Oranje boven!

I haven't really felt homesick since I moved to London -Holland just isn't that far away- but today I am feeling a bit melancholic. For the first time in years I can't join in the wonderful madness of Queen's day in Amsterdam. I am neither very patriotic nor a big fan of the monarchy but I do love Koninginnedag. I love strolling through the Vondelpark and seeing all the kids with their tiny screechy instruments, the egg races and all sorts of bizarre games. I love the organised chaos of the boat parade and I generally just love the whole party atmosphere that takes over the city. It's 'gezellig'!

To soften the blow of having to miss all of this this year, on Saturday I went to the London Holland House event sporting a bright orange top. Everybody with Dutch blood running in their veins and living in London was probably there. It was really weird being in a place where so many people were dressed in orange and speaking Dutch...while being in London. As one might expect it was quite a cliched event. (pictures!). Obviously there was a Volendammer herring cart, a stroopwafel vendor, dutch cheese girls, flowers and of course Heineken. There was even a guy making clogs, something I have never seen on any Queen's day before! Amazingly enough I even ran into a familiar face from the lab. It was fun but it can in no way match the real thing.

So today I am feeling a bit sad knowing I'm missing out on all this. I have put on my white trousers and a blue shirt and varnished my toe nails bright red so in my own subtle way I'm still keeping up our national colours. Next year I will definitely try to be there again. I hope all of you in Holland are having a great time today. Happy Queen's day!

Sloshed

To any teetotallers out there and to my mum: please stop reading now. The picture I am about to paint here is not a pretty one.

I have just had what I sincerely intend to be a one-of-a-kind Friday night. There are a few things you need to know in order to understand what happened:

1) My exams had just finished. It had been a very stressful week and we were all celebrating it was over.

2) A week before I had literally burst out of one of my tops, a none too subtle sort of way of telling me perhaps it was time to shed those winter kilos. So for all of last week I have been dieting. Not the sensible kind but the kind where you essentially just starve yourself. I had had no more than 2 slices of bread and some tea all day...

3) English wine glasses are HUGE. They generally hold about 250 ml so even if you have had "only 3 glasses", that means you have drunk a bottle.

With such a dangerous cocktail of ingredients the result should have been predictable. I can honestly say I have never made such a spectacle of myself before. The only good thing is I made it to the restaurant's bathroom in time. The bad thing is I didn't quite make it all the way over to the toilets. Also unfortunately; I was drinking my usual red, not stainless white. I am ashamed to admit that I was regurgitating a bit more than just the principles of Marketing yesterday. That is one place in London where I can never show my face again!

Even worse than being this horribly drunk is being horribly drunk in a foreign tongue. English comes pretty natural to me these days. Most of the time I think in English and sometimes I even dream in it. There are really only two instances where my English starts to break down. The first is when I am exhausted, the other is when I am drunk. Yesterday night I was both. I fear I must have been talking complete gibberish, or at the very least some awful 'Dunglish'.

I was kindly taken care of by a friend who guided me out of the restaurant and into a cab. Angela: you are an angel for putting up with me! Now that the killer headache has subsided, embarrassment is taking over. So this is what it feels like to be a student in Britain.

Never again!

That's it. I'm not doing this again, not ever!

Over 10 hours this week have I wasted regurgitating things that by next week I will have irrevocably forgotten. My arm is sore from writing. My back aches from stress and sitting in very unergonomic lecture theatres. My brain is suffering from information overload. What was I thinking when I decided to embark on this? No more. This is the last degree I ever hope to do in my life. Please tie me down and read this post out loud to me if ever I would be foolish enough to suggest otherwise. Enough is enough.

Blessing in disguise

This week my lifeline connecting me to the outside world has snapped: our Internet has been disconnected! The line we had was being paid for by the company of one of my now ex-flatmates. Of course now that he has moved out they will no longer extend us this courtesy.

I suppose the timing has been somewhat of a blessing in disguise for me. It is amazing how much time one can waste being online when really all you should be doing is studying. I live and breathe internet & e-mail these days. It is killing me to be cut off from my digital world. Turning on the computer is almost the first thing I do in the morning and the last thing I do before I go to bed. It is absolute agony that I can't check if I have any new e-mails on my GMail account (just a few), my College account (even fewer), my old Uni account (about 30 messages about cheap drugs) or to see if he has left me a message (he hasn't). I miss checking the Dutch news (no world peace yet) or the BBC news (no world peace there either). I miss looking up random words and facts on Wikipedia, Google or YouTube. And of course the worst: I can't even update my blog without having to go to Uni!

For my exam results it has probably been a good thing that I have been cut off but now exam week is almost over... can somebody please, please, please reconnect me again?

In an English country garden

There is no more effective way of getting me to do those laborious chores around the house than exam week. True to the spirit of escapism, I will be defrosting the freezer, painting the bedroom or rearranging my drawers. Anything not to have to sit still and study! This time it is no different. My new distraction is the most unlikely so far. Instead of working on my Marketing exam, I have today taken up that most English of hobbies: gardening!

