The Intro Weekend

In the preceding weekend I went to the Erasmus Student Network (ESN) Introduction Weekend. The group of about 100 exchange and master’s students were taken around Rotterdam.

On Friday night, we met at Café BED which is where the ESN have had their famous Tuesday parties until now. The place is moving to another location. After that we went to a restaurant on the main shopping street, Lijnbaan (pronounced: lainbaan, I think), before taking a pub crawl.

Saturday, I spent the day with my parents before they left for the airport to go back to Denmark. Later, however, I met up with the ESN group at a very nice place called Locus Publicus which is quite close to where I live. We went on to have dinner at an Italian restaurant called Happy Italy.

At Happy Italy, my table had to wait a very looonnnggg time for our pizzas. In fact, one of us had to wait two hours for his pizza. When he got his pizza they served the rest of us dessert. Completely unacceptable – and they didn’t understand why we didn’t tip them!

After dinner, a smaller group of us went to two bars and had drinks and beers before the party continued at a café close to the harbor.

Sunday was a very relaxing day. We all met for lunch at noon before going on taking a boat ride in the port of Rotterdam. The weather was, like the rest of the weekend, absolutely beautiful which made the impressions even better.

The boat ride ended and we walked to the cinema to watch the 2011 British espionage movie “Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy” (read more). Very interesting movie – but some parts of the movie was in Hungarian and since I didn’t understand the Dutch subtitles it was a little difficult to keep up.

The day ended with a dinner buffet and finally a visit to a brand new place called BIRD. Certainly a place I can recommend. Nice music, mostly jazz. Polite staff. Good beer!

Looking back at the intro weekend it was a fantastic time, including meeting a lot of new great and interesting people from countries such as Poland, the United States, Canada, Norway and Finland.

The intro weekend was definitely a success.