The trip
We had to leave our dorms at 4.00am and some of us were still a bit wasted from the night before *kuch*. We flew from Springfield to Chicago at 6.00am, from Chicago to Charlotte at 9am and from Charlotte to Cancun at 1pm to finally arrive in Cancun around 4pm. From the airport in Cancun we had to take a taxi van, and of course we got ripped off. We ended up paying $45, which seems not that expensive given that we are with 6 people, but when you hear that a taxi ride is usually not more then $5-10, you know that they laughed at us.

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The hotel
So we finally arrived at the hotel, we decided to have dinner and take some pictures and rest for a while. The hotel seemed very nice, the food at the restaurants was amazing, the room looked okay and the pool was awesome. We wanted to go out later, but we ended up sleeping until the next day. The next day we woke up early, took some more pictures of the surroundings and hit the pool. We went to the swim up bar and hung around there till dinner. We heard that we could join the hotel to the nightclubs, which basically means you will get the wristbands for the club at the hotel.

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The nightclubs
The first few nights we went out we went with the hotel. The nice thing about that is that they gave us a “VIP treatment”. Although it didn’t really differ that much from the normal treatment, it was still nice to have. For $45 you would go into the club, get your own table and your own waiter, have an open bar and bottles of alcohol on your table. You could also go into the VIP section, which was usually above the dance floor. We wanted to see all the different clubs, so we went to Bulldog the first night, Sweet the second, Dady’O the third, Coco Bongo the forth and at the fifth night to Bulldog again. The clubs had really cool shows, we had a fake MJ and Spiderman and The Mask flying around, and things like bikini contests which you can see at the end of the page (rated: NSFW). The last night we didn’t want to go out because we had an early flight to catch, so we went to a casino. Not some kind of casino, no, a Playboy casino. I wasn’t allowed to take pictures inside, but it was basically a regular casino but the waitresses were wearing bunny outfits.

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Gangster minivan owned by the hotel:

Bulldog from the VIP area:

Cecile (one of the internationals) dancing on stage:

Justin (the guy with Aqid.nl on his forehead) spitting outside:

One of the awesome shows they did at Coco Bongo (Spiderman):

Another awesome show at Coco Bongo (MJ):

And of course, we found a gangster cab to get us home for a reasonable price:

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During the day
Of course we slept in till at least noon, cause everybody was tired from the day before. After breakfast we did some things like going downtown, going to the market or jet skiing. The jet skiing was really awesome! We had 1100cc jet ski’s which could easily go over 80km/h. To bad I couldn’t take any pictures or movies. The crew took one picture of me, but I thought $10 was way to expensive for a picture made with a camera crappier then mine!

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Our flight back
That was basically our vacation, but on our way home we missed one of the connecting flights. So we were stuck in Charlotte for 12 hours. Because Leigh and Kristijan are such big NBA fans, we decided to go an NBA game. The team of Charlotte (called the Bobcats) was playing. After the game we hang out at the airport, racing some wheelchairs cause of boredom. After a long 12 hours of waiting we could finally leave to Chicago and after a wrecking 32 hours we were finally in Springfield again.

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Wheelchair racing at the airport:

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NSFW
Don’t scroll down if you’re at work, if you don’t want to or if you’re not allowed to see things like girls in bikini’s or girls doing body shots.

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Bikini Contest 1:

Bikini Contest 2:

Topless girl dancing:

The 11 hour road trip was quite boring! But it was all worth it when we got at The Masquerade. The venue looked good, it wasn’t extremely big but it was bigger then the average dubstep party in Holland. The pre-show consisted of Downlink and Antiserum, weird enough they started with Downlink (I would have thought it would be the other way around). After Downlink, Antiserum started playing and the volume got turned up a little. It started to sound a lot better but it still wasn’t really loud. Then finally Excision started playing, I expected a big introduction and all but that was not the case. The 50.000w speakers got turned up until a level where it was impossible to talk to each other and everybody was skanking their ass off! He played a lot of new tracks which I expected already. He closed his set with 15 minutes of drum and bass, but by that time I was sooo tired. So I went to his T-shirt stand and bought myself a really fucking awesome hoodie! After a good night sleep we had to drive the 11 hours again, which again was… boring! But hey, when you can fill up a car for 30 bucks, what would you do?!

I brought my compact camera, made 1 or 2 movies and then the battery died on me! Then I wanted to make movies with my iPhone, and the memory was full! I was like… DAMN. So then I deleted a big application and I was ready to go again! Here are the movies I took:

How it all started:

Excision 1:

Excision 2:

Excision 3:

Excision 4:

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Armed with sweatpants, hoodies and camera’s we start to move (at the lowest pace you can ever imagine) downtown to take a few pictures. This way our readers can see where we are living and we have something to do outside thats not as intensive as football, win-win.

