Thing you need to know about studying there study style

Since the 1950s, the Netherlands has had courses in English especially for foreign students. Students are expected to be critical of what they read and hear, and to be able of working independently. Foreign students will soon notice that at Dutch institutions for higher learning is people are expected to do a lot of talking. The most common form of teaching is the seminar or working group, where a small group of students work under a teacher’s supervision to analyze a certain problem. On exams, they have to show that they know the material, and that they have formed well-founded opinions on the subject.

Accommodations

If you are in an exchange programmer or an international course, it is quite possible that a room will be arranged for you. Accept it immediately, or you will regret it later. That’s because finding a place to live in a country as crowded as the Netherlands is not easy.

Before you leave China, ask your host institution whether or not housing will indeed be arranged in advance. If you are in the Netherlands and still looking for a place, ask the international relations office or the student dean for advice.

Expenses

Tuition:

Bachelor’s degree: about 2,500 euros a year   

Master’s degree: 5,000 — 12,000 euros a year

Living expenses:

Experience has shown that a year in the Netherlands costs a Chinese student about 450 — 750euros a month. Here is a breakdown of average prices of supermarket goods:

Litre of milk:   0.5 — 0.8 euro   Kilo of apples:   1.5 euros          Shampoo, 400ml: 4 euros

Tube of toothpaste:   1 euro     Bed sheet:   20 euros

Other expenses:

Haircut: 15 euros     Air ticket to China: 600 — 800 euros     Mobile phone call(one minute): 0.1 — 0.3 euro

Phone call to China (with IP card):   7euros(one minute)

Postage stamp in the Netherlands: Stamp for China:0.39 euro (1 euro = about 10yuan) 0.78 euro

Transportation

Trains, buses and trams run throughout the country.

If you really want to sample Dutch life, and get around quickly and easily, buy yourself a bicycle. Most students buy second-hand bicycles. A reasonable one will cost you 70 — 120 euros. You can find them at second-hand bicycle shops or at the bicycle parking facilities near railway stations.

Tour operators have seasonal deals on holidays to Australia and other countries in a new year.

Austravel

Holidaymakers can save up to 30% on a trip to Australia with the Austravel sale, which runs for about a month. It also includes a fourteen-day-long trip to Perth and a west coast self-drive trip from £795 per person including flights in May or July.

● austravel. com

Thomson and First Choice

Some deals are being launched this week by Thomson and First Choice, with early booking offers including free places for kids, lower deposits (押金) and up to £300 off per couple on a lot of destinations.

● thomson. co. uk, firstchoice. co. uk

Eurocamp

The camping company is offering thousands of Easter and May half-term holidays for under £350, such as an Easter break at La Baume on the French Riviera for just £25 a night, based on a stay in a two-bedroom holiday home. Early bookers can save up to 25% and secure a holiday with a deposit of just £99.

● eurocamp. co. uk

Kuoni

Running from Christmas Eve, the Kuoni sale includes a wide range of offers. These offers include ten nights full board in the Maldives from £1,599 and seven nights in Phuket, Thailand from £999 per person—both including flights and transfers (换乘).

● kuoni. co. Uk

Are we trapped in the present, free to move in space yet unable to travel in the fourth dimension（次元）? Or is there a chance or a glimmer of a possibility that the past and future could unfurl（展开）to our physical experience at will? James Gleick’s latest offering Time Travel: A History sets out to question the questions, exploring how the idea of time travel emerged, held our imaginations and shaped our society.

From the start it is apparent who the hero of this journey is. “One way or another, the inventions of Mr. H.G. Wells colour every time-travel story that followed,” writes Gleick, pointing out that while a small number of earlier stories explored utopian（鸟托邦的）futures, it was him who, with his 1895 work, got to the practical details of the matter in knocking up a time machine.

It’s easy to forget that time travel is a relatively recent idea. As Gleick points out, for most of human history, change wasincremental-yesterday looked much like today, today much like tomorrow. “Before futurism could be born, people had to believe in progress,” he writes. The development of technology, resulting in the industrial revolution, made that possible. With a great many changes, the future, and what it might look like, became a subject for meditation. And as archaeology developed, writers like E Nesbit began flights of fancy to the past, too.

Embraced by novelists, wrestled with by philosophers and informed by science—not least Hermann Minkowski’s revelation, following Einstein’s breakthrough, of four-dimensional space-time-the possibility that the arrow of time could be tinker（走街串巷的小炉匠）became a meme（口头禅）. From fiction writers such as Robert Heinlein, to F Scott Fitzgerald and his The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, from Terminator to Dr Who, events in the future which are affected by imaginary developments in science blossomed the literary world.

As Gleick reveals, problems and paradoxes（看似矛盾而可能正确的说法）were immediately put forward. Is our future governed by fate, or free will? Does time travel always mean ending up naked, with your clothes left in the present? “All the paradoxes are time loops（循环）. They all force us to think about causality, the relationship of cause and effect.”

Among those doing the thinking are philosophers and scientists. Attempting to tackle the idea that wormholes-tunnels in space-time-could be turned into time machines allowing journeys into the past, even Stephen Hawking has entered the heated discussion, concluding that the laws of physics are against it.

Gleick navigates the twists and turns of our fascination with time travel, investigating its evolution in literature, exploring scientific principles that have hinted at or contradicted the idea, and teasing the curious spell it has cast across society with its suggestion of immortality（永生）.

But, as he notes, not every product of this obsession with time was hard to understand. “The time capsule（时间胶囊）is a characteristically 20th-century invention: a tragicomic time machine. It lacks an engine, goes nowhere, sits and waits,” he writes, surveying various attempts to send snapshots（快照）of civilisation into the future. Indeed, it’s hard to know whether disappointment, amusement or simply confusion will be the dominant emotion when the Crypt of Civilisation time capsule at Oglethorpe in Atlanta is opened in 8113 AD. Created in 1936, its contents include voice recordings of historical figures.

Not every idea of time travel is rooted in the physical, and Gleick explores how in the act of storytelling we mess with chronology（年代表）. “We don’t have enough tenses. Or rather, we don’t have enough names for all the tenses we create,” he writes of the complexity unleashed in literature by the concept. Readers, too, become time travellers, able to move at will backwards and forwards through a story. More than that, Gleick argues, books cannot be separated from time. Even if you know a book well -even if you can recite it, like the Homeric（荷马史诗的）poet一you cannot experience it as a timeless object.