Bienvenue a l'UNIL!

So it's Thursday, and I feel like this week has zoomed past so quickly!! I'm quickly approaching having been here for 3 weeks, and am now surpassing the amount of time usually spent here on holiday, and can thereby say I'm feeling more and more at home.

This week I've spent basically getting myself a little more integrated in university life here, going to the faculty office to get my schedule sorted out, getting to know an increasingly large-sized group of people in my classes, and learning the ups and downs of "Modules", which are the way classes are organized here. We are currently doing 2.1: Cellule, organe, systeme, containing courses like biochemistry, pharmacology, pathology, endocrinology, radiology, and morphology (which is like anatomy and histology combined). It's been a bit of revision from last year so far, but the new material is piling up, and I realize I do really have to put aside some time for a good study session this coming weekend.

Now I am for the first time testing the little living room in my apartment, sitting here chatting with my flatmate after we've both come home from classes, and I quite like this armchair after a day in the auditorium... :)

I thought I'd also share some of my newest observations here in Lausanne:
- The postman drives a YELLOW tricycle moped and wears a matching yellow helmet. They look hilarious and I kind of want to go steal one and try it out-- it looks like so much fun!
- There is a "biblio-bus" driving around the town center-- I saw it at Flon the other day-- It basically looks like any of the normal buses here apart from the fact that it bears the words BIBLIOBUS all over the side, and if you look inside it has bookshelves!!! It's basically a transportable library. Apparently they place it around at different places and people can borrow books... cool concept!


- I think I have more Italian-speaking professors than French-speaking ones! The Swiss-French accent is definitely more interesting when you add a good mix of Italian pronunciation-- as does my biochemistry professor. I didn't initially know the Italian part of the Swiss culture was this integrated, but I'm starting to see it everywhere I go.
- It is practically impossible to find normal yellow cheese here, like a gouda?-- everything is Swiss Gruyere or something similar... took me ages to find grated cheese that's not something fancy, but it does exist, one just has to search pretty hard to find it :) .

There you go, a little Swiss input from today, definitely can't hurt! I am now going to go do some studying of the endocrine system (that's hormones and bodily messengers for the non medics), so that I'm prepared for my practical tomorrow! After school tomorrow I also have a scheduled "fitness"-session with one of my Erasmus-colleagues from Belgium; we're going to see whether we are going to join pilates or yoga or discofit, or something of the likes so that we don't look like blobs when we go home to see our mothers (very concerned about eating habits and general well-being) at Christmas.
Feel free to comment on the yoga plans! I've never tried but I hear it is quite fun? (but that's maybe for more bendy people than me...) Have a good Thursday night! Tomorrow's Friday-- that is very nice!

Les Rochers de Naye

Hello again from Lausanne!
I've now been here for over two weeks and things just keep on getting better! I'm getting a feeling of how great it can really be to be an exchange student-- opportunities presenting themselves all around me, meeting a begillion new people every day, and generally just having an excellent time! Sitting down to study isn't too hard either because somehow all this new-ness is really motivating!

Today's blog mission though, is to show you a bit of how beautiful the area of Vaud really is, here at the eastern end of the Lac Leman, mountains shooting into the air just off its shores, it's just something really really different to what I'm used to with the general flatness of Belgium!

I was studying yesterday when I had the urge to check facebook (as one does when studying :P ). I there discovered that one of my fellow Erasmus medical student had suggested for people to join him and some other people for a hike in the mountains above Montreux, about 20 mins by train from Lausanne. I knew there was really no question to be asked to get me to go along, Saturday being very rainy and me having had a very long day.... what excitement!

So without further ado, off we went this morning, meeting at the station at 10am, and got on a train to Montreux. From there we took a much smaller mountain train upward to the small village of "Caux" which is really just in a vertical line UP from Montreux. How they ever decided to build a RAILWAY up there goes beyond me... but just the view from the train is worth sharing with you...

Rising up in the slopes above Montreux...

