I live near Ghent and I study in Ghent, so I obviously know how it feels to be a student in Ghent.
I don’t live in a room in Ghent, but I do have friends with one. Ghent is a magnificent city with a lot of bars and restaurants. As a student there are a lot of opportunities to eat and drink, and I think that’s a good thing for Ghent and the self-employed. But in my opinion Ghent is actually trying to get rid of his students. I will give you some examples. The car park at Sint-Pieters was one of the only ways where students of Artevelde, and the university would park their car. Not too long ago the car park was fairly low priced if you’d compare them with other car parks in Ghent. A couple of months ago, the prices were doubled. Another example is quite an irritating measure as well. Sometimes rooms are too expensive for students and it’s actually cheaper to rent or even buy a house and share it with friends. The city council now asks for an extra tax to avoid students renting or buying houses. And there are many other examples. Luckily for us, there are still good things, such as the Guido guide, with all its discounts. And you can rent yellow city bikes as well.
But in the end, if the city council keeps on adding detrimental measures for the students, Ghent will no longer be a good student city anymore.
That would be a shame, wouldn’t it? 

I see many cars every single day,  but little did I know about how all these different and especially the personalized cars were made. It’s not possible to explain to you how these cars are made, but I will give you a short explanation about how the factory of Volvo cars Ghent looks like. Volvo cars exists of three factories. Two of these factories are connected. Volvo produces cars 24 hours a day. In one shift approximately 500 cars of the models xc60,v40 and s60. You can see the factory as a small world. Thousands of people are working there. Fifteen minutes before the shift starts you are waiting in the traffic jam, of all people who have to work. At least five busses arrive with people and they leave again with the workers who are done for the day. Inside the factory you hear the noise of machines and the people who are working.  There are roads and crossings inside.  Depending on the color of the lines on the floor, you know where you can or can’t walk. You have to pay attention though since forklifts and small trains are driving around all the time. Every time you want to meet someone in the factory, you have to ask him if he wants to meet you at ‘Harry’. Harry is a doll standing in the central point of the factory. If you’re lost (and believe me that this happens) you have to ask people where you can find Harry. 

I think it’s already more than 2 years ago, but there are some things you’ll never ever forget.
Pukkelpop 2011 had to be a better festival than the year before, it had fantastic names such as Eminem, wiz Khalifa, and many more. It was a beautiful day on Thursday the 18^th of august.  If I recall correctly, it was around 30 degrees and it was quite difficult to find any cooling. The festival was sold out and with a small group we had planted our tents near the Showertower (a big tower that indicated where the showers where). It was around six o’clock in the evening. We were enjoying the music in the dance hall, everyone was dancing, nothing could stop us, right? Sadly we were wrong, suddenly it started the rain, and this didn’t stop. Suddenly it looked like the tent would collapse. By then it started hailing outside. A lot of people outside, tried to get inside, but at the same time the ones inside tried to get out. We were all crushed between these two strong currents of people and we couldn’t move anymore. A couple of minutes later the sun was shining again. Outside, it was like a gigantic swimming pool. We saw that one tent collapsed and we saw loads of people walking who didn’t realize what happened.  A couple of friends were on the campsite during the storm, so we went straight to it. When we arrived we saw tents everywhere, but that wasn’t the worst, we hadn’t seen the showertower just yet. The showertower had fallen down and there was security running towards it. Luckily my friends weren’t injured. Our tents were blown away and when we heard that the festival was cancelled, we just couldn’t be more happier that our tents weren’t a tad closer to the showertower.  

The popular festival Tomorrowland is the best festival in the world according to the International Dance Music Awards, and believe me they are right! Today I’ll give you a brief explanation on how it was.

Obviously, the expectations were extremely high for this festival. I went three times to Pukkelpop and I also visited Crammerock but I just knew that Tomorrowland would be different. We arrived with a car and we noticed that there was actually quite a lot of parking provided, which is really nice.
The entrance of the camping (Dreamville) was also really astonishing, there was a wooden floor, and everything from the trashcans to even the people who worked there, were dressed up.  (It has to be said, the security members were wearing their normal outfits, but I guess security comes first).

Everyone was dressed up in the theme of Tomorrowland. Behind the entrance you could see a village. It had a bakery, a butchery, a clothing story and all kinds of foods. The camping was divided in different colors and at the end of the camping there was a stage.  I slept quite close to the Dreamville entrance, but it was still quite a long walk from the festival entrance.
The festival meadow was really large! The main stage is even bigger than Crammerock. Every stage was simply breathtaking. Everything just gave me a ‘wow’-effect. And obviously the music was really good.

According to the Dance music awards, it is the best festival ever.
And I can safely tell you that it truly is! 

During my last year on secondary school, I started thinking about what college I’d go to.  On a scholarship of the different courses I could do, I decided to do business management.  I could choose between three different colleges. Artevelde, University college Ghent or KAHO Sint-Lievens.  All three offer business management but all of them are very different. I was certain that I wouldn’t go to KAHO Sint-Lievens since there are only three months of general courses and afterwards you’d have to make a decision between different disciplines. I could also opt for Artevelde or University college Ghent. First of all I looked for the college that was the farthest, but there was hardly any difference. The only big difference was that Artevelde had one general year and the University college Ghent had one semester. The teachers on my high school also told me that Artevelde was a really good school with good courses. Artevelde is also in a very good location, it’s pretty close to the center of Ghent and it’s next to ‘De Overpoort’ and a couple of other bars and pubs you can go to when there are no lessons.  Because of all these advantages that Artevelde has and had, I don’t regret choosing for Artevelde at all. 

My holiday in France

This July I went to France with my girlfriend and her family. First we went to Marseille, where we stayed for one week, afterwards we went to Baux-de-Provence. Three days later we visited Lyon. The house in Marseille was quite big, unfortunately it didn’t have a big garden. Then again it did have a very big swimming pool, which was quite amazing. The weather was usually around 30 agrees, so we could tan in the sun daily. We visited some buildings with city bikes. It was rather easy to rent them since there’s a lot of traffic in the city. On the 4^th of July there was a very big fireworks show we all attended.  It was really amazing! Every restaurant was pretty good and it wasn’t a lot of money either.  After one week we went to Baux de Provence. We stayed in a marvelous hotel surrounded by vineyards. Obviously we had to visit the local wine farmers. The differences in wine flavors was quite remarkable. I didn’t expect that different wine brewers could make such a different wine, even though they live quite close to each other.  After three days and seeing a lot of nature we went to Lyon. We went to a big Hotel where we relaxed in saunas and we did some wellness as well. After two days of relaxation we went back home with a very satisfied feeling, a tanned skin and full bellies full of good food and wine.