre, and my friends and me used to go there to drink beer because in Coimbra everybody drinks that instead of other drinks like gin tonic for example. 

I´m going to remember all this kind of things and obviously the people who I met there, especially my flatmate Marta, a person who has known me a lot in a very little time.

My Erasmus to Bologna.

My Erasmus to Bologna.

Last year I decided to go on an Erasmus to Bologna with two classmates who were also my friends.

We arrived to Bologna on 11^thSeptember without any apartment to live because through internet was impossible to find one. We had booked an hotel for a week, but one week wasn´t enough. We had to spend 3 weeks in different hotels until, finally, we found our perfect apartment.

The hotel experience is the only bad memory I have from the Erasmus.

Now, I’m going to tell you a bit about Bologna.

Bologna is the capital and the largest city of the Emilia-Romagna Region in the North of Italy and it’s the seventh most populous city of this country.

The arcaded streets of the central part of the city, built on the old Roman town, still preserve a medieval aspect from typical Italian city. The characteristic of this city are two leaning towers and you can go up to one of them, `Torre degli Asinelli´ which has 498 steps.

Another thing to mention about Bologna is its University `Alma mater studiorum´ is the oldest university in continuous operation and it`s the most prestigious Italian university. Every year many Erasmus students choose Bologna to study, like me, because of its parties at night and its prestigious university.

In my opinion I really like this place with its streets are full of university students from very different countries, each one of them with a different culture from which you can enrich yourself knowing more about them despite of the language or customs.

About the language, I have to mention that I was almost always with Spanish people and we spoke in Spanish and I didn`t practice my Italian, although my exams were in Italian, so me and some of my friends had to sign up to Italian classes and we went two days a week, being able to finally pass our exams.

Lastly, another great thing about Bologna is that you can travel to places as beautiful as Florence, Venice, Verona, Milan…because they are very close, and you arrive in less than 3 hours by train or bus.

In addition to how close the Italian cities the airport of Bologna isn´t not expensive so I could travel to Poland and France.

In conclusion, I'm really happy with my experience and I totally recommend travelling or living in Bologna especially if you are student.