Monthly Report 2: September

My first full month in The Netherlands is complete. Each week was different. My first week here school was supposed to start but instead Rotary arranged for the exchange students to have an educational week long program. The next two weeks I went to school Monday-Friday, meaning that I had just 8 days in school before I took off for a week long Dutch Orientation Course in Schiedam.

The first two weeks of school were a bit unstructured. They didn’t quite have a place for us so we just sort of drifted from class without any books. Dutch high school seems to be very book-dependent. There is even a reward system for not forgetting your books. If you bring your books to all your classes you can earn “free time” where you are allowed to skip class. The other exchange students and I are still working out the kinks in our school schedule, but it is going okay otherwise. We’ve formed a good group and like spending time with each other, but we’re all trying to make Dutch friends a priority. I am hoping that next month will be a bit more regulated and I’ll be able to work a little more. I am really hoping to learn something from school this year.

My host mom took me into Amsterdam where we took a canal tour and saw the Rijksmuseum (home of both Rembrandt's Nachtwacht and Vermeer’s Milkmaid, as well as many other famous works). I included many pictures of that day. I did not take a picture of The Milkmaid, as I thought it would not be a very good representation of the painting itself. I was very familiar with the image before going to the museum, but I didn’t think much of it. I have to say that it is much more beautiful in person, and I spent a good bit of time in front of it. Rembrandt's Night Watch is also impressive, but a bit less to my tastes. There are some other pictures of art that I liked which I included. I realize now that I never bothered to see who the artists were, but you can always look them up if you’re interested.

The canal ride was also fun. I learned that despite low fences lining almost the entirety of the canal, an average of 1 car a day still falls in. That’s not all that falls in the canals either. While walking around the city we saw a large group of people crowded on a bridge, looking into the water. When we walked over to check it out, we saw nothing in the water save for some bubbles. A British woman informed us that someone had lost their keys in the canal and they hired a SCUBA diver to try and retrieve them. I have no idea what type of keys they were, but I can’t imagine any keys that important being in the position to fall into a canal.

A few other highlights from the month include:

1. Playing the game Headbanz with my family, all in Dutch. It’s actually a really useful language learning tool because all the questions are pretty simple, and you learn new words.

2. Attending a dinner for Syrian Refugees. The charity that runs the event intends for the dinner to be a good connecting place for Syrian refugees and the rest of the community. We had authentic Syrian food, which was delicious. It was an interesting night and I was very glad to have gone.

3. Eating a gourmetten meal with my extended family. It reminded me of korean barbecue in that everyone cooked their own meat on a shared pan in the center of the table. Apparently it’s a very common Christmas tradition, and I thought it was fun. It isn’t something I’ve seen in the U.S.

4. The DOC week and Rotext weekend

The DOC (Dutch Orientation Course) is a week long event attended by all the exchange students in the Netherlands. There are 41 of us that came in August/September, and 6 students that are on a January-January exchange. At the end of the year they will go home and we will be joined by a new group of January-January exchange students. The purpose of the week is to bring all of the students together and teach them some Dutch basics, as well as talk about what to expect from the rest of the year. The Oldies (January-January kids) were really helpful in this regard because they’ve already been here for 9 months, and know what it is to learn Dutch.

The DOC was in Schiedam, about an hour, hour-and-a-half drive from Lelystad. It’s a really cute town, with the country’s tallest traditional-windmills. It had a very European feel to it, which I appreciated. Lelystad definitely has a more modern vibe. Sadly, over a fourth of their store fronts are closed or empty, but it was still fun to walk around. I visited a very pretentious modern-art museum there. It also housed a lot of CoBrA art, but that isn’t really my style either. Photos not included.

We stayed with host families in Schiedam, geographically grouped into pairs. I was with a Californian girl in my host family. There were very, very nice. I really enjoyed practicing my Dutch with them, and I think I learned more from them than from all the DOC classes. They had four kids and they had fun hearing my Dutch and using the English they had. We had pannekoeken for dinner one night. They say that it’s “typical Dutch”, but I find the difference from crepes to be very slight. Still, they were delicious. They were asking me a lot of questions about American food, including the differences between Dutch and American peanut butter. On my last day there I went out and bought them a small jar of Skippy so that they could see for themselves (fyi when you compare the labels a Dutch jar of peanut butter will usually say like 85% peanut, palm oil, salt. Skippy Creamy said 90% peanut, sugar, palm oil). I couldn’t find the Skippy in the store (it’s a very, very small jar), so I tried to ask where the foreign food section was. Foreign translates to buitenland, so I said “Heb jij buitenlands eten?” The guy I asked did not know what I was talking about, and asked me to spell it. Instead I said “Mag ik in Engels spreken?” and proceeded in English. It wasn’t until the following week that I learned they don’t literally call foreign food sections “foreign food”. It’s “wereldkeuken”, or literally: world kitchen. The more you know.

The DOC classes themselves were a bit of a let down. The teachers were really cool (they were all in college studying to be elementary school teachers, so their ages ranged from 20-22). We did learn a bit about sentence structure and past tense. Past tense conjugations are difficult, so it was nice to spend some time on it even though it wasn’t quite enough time to completely understand it. In my opinion though, we spent way too much time playing games. Things like hangman, “hoofd, schouders, knie, en teen” (head, shoulders, knees, and toes), telephone, etc. There just seemed to be a lot down time and not a lot of actively learning. We spent one entire afternoon and evening just playing games. We rode on kick bikes, canoed, sang songs, and ate kroquets. It wasn’t awful, but it felt like a space filler. I definitely think I should have learned more this past week. Coming back it makes me much more highly motivated to learn Dutch. It was frustrating not learning enough last week and I hope to be more aggressive in learning on my own now. Right now I can understand a good amount if people aren’t talking too fast or too quietly, but my speaking ability is much lower.

Schiedam is right outside of Rotterdam so one evening all the exchange students went into the city together (pictures below). It has Europe’s largest, and the world’s fourth largest, harbor. Sadly, the other exchange students are not as adventurous as myself. They didn’t want to explore the city so much as they wanted to sit down in a park and chill. I decided to explore by myself. It’s a very big city, so I didn’t stray too far from the group. I walked to an old church (which was sadly closed) and around a very interesting “Cube House”. There was a large market where I fulfilled my dream of walking up the down escalator. I wish I could have seen more, but my roommate and I had to return together and I had the house key. Luckily when we decided to leave I already knew where the stations were. Going home was extremely straight forward, but that didn’t prevent some kids from ignoring the signs and going towards the trams instead of the subway. Teenagers are kind of dumb like that.

The best part of the DOC week (and Rotext weekend in Goes) was meeting all of the other exchange students. It was really good to meet them all even though the week was overall a bit boring. There will be more Rotary events where we all meet up, the next one being a weekend in Den Haag.

Upcoming things that I am excited for include an overnight trip with my classmates in Lille, France, a J. Cole concert this Thursday, and a week off school this October for “Herfstvakantie” (autumn break). I don’t think my family is doing anything special, but I am taking a day to spend in Amsterdam with some kids from school. We are going to see the Van Gogh museum and a couple other sites. And even though there is no Halloween here, we might still be taking a trip to see some haunted houses! I’m definitely going to be teaching kids how to bob for apples this month.

Amsterdam and Rijksmuseum