The Nether Regions: Amsterdam part one

Here in Europe, from everyone that I have told that I am Australian, I have received the exact same reply: “Oh, that must have been a long flight”, and you know what? They are 100% right. Unable to sleep, I had a total of 21 hours straight of watching movies and 4 hours of aimlessly pacing around Dubai airport.

 It was totally worth it. Europe is old and beautiful; every city is like a museum working around the clock to preserve its memories. So you move through it, with one eye on the past and one on the present. I ate and drank my way through Brussels, I got nostalgic in Ghent’s vintage markets where I purchased an old school Gameboy and Pokemon Yellow and then I embraced Ghent’s pro-street art culture. Tucked in between castles and giant medieval churches there are alleyways, which have become legal paint walls where everybody is welcome to put up a piece.

After a brush with Belgium I made it to Amsterdam. I moved into my new home called the Houthavens, however everybody just knows them as The Containers. It doesn’t look like much, in fact the inside looks like I have ransacked IKEA but it’s my burrow and I have found my community here. We were united by an introduction week by the International Student Network. This consisted of a different party every night, a Dutch crash course (this is actually to do with the language, but the name does reflect learning how to ride a bike in Amsterdam), a canal cruise and a trip to the zoo.

Life here in Amsterdam is easy, you just hop on your bike and you go. Everyday is another spin class – my legs are going to look amazing by the end of these next 6 months. Strangely enough the bike lock costs more than the bike not that it actually works, the salesman sold me the bike lock like this “you can have a bike lock which someone will cut through in 1 minute, or this bike lock which someone will cut through in 5 minutes”. Sold.  Then when it is sunny, I’ll just go have a picnic in a park with some friends, or sit on the pier outside of our containers or have a beer in the Jordaan, which is a really beautiful part of town.

The good times kept rolling. I’m actually writing this after arriving home from what has been my 4^th music festival in Amsterdam. This is also after a 40-minute bike ride from the festival back to my home in pouring rain (this actually happens a lot – they didn’t mention that in the brochure). Tonight’s festival was called Magneet and it literally ended with a bang, where we all stood huddled and cuddled together like penguins being beaten by the rain while “professionals” danced around and ignited a wooden boat on fire. Still the most amazing festival I have been to is Valtifest. For it everybody dresses up to a theme and goes absolutely mental, or they looked absolutely mental because the theme was Kak (which in Dutch means poo).  What was crazier is the main stage was raised onto a giant toilet, where everybody got loose like stools and danced beneath.

Oh there is also this thing called university, which I have started at the Universiteit van Amsterdam. It was actually quite a shock and a little bit refreshing, it feels good to learn something again. There are a lot of similarities between this and UTS. Physically because there is no identifiable campus, rather it consists of different faculty buildings dispersed around the centre town – with a curious amount very close to the heart of the red light district. The learning method is pretty similar in its lectures, tutorials and a ton of never ending readings. I have picked up a masters subject, which in essence is just about comic books, so I can’t really complain about those readings. I’m also learning Dutch now as part of my degree where my assignments consist predominantly of ordering coffee.

This is where I am at now. Everything is going so quickly, I have just realised how short six months is, so anyone who is reading this and thinking of exchange, I would recommend trying to go abroad for a year instead. Although maybe I am still in the honeymoon period and I will feel differently in a month. If that is the case, this has been a long upswing. If you want to know whether you should still try to apply for a year-long program, stay tuned to see if I can have a bad time.

I doubt it.

Zachary Goldberg

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