Very nice view of the beautiful Lac <3 

The trainride took about 20 minutes, and the line actually had several stops along the way where there were farms or little groups of houses. It was clear we also had locals onboard in addition to the vast majority of tourists, as they chatted with the conductor and driver. Cool to think people actually live up there! We made it up to Caux, and got off (unlike the majority of the people-- the train actually goes all the way to the top, so many choose to stay on and then walk back down), because we, of course, are hardcore, and have chosen to walk up the 8 km trail leading us to the peak.

 
 The station at Caux..

That's the mountain we're climbing!-- seems far...

All along the path there were breathtaking panoramic views of the lake and the mountains surrounding us. Clouds formed in the hills below us, and we came across challenges like a herd of "mountain-cows" grazing in the middle of our path. We took several breaks on the way up-- the first couple of kilometers were easy enough, the path sloped upward but not steeply, and was large and cleverly constructed through the winding wooden landscape. As we got closer to the summit the path got trickier though, and much steeper, so progress was slowed significantly. We made it, however, in a little over 3 hours!! I guess I'll just let some more of these pictures speak for themselves...

And last but not least, what does one have to drink at the summit of a Swiss peak?? Rivella of course!! Yum. (My photo looks like an add.. maybe I could sell it to them.. :D )

Hope everyone's had a really good weekend! Please give me a tip if you know any other great hikes to take in Vaud, I think I want more of this! 

Let the studying begin!

It's a beautiful day in Lausanne today, but I can really start to feel the fall coming on, it was only 8 degrees when I left the apartment this morning! Skies are clear though, and I think we got up to about 16 degrees this afternoon. I spent my last weekend of holidays with my boyfriend here in Lausanne, and I have to show you where we went to eat on Monday, it was beautiful and I would recommend it to anyone staying in Lausanne even if only for one night! We had pasta and pizza which were both so good :D

 LE WATERGATE RESTAURANT
http://www.water-gate.ch/

After this idyllic finale to my holidays, classes have now since Tuesday officially started and my first three days are complete! To be honest the "rentree" was completely chaotic for me-- it's a new system of classes and schedules and groups and professors and information desks and people to contact and registration forms to fill in. The Erasmus program also brings its own administrative fun, so that's basically all I've had time to do this week so far!

Today though, brings new hope for a slightly less paper-work-filled existence, as I have now sent off my "arrival attestation" for Brussels, then gone to the "controle de l'assurance maladie" where all they did was look at my European health insurance card and then made me fill out a form... it took me ages to find this little office as well... but it's done! Third, I went to the "Bureau de controle des habitants" which I found by asking at the police station handily positioned at Flon so I didn't lose myself too badly in the vast network of shopping and walking streets in the area. The office building was huge and very hard to miss when I found it, and a very helpful and happy man behind glass made me a whole file with copies of my apartment contract and my Erasmus contract and whatnot, also accepting my wrong-sized  passport photo for which I was very grateful :) . So it's now a relief that I don't have to go back there for another month or so before my ID card and official residence permit will be ready.

Otherwise having actually started studying has been quite good- I like having a schedule for my day, and my schedule is definitely busy so it's not like I'll have tons of time to just hang around... but who am I kidding? I am doing my 3rd year of medicine here. Nobody said that would be simple. I will have my official schedule available on the university network website tomorrow morning as well, after having sorted out a series of problems with it with the help of the very nice ladies manning the faculty office. Again I have to comment on the niceness of all the Swiss people I am meeting. They all seem so welcoming and happy to help-- I really don't understand why they're being stapled as being "closed" and "hard to get to know"...?

I am getting quite ready for the weekend now though-- I have to get started on some school work, and the weather forecast for Saturday (really crappy) will probably let me do that without feeling too guilty that I'm staying inside :) Anyone with fun weekend plans they want to share?

