Tanger, Morocco

I'll start to write my travel notes from the soonest to the oldest as the other way around might be too difficult for me and i might never catch the current moment (Considering I have other travel plans very soon).

The last city I've been is Tanger, which is a small town in the very north of Morocco overlooking to Spain through the Strait of Gibraltar. This is one of the many Ryanair stops in Morocco which is more famous for beach tourism I suppose. There are many cheap holiday resorts to attract Spaniards. But I'm not really sure if they really succeed this as I didn't leave the city with the best impressions.

Tanger has a "Medina" (Old town) as many other cities in Morocco. This one can be considered small compared to Marrakech and Fez, and the number of shops and tea shops around was quite limited. The more famous part of the city was "Kasbah" which consists of narrow streets, white houses and blue doors. Walking around these streets and getting lost is quite enjoyable.

The photo on the left is a typical door and house from the Kasbah. There's also a museum in that area which is nothing special but you can still visit since it costs only 10 Dirhems (1 euro). There are also a few cafe/restaurants where you can go up to terrace and enjoy the view and the wind! Yes Tanger is very windy so is the beach. Don't know how people sunbath or swim in summer as the sea is wavy and the wind might be disturbing if you end up waking up buried under the sand after a nap on the beach.


The beach is a bit dirty also because of the touristic camel and horse rides. One thing that bothered us so bad there, was the behavior of some people to tourists. They were mostly mentally sick or something but they have learnt quite well how to swear in Spanish. And every single child knows how to say "Hola chicos!" in Tanger. Some of them know more that that(!)

I was quite surprised to the number of cafes, bars, clubs right next to the beach. There were even more than Barcelona. Maybe during the season it's full of Spanish people but i'm not really sure if there are that many tourists.

Here's a scene that I caught from the beach:

By the way,  about finding a hotel. If you are only going there to see the city not for facny holiday resorts, then you can do like we do. We didn't book a hotel before going, instead we had some addresses of some cheap hotels and some street names. It wasn't easy to find a clean hotel but in the end we managed to find one which is ok. It was only 4 euros per person and it had showers!!! Yes this is something hard to find in the hotels of Tanger. We checked many without showers until we found this one. It was in the same street with Hotel Madrid, Valencia, Miami.. Street name is Selahaddin Eyyubi.

The other issue is food!! If you want to try some tasty Tagine or Couscous, this is not the right address for you. You better head to Marrakech or Fes. The restaurants which have tagine were not clean or good. But in the new city part you can have better restaurants to eat fast food kind of stuff.


I'll add some of the photos I took there. Here you can check the other pictures I've taken.








This one is I suppose the tomb of Ibn Batouta. He is a famous traveler, kinda my idol.. I didnt really read any of his books, but i want to do it soon











This girl was collecting flowers from the cliff. We tried to stop her. And she was too gentle to send us a perfect smile :)






And in the end yummy snails from the market.. I dont think it was a good idea to leave them unattended :)

EMSE - European Master in Software Engineering

Emse is an Erasmus Mundus program which I've written about in my previous post.
The main host university is Universidad Politecnica de Madrid where I've been studying my first year. The other partner universities are BTH in Sweden, Technical University of Kaiserslautern in Germany and Free University of Bolzano in Italy.
When you apply for the program you are asked to declare your preferences about which 2 universities you would like to go. But this doesn't mean that you'll definitely go there. Although for most of the cases they try to consider those preferences.

You can find detailed information about the program in their website here.
I'll try to give more unofficial information. In my term 1200 people applied for this program and 12 Category-A students (non-Europe) were awarded scholarship and 8-10 Category B (Europe) students. The applications close in around december and you'll receive the results sometime in april.
I can't really say anything specific about selection criteria since I don't know anything other than the information in the website. I didn't graduate with a high GPA from my previous university (I mean less than 3/4.00) and I was surprised to be accepted. These years, it seems like they value working experience a lot since the students are a bit older and the classes mostly target them.

There are a lot of students in their 30s who are working at the same time and taking this master almost like an executive MBA program. They are not EMSE students like us but we take the same classes. Anyway, there are quite a number of EMSE students who are in between 27-30.

Hence, the classes are more focuses on Engineering part of Software. The obvious examples would be Requirement Eng, Quality Management, Project Management, etc.

Among the 4 universities, Madrid is the only one which is in a big city. The others are all in very very small areas. That's why I chose Madrid. The other common destination is Germany. People prefer it because they think there's good opportunity to find jobs. It actually applies for Sweden since BTH has good industrial connections. But people don't really like to go that north maybe :)

Well in the begining I chose Sweden for my second year. We will see how it will  be like. I'm expecting that courses will not be as hard as Germany.

That's all that comes to my mind for now..

Erasmus Mundus Program

In this post, I'll try to clarify some unknown things about Erasmus Mundus Programs. First of all, it's not a regular Erasmus Exchange program that everybody knows. This is a joint Master or a Doctorate program that allows you to graduate with at least 2 diplomas from European universities. It's not like you already have a university like in Erasmus, after you finish your undergraduate degree, you apply for these programs individually directly from the websites of the programs.
In the end, you study 1 year in one unversity and the next year in another university (this can also be 3 universities with 6 months in 2 of them and 1 year another). All the courses are offered in English and they provide VERY generous scholarships especially for non-european students.

The scholarship is about 16000 euros a year for Category A students which means non-european. Turkey is also in this part although you might come across some wrong information about this. Actually they opened a special window for Turkey and Balkans and each program accepts more or less 2 students from this window. Before this Turkey wasn't eligible. It's been only 3 years for Turkey so this program is still not very known.

For the European students the scholarship is about 6000 euros a year. This is quite weird actually, because the gap between europeans and others is really huge, and surprisingly on the favor of non-europeans.
When you search information about the programs, you'll see third-countries instead of non-european.. This doesn't mean third world country but the countries which are not host.

You can find a full list of programs in this link which is from the official page of Erasmus Mundus.

I'm studying in European Master in Software Engineering and I'll mention about this program in another post.