Benjamin Voss & Simon Hansen

We stayed at a B&B for 6 weeks. We paid for rent and food. But we also got both food and access to a washing machine. Our ”Landlady” was very nice and always happy. She was a real granny type, who felt sorry if we did not finish all our food.

 It was totally cool to be at the college. The students were very open and were interested in talking to us and we were even invited to a barbeque. The teachers were also fantastic and we visited a one of the teacher’s home twice.  In Holland it is normal to go to school two days a week and then work at the apprenticeship three days a week. Different from the Danish model. For us it was quite exciting to try that system.  The school is fairly small and that means that everybody knows everybody and that there is a nice atmosphere. All students were very open and positive and they made an effort and showed initiative towards us.

 Me, Benjamin, I was so lucky to get the pleasure of working at the BMW workshop. In addition to the fact there the place i crowded with really nice cars ( low tax only 19 per cent) it was really a pleasure to work at this garage in Holland. It seems to me that there is another way of dealing with apprentices. Here they are very serious about how you treat apprentices, that they have t o learn and so you get to work only with cars and not do other things like cleaning, moving things around and so on.  A typical day at the BMW workshop was all about customer sercive and quality and professional work as a mechanic. The skilled mechanics were very good and professional, so I learned a lot from being there.  In addition, I had a worksop manger who did his utmost to make my stay worth while and enjoyalble. I hope for others that they can get to try to work at the BMW workshop.

Toyota Me, Simon, I had the pleasure of working for 3 weeks at Toyota and 3 weeks at an independant garage named D&D. The first three weeks were at Toyota and I had never been at such a big place before, so I was looking forward to the weeks there. The first few days I had to get to know things and all the people there and see how things worked, so it was not so busy for me. But after the first two days I was allowed to works as much as I wanted and I found that quite impressive. The atmosphere at the workshop was actually quite quiet, but the people there were very nice to me and good to work with.

D&D Me, Simon, I also got the pleasure of working 3 weeks at D&D. I had heard that D&D was very different from Toyota, where I had been for 3 weeks. And it was very different, but in a positive way. The owners were Arie and Arwin and Roy who was a mechanic there. I liked it there very much. We did not have so much work all the time, so every time a car came in, I got the job and was told to take my time with it, so I could learn. When we had finished the jobs, Arie had an old truch that we could work on. I had 3 very good weeks there.

There differences compared to Denmark. If you go to Holland, generally it is cheaper to go shopping. But houses and flats are more expensive. The income seems to be lower than in Denmark. The work is more or less the same. But there are differences form workshop to workshop, like in Denmark. It is different with the school.forskel. You go to school and work every week. uge. The school is very small and so therefore there is a very personal atmosphere between teachers and students. Many Dutch people are good at speaking English, but we also think that many Danish people speak English, so that is much the same. We also thing that most Dutch people are nice and friendly. We have not had any problems in the 6 weeks. So all in all we can conclude that we have had a great trip!

 Saturday morning we got up and went to Pauline in the kithcen to get the last breakfast there. We had packed most of our things the day before, so we only had to get the things in the car and we were ready to go to Denmark. We said goodbye to Pauline and thanked her for the 6 weeks. At this point we could feel that we were looking forward to go back home. On the way home in the car we talked about all the things we had been doing og how great everything had been og how great it was that you can actually go abroad like this and work and go to school. We agreed that this had been a great trip and experience!