Belgium and the Netherlands

“Traveling is a brutality. It forces you to trust strangers and to lose sight of all that familiar comfort of home and friends. You are constantly off balance. Nothing is yours except the essential things – air, sleep, dreams, the sea, the sky – all things tending towards the eternal or what we imagine of it.” –Cesare Pavese

I was born to travel.

I knew that before coming on this trip, but fifty-seven days on the road have solidified that fact. I thrive on a trip like this, constantly moving and seeing new spaces and experiencing new cultures. I understand that people get tired of living out of a suitcase and using hand motions when words don’t translate, but I love it, I love it even more than I thought I would. I step outside our hotels for early morning travel days with a smile on my face, glad to venture onto the bus and end the day in a new place. It never gets old. My inquisitive mind has a bad case of wanderlust, and right now Europe Semester is the perfect cure.

What’s interesting, though, is that I love a good routine just as much as I love to travel. My personality is an odd combination of yins and yangs. I was worried that Europe Semester would be hard because we’re always moving, always going, and always doing something different, but it’s not. My definition of routine has morphed into this variable change I’ve become accustomed to. Some days we spend the bulk of our time in class, or in museums, or on excursions. Some days are entirely free for us to spend as we please. You never know what’s around the river bend. It’s good, this unfamiliar way of life. It keeps us engaged and on our toes.

As I type, I’m in Rome, Italy. We’ve been here for six nights, and soon we’ll move onto Florence, where we’ll live for the next three weeks. It’s the longest stop on our semester itinerary, and I’m excited to plant roots, learn a bit more Italian, and really get to know a city. It’s been a few countries since I’ve blogged, so let me take you back a while…back to the land of brick houses and chocolate and cobblestone streets: Brugge, Belgium.

Just about every other store in Brugge was a chocolate shop and let me tell you, the Belgians know how to do chocolate. It’s a good thing we only stayed in Brugge three nights, or else we all would have been in trouble with the amount of chocolate and waffles we were consuming. And if it’s not a chocolate shop your walking by, it’s a lace store, or a waffle stand. Complete the picture with narrow cobblestone streets and brick houses squeezed close together and that’s Brugge. The city is cute and simple and touristy, so our quick stay there was perfect. The best way to see Brugge is on two wheels, so a few of us rented bikes for a leisurely ride one afternoon. After successfully navigating narrow streets and heavy traffic, we rode around the canals and out into the countryside, passing cow pastures and quaint neighborhoods and signs we couldn’t read.

In the blink of an eye our time in Brugge was up and it was off to Haarlem, the Netherlands. Oh Haarlem, cute, little Haarlem. Just thinking back to the tiny Dutch town makes me smile. It’s just a quick train ride away from Amsterdam and it was the perfect location for our stay. We could go into the city when we pleased or stay around Haarlem and enjoy it’s quite atmosphere and picturesque Dutch streets. A few of us ventured a bus ride away out to the North Sea one Sunday morning for a few hours of fun. It was cold and windy, but we ran into the sea like she was a long lost friend, prancing through the waves and rolling up our pants so they didn’t get too wet. We took panoramic pictures and watched locals surf in the churning, jagged waves. It was a perfect morning, the perfect escape from the stress of midterms and crunch of class work we were all feeling.

Holland is the land of bikes and French fries and sing-songy words, with windmills and brick houses defining the landscape. The language is light and pretty, with a nice beat to it that makes even the grumpiest man sound like he’s in a good mood. But their pronunciation is killer. You try to pronounce ingewikkelder or voorbeelden or moeilijk. Yeah, it’s crazy. My simplified guide to creating your own Dutch word (which I often did): add a double vowel and a J and call it Dutch. The J’s are normally silent, and as long as you sing the words with a smile on your face you should be just fine.

We actually didn’t spend much time in Amsterdam, but the time we did spent there was great. I’ve been to Amsterdam twice before, including just a few months ago with my parents, so it was really nice, and almost comforting, to be back in a city that I was already familiar with. We walked along canals lined with orange and red trees just starting to change colors for fall, and we got good use out of our umbrellas because it rained most of our visit. We looked in tiny shops overflowing with delftwares before visiting the Anne Frank House and enjoyed perfect dinner and dessert crepes at The Pancake House.

The Dutch definitely get an A in my book. They know how to make great French fries and stroopwafels and windmill cookies that taste like fall and winter married in sugar. The people were great, and despite a few close calls with the thousands of bikes in Amsterdam, no one got hit. Bikers in that city mean business, they have the right of way and they don’t mess around. It’s funny that Amsterdam is not my favorite city in the world, but it’s the one in Europe that I’ve been to the most. Adding Haarlem and the North Sea to a few of the other Dutch cities I’ve visited, and I can confidently say that I like the Dutch. How can you not like a people who eat toast with chocolate sprinkles on it for breakfast? Precisely.

Here’s to life on the road. To feeling alive and knowing that where you are right now is exactly where you’re supposed to be. The trip is more than half way over, and I’m savoring everyday that I get to spend in these places, with these people, learning and growing and getting lost in Europe. Stay tuned for a catch-up post on my crazy, wonderful week in London, and my time now in Roma. Ciao!