Doing some tourist-y things :)

Hi! It's Monday, and what they here call "Lundi Jeune", which is a public holiday in most of "Suisse Romande" (the French-speaking part of Switzerland), including in the two cities Lausanne and Geneva. Therefore my classes don't start until tomorrow and my boyfriend who has been here visiting me since Thursday gets to stay a whole other day before he leaves in the morning.

It's been such a nice weekend here, the weather has been really nice even though the temperatures for the most part now stay below 20 degrees. I am becoming a pro at taking the bus and metro round the city, getting less and less confused every day, for example managing to locate and then relocate the next day the biggest shopping centre in town (at least the biggest I've found); the "Metropole", which lies in between the metro stop "Riponne-Maurice-Bejart" and the bus stop "Pont Chauderon".

We've done some good sightseeing this weekend as well, to show off the beautiful town I have moved to. The two highlights I guess are the area by the lake "Ouchy" (end of metro line 2), and the Sauvabelin Tower right next to where I live. Here are some photos I've taken on our excursions to give you an idea of why it's so nice here :)

I love how from many parts of the city if you just look down the street you see the beautiful view of the mountains and the lake, just peaking in from between the buildings. This is the bus stop at Pont Chauderon.

 The view from what I call the "Lake campus" of UNIL, aka Dorigny, which is right on the lake and has a beautiful view of the already snow-covered mountain tops of the alps. This was taken thursday 13/09.

 From the docks at Ouchy on Friday....

And these are from Saturday when we walked up into the Parc Sauvabelin right next to where I live to the very cool tower there...

Sauvabelin tower

Toward Geneva

I'm officially horrible at placing pictures on my blog, they seem to go all over the place so this will just have to do. Also, I think I should share some of my awesome cooking skill that has been blossoming the past week or so--- just look at the salad I made on Wednesday:

= Rucola salad, 1 tomato, 50g pasta, 200g minced chicken meat, 1 avocado. YUM.

After this we've made some good food too, Thursday we fried chicken breasts and ate them with pasta and a simple salad. Friday we bought a pizza which we spruced up a little with ham and some good Swiss sausage. We made Mexican chicken wraps on Saturday, and then some good old pasta carbonara yesterday (from scratch of course :D ). 

The highlight of the culinary week however came yesterday when we decided to bake cinnamon rolls, which were absolutely delicious, and guess what? There are still some left in a box in the kitchen!! I think I may go have one in a little while! 

So now I've updated you on the goings-on here, tomorrow is the start of classes so I'll definitely get back to you on how that goes :) 

All the German!!

So it's Wednesday and I am slowly inching my way toward having been here a week! Practical matters are slowly being taken care of- I went to the Dorigny Campus by the lake yesterday and got my UNIL student card, which was in an envelope with my name on it that was in the Erasmus office! Quite a good feeling to discover that they actually know I'm here. This trip required I take the Metro line 1 which meant actually finding said metro in the Lausanne-Flon area. To illustrate why this was not a simple task I need to describe this area a little more.

"Flon" (pronounced "FLA" by the Swiss- again, what is with the accents!?) is what you might define as the city centre of Lausanne. It is synonymous with "Place de l'Europe", and is at the bottom of a large number of hills. Above it is a massive bridge (there are about 3 of these bridges in Lausanne and I'm never sure exactly which one I'm on), and you can walk about 50 meters from it and there is a big church. Shopping streets branch out in all directions (including up and down). Why I find Lausanne so confusing is exactly this- everything is on a hill, but the hill is wavy, so houses are built at the bottoms of the created "valleys", as well as on top of the hills and on the sides and just everywhere! So everywhere you go you can find at least three levels of roads/bridges/metro lines. Trying desperately to orientate yourself according to "downward is toward the lake" doesn't always work either because of the silly "wavy" hill the city is on. So, Flon is at the bottom of a certain amount of roads, and is a major connecting point for public transport. It is the destination stop of my Bus 22 that I have now taken many times as it's the quickest if I want to get to university.

