I confess, I've been lazy. Partially because staring at a screen
for any longer than I needed to in order to write my thoughts down seemed
absolutely unbearable and partially because writing about my last few weeks in
the Netherlands would mean accepting the fact that I was indeed actually
leaving.
Now that I have actually kicked myself out of the EU, escaped
the reality of returning home for a week, survived the nine hour flight home,
and am (not making any progress on) recovering from jet lag, let me catch you
up. Here we go:
My final weeks contained mostly mad dash of getting everything
graded before my departure - tests, papers, etc. all needed marks before I
split. In between my red-pen frenzies, I wrapped up my units and began saying
goodbye to my classes. That last week of teaching, each class surprised me with
kind words, more Dutch-themed sweets and pastries than I could ever eat, gifts,
and parties. In every class, my students surprised me with showers of presents
and affection. I’ve never been much for showing my feelings, but oh how I’d be
lying if I said that I wasn’t biting back tears in every class. Although, it
did make things a bit awkward since my last week of teaching wasn’t actually my
last week of being at Marnix. But I’ll get to that in a little while.
 |
| biking to Arnhem |
My second to last weekend was jam packed. I'm actually still a
little surprised I can walk straight after my host family and I cycled all the
way from Renkum to the Open Air Museum in Arnhem. It wasn't so bad except for
one particularly nasty hill, but I was still considerably out of breath when we
arrived. The museum is like a giant park with houses and structures that walk
you through the history of Holland. With a rare bit of really warm sun, we
spent the whole afternoon wandering around peering into windows. Lennart left
us around midday to get to his soccer game and when we had finished our
explorations, we cycled over to watch the second half of his game. We got to
the field just in time to see one of his team mates get his shoulder dislocated
and get carted off to the hospital - yikes.
On Sunday morning I met Ester early at the Ede train station. As
my resident museum buddy, we had been talking about doing the Rijks Museum for
ages and finally found a free day to do it. Because we have knack for a
snail-like pace we had planned to get to the museum really early and spend all
day getting our fifteen euro's worth. Upon arriving in Amsterdam, I managed to
trip (only slightly) down the stairs and barely miss running smack into quite a
few poles which led to the very necessary decision: breakfast (and coffee)
first, then museum. We ate, regained the ability to be functioning human
beings, and set off. All was going according to plan until we decided to follow
a street sign that pointed us toward the Rijks - following that seemed like a
good idea until twenty minutes later we were wandering between the poshest
looking leaning houses with the museum nowhere in sight. We laughed at our
habit for wandering in our travels and fortune for having a sunny day, and
popped into a hotel lobby for directions. It was probably noon before we
finally managed to reach the museum entrance. Nevertheless, we quickly bought
our tickets and scampered in. At the entrance to the galleries there were
security guards posted around checking the contents of people's bags - pretty
normal. As we approached, a nervous, little man wearing a museum security badge
asked me, "do you speak English?" Nevermind the fact that Ester and I
have been prattling nonstop in English during our entire approach, I suppose he
was being polite. I indicated that I did, to which he then asked, "are you
American?" I thought the question was a bit odd, but figured it was just
out of general interest so I affirmed that yes, I was. Then came the spiel:
"well, I'm sure you're used to this as an American I'm going to need to
look inside your bag, you understand." As I opened my bag for him to peer
inside, Ester and I looked at each other with raised eyebrow. Then the security
guard asked me, "any hard or soft drugs in here?" I told him that I
did not and he welcomed me into the museum. Ester and I made it about four
steps before bursting into laughter - "did I just get racially profiled to
get into the Rijks Museum?"
"and who is sneaking hard drugs into an art museum??"
"you know what would go great with this Van Gogh?
Meth."
Goodness gracious.
Hours
melted by as we wandered around inspecting the paintings, Ester teaching me all
the things I needed to know about Vermeer and Rembrandt and Dutch style and
whatnot and me trying desperately to remember what little art history I got in
college, and when that failed making snarky remarks (shocking, right??) . When
we reached the famous, "Night Watch" - where President Obama gave his
press conference a week earlier when he was in town for the Nuclear Summit - I
confirmed that I did, in fact, feel freedom still tingling in the air.
Jokingly, I announced to Ester in my booming American accent, "alright,
seen where Obama stood, we can go home now" and earned some delightfully dirty
looks. Whoops. We wandered through, gawking at paintings - making inappropriate
commentary on portraits of fatties and expressing our preference for ship
paintings where there the sea is raging or there's a battle going on. By the
time we had finished with the second floor the loudspeaker was chiming that the
museum would close in an hour. We breezed through the remainder, pausing only
to take a picture with a Van Gogh. I think we made it out of there with all of
ten minutes to spare before closing.
After
making a mandatory ice cream stop we boarded the train back to Ede, where we
had plans to meet Saskia for dinner. What we didn’t know beforehand was that
the train stations in both Amsterdam and Utrecht were under construction. The
train crawled between stations. Crawwwwllleeeeddd. But of course I thought
nothing of it as we only had vague dinner plans and Ester had been furiously
texting Saskia alerting her to our late arrival. When we finally reached the
restaurant off the little square in Wageningen, Ester rushed into the
restaurant which should have tipped me off that something was up, but of course
Captain Oblivious over here just followed suit. We rounded the corner to find a
table full of my colleagues and friends – “surprise! this is your going away
dinner!”
We
ate and laughed and they wrapped me in my very own Dutch flag and it wasn’t
until they started chanting, “speech, speech, speech” that I had to say “um,
you guys know that I’m not actually leaving until next week, right?”
They
did, and they had to wait to hear emotional things from me. I wasn’t about to
make my big spiel and have to look them in the face for five more days. And
with that, I’m going to conclude my first installment of “The Great Catch-Up”.
Stay tuned as I try to type faster than my memories can dull.
