About Me

So, maybe you stumbled on to this page on the web. Or maybe I gave you my blog address because you're a family member/friend/random person I just met. Either way, I've created this handy-dandy little "About Me" not only to inflate my own ego, but also help you figure out what, on Earth, I actually think you can get out of reading my blog.

What the heck is this blog about?

This blog is meant to cover my exchange to the University of Maastricht, in the Netherlands. Having learned from my previous experience as an exchange student (more below), I'm covering the entire experience-from packing to travelling to living to leaving. As such, it will be a mix of life in Maastricht, school, and travel stories.

Who do you think will actually read this?
That can be broken down into two main groups-family and friends who want to follow my experiences and adventures, and people who want to learn more about my experiences, for their own planning or interest.

For family and friends who want to know what I'm up to, this blog is useful because I plan on posting a lot, meaning it'll be easy to follow my adventures. It also allows me to be a bit lazier, getting the info out to a bunch of people at once. Plus it lets me keep a record for my own interests.

For random people on the internet, you might be interested in the places I'm going-either Maastricht itself or my various side trips; you could also be interested in more specific aspects of travel-tips from my train adventures, for example. Or, you might be interested in the exchange student side of things-what's it like to study at Maastricht, or to do a second exchange?

To make it easier, I'll be using three labels, as Blogger calls them (#'s). F/F for posts mostly geared to family and friends, Travel for posts that are about my travel adventures, and Exchange for posts that talk about the experience of being an exchange student. These will appear as buttons on the page, to help sort. I also hope to use as many specific labels as possible, and when there's enough I'll add a "word cloud" feature to find those.

So who are you anyway?

I'm a law student from Canada, on exchange in the Netherlands. As I eluded to above, this isn't actually my first exchange adventure. See, in most of Canada, students actually have to complete a Bachelor's degree (in basically any subject at all)prior to entering law school. So, during my first degree, I went on exchange to Hong Kong, and travelled around Asia quite a bit (feel free to read about that here). Not only is this not my first exchange, I'm also doing things in a bit of a reverse order: Asia was my first major international experience (though I've travelled Canada and the US quite a bit), and this will be my first time to Europe. That's the opposite of what most people tend to do,  and I'm sure that will give me very different experiences (and, as is always the case for travel, different misadventures and blunders!) than those who are in Europe as their first experience outside of their own country (and often, I hate to admit, at a younger age).

When can we expect updates?
I'm no longer naïve enough to think I'll update regularly. In fact, let me level with you-most updates will probably occur after midnight, and will increase in frequency as deadlines approach.
7 years in school teaches you to be honest about these things

What's with the title?
The Meuse (pronounced Mahze), is the name of the river running through Maastricht (the "Maas" part of the word).
Basically, the origin of the title of the blog is that I think I'm clever.