After you now get the picture a little better, I was very confused when having to find the metro 1 line, having only ever seen signs for the metro 2. Looking closer, however, I discovered that inside the building with the signs for metro 2 there were signs pointing back OUT of said building toward metro 1. Following these back outside I was immediately lost, but then, to my great surprise, I had to take an elevator UP one floor (as in the metro is one story above ground level), and lo and behold there it was, a white train waiting patiently at the station with a large sign for "Renens Gare". Who would expect me to go UP to find a metro? I figured the very definition implied underground... but hey I found it eventually!

Today I've been to Medical-Erasmus-Student orientation at the CHUV. It started at 12 and we weren't done before about 16:30. We were given all sorts of practical information, not extremely useful but the tour around campus managed to make all 30 of us that we were going to be genuinely lost the first few days. There are 43 medical exchange students here this year, all doing something from 3rd through 5th year training. Fun fact though, in the 30 that were there for orientation, there were 24 Germans! From all over Germany! Then there was one Italian, me, two Spanish, and two Swiss girls. So obviously the languange of the day has been German! Also fun was the fact that I spoke far better French than anyone there so everyone thought I was so much fun to talk to! They all seem really nice though, although nobody is doing quite the same combo of classes as me. It was nice to finally meet some people in my exact situation! We got chatting about living arrangements and phone companies and food and whatnot, so it was an overall very productive day! Tonight we're going out to a bar for drinks with the same people and our three UNIL "guides". Should be fun and it's nice to be social!

I am now really hungry and exhausted though after a day of information and walking, so I am making a chicken salad with avocado today! Nom nom. More updates coming as I close in on the start of my classes!

Accio Mobilis!

It is day 3 in Lausanne and I have to share my latest accomplishments:

1. This IKEA piece of furniture that I built myself *proud* (becoming very pro at using the hammer and screwdriver and terrified this morning that my neighbors would come knocking because I was making too much noise):

2. I went to the Migros across the street and did my first proper grocery shopping, of course doing about 50 rounds around the store to find everything I needed. I'm quite proud of the healthiness of everything I bought- let's hope I can keep this up! I also bought new coat-hangers for my wardrobe (it only contained about 5.. who only uses 5 coat-hangers???), as well as a "plug-converter" so I can now charge my laptop. The plugs here are different than in Belgium- they're "oval hexagonal" and so my perfectly round "pig-nose" ones did not fit. Problem solved though so all is well.

3. I took the bus into town today for my first venture into the Centre-ville. However, the ticket-machines in this country clearly do not love me very much as they only take coins. I don't have any of those yet thanks to the 200 notes I am carrying round (very scary amounts of money to have in my bag...). Grudgingly accepting that I couldn't use the machine at the bus-stop, I decided I would by my ticket on board. But hey-- no such luck! I get onboard and the lady looks at me questioningly when I asked her for a ticket to the Centre. Nope, you have to buy a ticket at the stop. I pleadingly explained the situation to her, and thankfully a very nice lady sitting at the front of the bus heard our conversation and said she could change my 20CHF bill (I got that this morning after my grocery shopping). The chauffeur then happily let me get off at the next stop to hassle the ticket machine there, and it finally spewed out a valid ticket for me to get to town.

The reason for my visit to central Lausanne today was in fact to aquire a "Mobilis" card- which is the only way to travel here without having to fight with ticket machines every day. I thankfully found the "point de vente" that I had located on my map before leaving, and after about 15 minutes in line I was helped by a very nice man speaking in his Swiss french accent so I understood nothing. The French here is really funny, they do a sort of "sing-song" voice and pronounce things weirdly. I did, however manage to get my year pass for the transport in Lausanne, and gave my address here for the first time when he registered me in the system (I had to think for a moment not to give the address I've had for the past 10 years).