Anybody who has ever lived with me will appreciate the unlikeliness of this. I have the least green fingers ever. I have repeatedly managed to kill off cacti! I was once even given a "how to take care of your potted plants" book for my birthday by friends who took pity on the sorry state of my flora. So gardening wouldn't exactly seem to be my thing. In all honesty; it still isn't. The gardening I have been doing so far is no more than trying to rid our patio of the thick layer of weeds that is covering it. Our flat has a small garden in the back but because of the high turnover in occupants no one ever feels responsible for it. There is not a single plant in that garden that is actually supposed to be there. It is a big jungle of weeds run amok. It is further adorned with a completely rusted through barbeque and a collapsed wooden bench. All in all a pretty sorry sight. Now that the weather is getting so warm and sunny though, it would be nice to be able to sit outside without nettles stinging my legs all the time. So rather than focusing on the "4P's of marketing"(I'll tell you but only if you really, really want to know) I have been attacking this jungle with some garden scissors, uprooting a lot of creepy many-legged crawlers in the process.

My back is killing me and my hands are a bit rough but the patio definitely looks much better. I can even see the tiles again! Ideally I would like to do something about the rest of the garden as well, maybe even plant some real plants and flowers. Then again, by the time I would have the garden ready enough for that, my exams will be over and the spirit will most likely have left me again...

No place like home

In the past couple of days I have spent time in all three of the cities that at some point in my life I have lived in. Back in Amersfoort, the town I was born and raised in, I have apparently become somewhat of a tourist attraction. People were stopping by because they heard I would be home for the holidays. For them, Amersfoort is the place they most closely associate with me so going there means coming home. I don't really feel it as such. Amersfoort is a nice, fairly pretty place and, having spent 20 years of my life there, I know it well enough but I just don't feel a strong connection to it. If anything, home in Amersfoort is my parental house. My old room is still there, looking pretty much the same way as it did on the day I moved out all those years ago. Except of course it is full of moving boxes these days with most of my stuff in storage there...

Amsterdam is where I feel at home. I love my apartment there. I have lived in my place for close to 9 years and it is really the place that best reflects who I am. But it's more than that. Amsterdam has always been special to me, even before I moved there. Living in Amsterdam has been great. It took me a long time to get to know the city properly -my infamous lack of directional sense again- but in the end I knew just where to find those nice little shops and restaurants, I had my personal hairdresser, my favourite park and have memories all over the city. All the things that make you feel you belong rather than are just a visitor.

Now, in London, I have to start all over again. I still can't find my way even around the centre. Leave me at Picadilly Circus and tell me to walk to Covent Garden and there is a fair chance I'll end up in Notting Hill. I have a supermarket but am still in desperate need of a good hairdresser, dry cleaner and shoe repair shop. And I won't be able to find any of the nice restaurants and pubs I have been to with others any more. My house is not a home either. Although my room is cluttering up at amazing speed, it's mostly with paperwork, books and clothes. I don't buy anything unless it is functional because I know I'll just end up having to move it again. The house is fine but it isn't my own space. I like London, I really do, and I can picture myself living here for another while but it is still a long way off from truely becoming a home.

Brittania rules

This island is a quaint place in some ways. It so completely rejects the notion of being a part of Europe. l don't particularly think of myself as a "European", but here there is a real 'us vs. them' mentality. One aspect in which this is blatantly apparent is in the adoption of the metric system or, to be more precise: the lack thereof.

For some time now officially all business should be conducted in metric units and indeed shop prices are quoted per kilo and per litre. Much of the signage and packaging, however, is still firmly rooted in the old British Imperial system of pounds & pints. To this day a container of milk, for instance, holds 568 ml: exactly 1 pint! Also in people's everyday conversations it is apparent that metric units have no place whatsoever. I often find myself struggling in conversation. When people tell me they lost “a full stone” I try to look impressed but I’m unsure whether that is more like a pebble or like a boulder. Similarly, I'll nod appreciatively at a height of 6 foot, 5 inches still not knowing whether the person we are discussing is a Lilliputian or a full blown Goliath. And with 12 inches in a foot, the bloody system isn't even decimal so there are no quick and easy conversions!

I can't foresee the British giving up their habits any time soon so if I want to integrate into their society I’d better familiarise myself with this odd, archaic system. So I have begun practising: I am 5’8” and weigh 123 lbs. No, honestly!

Babylonian nights

One of the best things about my time in academics is the wonderfully diverse, multicultural, multinational and multilingual circle of friends it has given me. Living in London has only amplified that further. Until recently I shared this house with 4 others, none of whom spoke the same mother tongue. Amongst the people I consider my friends I can quite easily count about a dozen different nationalities. The world really has become a global village. Our only common denominator, our lingua franca, is English. I am not saying it is all the Queen's English but it serves us well enough. Without English many of the precious friendships I have would have never gotten beyond the stage of a Babylonian mime act. Last night I got a taste of what that world could have looked like.

Together with a friend -indeed one of the English speaking variety, though she more than holds her own in Dutch as well as half a dozen other languages- I went to see a very special performance of A Midsummer Night's dream. The play was performed in 8 different languages of which I can boast only 1 at best! And that one is in "Shakespearean" so perhaps it is more accurate to claim none. Astonishing. The actors seamlessly shifted from one language into another leaving the audience to wonder what had just been said. Thank goodness we had bought the programme book with synopsis beforehand! Of course the point is not at all to understand every word (most likely even in all-English Shakespeare performances most people don't manage that!). It was kind of liberating in fact to just sit back and simply let things unfold before your eyes. The motions, the expressions, the costumes, the dances; they all conveyed the magic of the story without much need for words. However, once the lights came back on I suddenly felt very grateful again for having been given the gift of English!