I am very grateful for the opportunity of going on an exchange still, as a kind of get-away from my thesis for a week. I applied for BME (budapest), UPM (madrid) and others on the list of the Athens Programme that TU Delft is part of. To my delight, I later found the mail that my first choice, BME in Budapest, had accepted me. The topic of the course? Civil engineering. Bridges on the Danube in Budapest to be exact. I was worried that everyone else would be from that field, since a friend from civil engineering recommended me this program, and most options were civil engineering oriented.
The first day I would arrive a bit late for the mandatory city tour. I had booked my flight before I was told about this event. Luckily, I got just in time to put my name down on the list of attendance and enjoy the last 10 minutes of the tour. What did I not book in advance? My stay at Budapest. It hit me on the Thursday before when talking to my roommates (Hungarian) friends, that I still had to do so. Luckily, the Avenue hostel had 1 bed left.
On the first day I also had a chance to meet some of the people from the exchange program. I found out that luckily none of the Dutch were civil engineering, and that there was a very big contribution to this trip from students of École des Pont in Paris. All living in Paris but as a double degree, and none were actually French. We visited a light show and also enjoyed delicious Goulash, I also used the cute metro line that runs very frequently under Budapest.
For this course we had many contact hours a day. We learned how design a bridge within a certain program that looks on the loads on the links, and there would be an easy test on Friday about the lectures we had. There was also a boat tour on Tuesday. It was quite cold with the wind but also a very pretty sight. We received coupons for consumption, which funnily enough included drinks as beer, wine or even champagne! We were also taken to the anchorage of bridges and were guided underneath a bridge.
Then of course, we also experienced Budapest to its fullest by also going out, seeing the monuments, going to ruin bars, and even relaxing at a thermal bath house! We also were lucky that they had an event going on with a live DJ at the city park ice skate rink, so we had to visit that too.
