Thanks for your response. All of a sudden sync has appeared and 81% left out of 230.000 blocks. I think I will have to leave it for the rest of the day as it does not move even for 1% since 5 minutes.
The question comes with this experience (this is my very first transfer from an exchange to my own wallet) is that if a transfer takes that much time from the exchange to my wallet, what happens to the promise of Bitcoin to enable instant transfers from one country to another?
Depending on the speed of your internet connection, the sync to get the entire blockchain can take hours, hours, hours, if not the better part of a day. When you open bitcoin-qt, what are the icons in the lower right of the window indicating? When you hover over them, you should be able to see their status. One (the bars) should give information as to how many blocks have been downloaded, and how long ago it was generated. The other (the rotating arrows) should indicate how many connections you have to the bitcoin network.