So this is what I came up with after 2,5 hours (and no, Springfield isn’t that big… we just walked really slow):

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Bears Introduction HQ:

Sugar Bears Dancing HQ:

The first day we went downtown with the L track, which is like a metro or a train. It was the first time for me to be surrounded by so many tall buildings, I felt really small. But it was amazing to be in a big city like this. We didn’t eat anything yet so we decided to go grab a bite. Sean knew this famous pizza place called Giordano’s, so we decided to go there. Man they did serve weird pizza’s! They looked like pie, with the tomato sauce on top. And they had so much cheese in it that it would fill you up immediately. I had enough after only 1 slice! I started on the second one but gave up after about the half. Later that night we decided to go out, so we took the L track again to visit a club, but we met some few people on the train. They were going to a house party and asked if we would like to join them. You don’t have to tell us twice, so we decided to join them. The house was filled with people but that was actually a bad thing, because they ran out of alcohol after about an hour. So we stayed a little bit longer and then decided to go. The people we met decided to leave too and asked if we wanted to go back to their place. We went to a night store and grabbed some new beers and went over there. It’s awesome that you can buy beer 24 hours a day, damn we need that in Holland. After a while we went home completely shitfaced and we could finally sleep in a normal bed, which I really needed after spending the night in a car.

The second day I woke up at something like 4pm, so I kinda slept away most of the day. I heard some others went to the zoo, but I don’t care about zoo’s anyway. I could really use some healthy food, so we went to this nice Vietnamese restaurant. I started off with the best mango smoothie I ever had and had a nice plate of beef with asparagus for dinner. After that I felt a lot better and we started planning our night again. We stayed at the hostel for quite some time and at 2am somebody still wanted to go out. At first I wanted to stay in the hostel, but I decided to go anyway. We took a cab and got dropped of at some random bar, but it was almost closing. So after that we went in to the next bar because it was open for another hour, but we came to the conclusion that it was a gay bar . Obviously the girls didn’t mind, but us guys wanted to get the hell out of there. So after a little while we left the place and took a cab back home. We hang around the hostel for a little bit and then we decided to go to bed, the next day we had to get up at 10am because we had to check out. I was so tired, but the good thing was that I could sleep in the car. After a little stop in St. Louis we drove back to Springfield and our road trip had ended. It was an awesome weekend, special thank to Thomas and Sean for driving 2×10 hours in one weekend.

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About an hour after I arrived my roommate came in, his name is Cody and he’s an American. He’s a nice guy and he isn’t in a lot, just like me. So that’s good, because in such a small place you don’t want to be around each other for too long. After we were finished unpacking we went to Bass Pro Shop and to Walmart. Bass Pro is like the biggest outdoor store in Missouri, they sell all kind of things. You should really check out the pictures!

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Pictures from Kentwood:

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Pictures from Bass Pro Shop:

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Movie for Josten:

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I guess you really have to see the pictures and the movies cause its really hard to describe with words.

I didn’t bring my camera with me but at the next game on Wednesday I definitely will. I took some movies with my cell phone and copied some pictures from Facebook profiles of other people.

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The introduction of the Bears, really impressing with the music n all:

The Bears scoring in the first few minutes:

Sugar Bears at halftime:

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Our final stop of the tour was JQH Arena, this is the sports arena of MSU. We got tickets for the basketball game later that night. You can read about the game in my next blog!

To give you an impression of the size, here’s a campus map to go along with the pictures: http://search.missouristate.edu/map/othermaps/CampusMap.pdf

And here are the pictures of the campus tour:

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The second day Laura from Study Away brought me to MSU so I could register for classes. This was the first time I saw the campus. Wow, it was so big. You will see more of that when I write my blog about the Introduction day, which was the day after that.

The evenings we’re pretty much the same, we hang out at someone’s room with a few guys, listened some music and having a laugh. We’ve also been to hotel swimming pool twice and we visited the Springfield Mall. The mall was big, it takes about 30 minutes to walk past every store without going inside. The food courts look great, we don’t have anything like that in Holland. It’s a big hall where different companies sell all kinds of food (subway/chinees/greek/taco bell and much more) and you can eat together in the middle. This way everybody can choose what they like.

Okay thats it for now, stay tuned for my article of the Introduction day! Here are some pictures of the first days at the Ramada Hotel:

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