4. I visited my campus! I decided to be adventurous and take the metro the 3 stops up from the city centre to the university hospital where I will be attending classes starting next tuesday (!!). It's called CHUV (pronounced "SHOOV") by the monotonous announcer-voice on the metro, and stands for Centre Hospitalier Universitaire de Vaud. Very fancy. It's a really nice area and it's got a great view of the lake as it's quite far up. I wandered around aimlessly for a bit to get a feel of the place, and then found the way to the auditoriums where I am expected to meet up for orientation on Wednesday. The metro here is also a fun experience. It's got fancy doors on the platform that open only when the train arrives, and the announcements of the stations along the way are preceded by a different shall-we-say "Swiss Noise" every time. There was cows mooing before they said CHUV. All the Swiss people round me seemed completely unaffected by this but I almost burst out laughing! :D

So here are my conclusions of the day:
-The Swiss people have a reputation of being closed and unfriendly toward outsiders (according to my Erasmus information booklet). This is completely wrong.
- I now have both milk AND a valid "titre de transport", so I am increasingly ready to live in this city for an extended period of time!

Milk

Hi! I'm Therese. I'm a 20-year-old medical student going into my 3rd year of medicine studying at the Université Libre de Bruxelles (that's in Belgium). I'm originally from Norway but I've lived in Belgium pretty much my whole life. This year, however, comes with a  bit of a twist for me: I'm on an exchange year in Lausanne, Switzerland via the Erasmus program and it's my first time ever living away from home. I just arrived here yesterday and I'm so excited for this year to kick off! So I've started this blog to share a few of my experiences of moving abroad, the process of creating a home away from home, and just day-to-day thoughts and things that might be worth writing about. Here we go!

First of all: Milk.

It is Sunday and my first official full day in Lausanne. I left behind my two little sisters (not so little anymore), my parents, and my cocker spaniel in Brussels (or more exactly my parents drove me down here and have now gone back home), and am now pretty much all by myself in a new city, with new people, and lots of things to take care of. Great. I quickly realized this morning on my little sightseeing trip round the neighborhood arranged by my new flatmate that everything is closed in Lausanne on a Sunday. Very useful. I therefore spent the day with my parents (who still hadn't left), visiting one of my oldest friends who's lived near Geneva for a long time with her family. This is where my parents left me, with instructions to take the train back to Lausanne and find the correct bus home to my apartment.

My first problem occurred at the train station in Nyon where I had to buy my train ticket from a very fancy machine. This machine took euros and swiss francs and all the bank cards you could possibly think of , and yet somehow I could not make it accept my bank card, my Swiss francs were in the form of 200CHF notes just supplied by my parents (too huge to be accepted by said machine), my only euros were a 10 and a 50 note (also too big for machine), and the amount to be paid of 16 CHF (or 14 euros) was therefore difficult. I had no coins either. The train was also arriving at the station. Thankfully the machine accepted my 10 euro (12 CHF) note and my friend thankfully had 4 CHF coins and my ticket was acquired. Don't we all love changing to a new currency? But I got on the train and made it back to Lausanne, my euro and CHF-paid ticket being approved with a nod by a strict-looking conductor.

At the station in Lausanne I happily found an open Coop store (!! yay) and remembered I did not have any juice, milk, yoghurt, or dinner for tonight. Right then, in we go. I bought my first official living-alone food consisting of one pack of pasta, a glass of pasta sauce (let's not make it complicated the first day), two packs of yoghurt, a bottle of orange juice, and of course, my first Swiss carton of MILK.

I've come to the conclusion that I don't think you can say you actually live somewhere before you have bought a carton of milk in your designated place. A carton of milk requires the possession of a fridge, something not often found in hotel rooms or youth hostels. Milk is also something I never drink when on holiday, and something usually related to my morning cereal if I'm not actually planning on drinking it. So there you go- my definition of having really moved somewhere- buying that carton of milk. My own carton is currently in my fridge, happily cooling off after the bus ride home from the Sunday-open Coop. Therefore I have now officially arrived in Lausanne. It's getting late though so I am going to sleep in my new bed in my new room, and look forward to a glass of my new milk for breakfast in the morning.