Life in Holland

It's been about two weeks since my last post, and while I've really only been in Zwolle during this time, it's been great! I'm becoming more comfortable with the area and loving it more everyday! Classes are pretty normal, besides our weekly excursions around the Netherlands, which are the highlight of the school week. I spent the last 2 weekends in Zwolle getting to know the SPICE students better and meeting some Dutch students also. For the Superbowl a small group of students, in need of some American culture, decided to stay up and watch the game which started Live at 12:30 am here. We anxiously turned on the TV to discover the commentary was in Dutch. We improvised and found an English commentary online to go along with the game, but missed out on most of the commercials :( This week I've been watching to olympics on the BBC channel which I argue is even better than watching it in America, because the commentators have the appealing British accent. Thankfully my host family enjoys watching the olympics just as much as me and we spend lots of our free time during the week watching them together. They especially are enjoying the success of their speed skaters; I love having two home countries to cheer for :)

I couldn't have expected to like Holland as much as I do. Outside of the traveling and touring, which is what I initially thought I'd like the most, the SPICE students and all the people I've met here in Zwolle have been wonderful! I love hearing stories about the history and current issues of The Netherlands from my teachers. I love spending time with my host family and understanding more the culture of families here. I love spending time with the other SPICE students, getting to know one other better, forming new friendships, and making memories traveling or going out together.

This week I've also been struck with missing home. In light of my best friend's mother's health difficultly - Sara, I wish I could be there to pray with you and talk to you through this difficult times. My host family and I pray every night for your mother and family and are so thankful for the improvements she's had so far! Also, this past week my best friend Kiley got engaged! Kiley's engagement is something all of us roommates were anxious for; I'm so very happy for Kiley and Taylor! I wish I could be back home to hug her and celebrate with her, though! As I've said before, thank goodness for Skype and the internet so I can at least convey some of these feelings to them!

This past week, a group of 5 students including me, decided to take a quick one day trip to London. We booked an overnight bus trip for Friday night and Saturday night to go back and forth. We left Zwolle at 7 pm Saturday and arrived in London via the Chunnel at 5:30 am. Surprisingly everyone in our group was full of energy, most likely from the adrenaline of being in London! We purchased a transportation pass and a venti Starbucks coffee and spent until about 8:30am exploring the city by switching between several double decker buses. We then began searching for the many tourist sites in London:

Our bus entering the Chunnel Train

Big Ben and Parliament

Westminster Abbey

The London Eye

Tower Bridge :)

London Tower Castle





Abbey Road

We made the typical tourist mistake

Platform 9 3/4 at Kings Cross Train Station

Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park

Buckingham Palace 

                 

We found the guards! 

Fish&Chips

...and of course we had to take a couple of the typical London Tourist Photos

Red Phone Booths- they're everywhere! 

One of the double decker buses we rode on throughout the day!

These reminders are actually very helpful - saved me from walking into traffic a couple times. 

The many monuments, especially in remembrance of WWII 

The early morning bus rides allowed us to see so much more of London including some of the different neighborhoods and parks as well as the countless monuments and statues. We also took the tube, which allowed us to get a feel for the culture in London more. It's very international and diverse, which made people watching fun. We always tried to guess which language was spoken or which nationality a person was from during our tube trips. After a 12 hour day of non-stop traveling and touring, we found what we thought looked like an authentic British Pub and ordered some famous fish&chips. With one more look at the Tower Bridge in lights, which was probably my favorite site of the day, we hopped on our bus at 9pm for the very long and uncomfortable bus ride back to Amsterdam. We took a ferry from Dover, unfortunately it was 3 am and we were all extremely exhausted so we didn't see any of the surrounding cliffs and channel, which I'm sure would've been gorgeous. We finally arrived back in Zwolle at 11 am, and now looking back, after resting awhile, the bus ride doesn't seem nearly as bad and definitely worth it for the wonderful memories made and sites seen this weekend. London is a beautiful city! I know we hardly skimmed the surface of all there is to see, the mix of Renaissance and Modern Architecture is a perfect balance and the historic buildings that are there have been kept in wonderful condition. A trip back to the UK to explore London more and visit surrounding cities to see more Medieval and scenic landscapes is a must :)

Touring The Netherlands

Thank goodness for a bit more of a "normal college week" with class only 2 or 3 hours a day rather than 10 hours...while this was only the case on Monday and Wednesday, it was a good change from the last two weeks.

Tuesday we visited Leiden, where the first university in The Netherlands was established. Here, we visited the History of Science museum and I was able to see many things I had learned about in school such as the first microscopes made by Anton Van Leeuwenhoek. Needless to say I was always about five minutes behind the tour, because I wanted to read every explanation and take dozens of pictures of the inventions! We've come quite a ways since the 15th century, the progress and influence from theology and the Church was extremely interesting as well.

Van Leeuwenhoek's first microscopes

One of the first drawings of the human skeleton, without the use of cadaver dissection, as that was against religious beliefs at the time. Instead they used information from animal dissection. 

Real mummies in the Artifacts Museum

Hieroglyphs

Replica of the rosetta stone used for hieroglyph translation

Roman Empire battle artifacts

On Thursday, we took off for Amsterdam! I was surprised at how international the city was. Especially after living in Zwolle where Dutch culture is very evident, I was able to see that Amsterdam was quite different. It was beautiful with the historic buildings, but similar to Chicago or New York there were rougher, poorer parts of the city and areas of the city influenced by other cultures such as the Chinese in their chinatown. Everything was in English; while that takes away from the Dutch feel, I didn't mind it much :) We took a boat tour through the canals and got to see multiple parts of the city from the red light district to the wealthy apartments and historic museums. We concluded the afternoon with visits to the Rijks museum to see the famous Night Watch painting among other artworks and The Anne Frank House. The Rijks Museum was captivating! I've never seen professional artwork in person and pictures cannot recreate every detail of these artworks. They were all so realistic! The Anne Frank house was equally as interesting. As we walked through the house, there were excerpts from her diary and videos explaining her life in the secret house in each room. While I'd heard much about Anne Frank's story and WWII in general, being in her house made it seem even more graphic. I was struck again with the evil of this historic event and the pain it caused so many people.

Beautiful train station where we arrived 

King and Queen's Palace

bridges, canals, and more bridges...Amsterdam

Bike parking garage...thousands of bikes!! 

Thursday night I experienced my first hostel. Right when we checked in and were brought to our rooms, I began thinking about how I was going to handle sleeping in this rundown place. Being slightly a germ-a-phobic, I began to imagine all the repulsive people who may have slept in the same bed as I was about to and how the clean sheets they'd given me weren't quite thick enough to keep away the germs. Finding a long black hair on my mattress and a signature sheet of WEEKLY cleanings didn't comfort me at all. After I'd been stirring these thoughts in my mind for about 10 minutes, a more experienced traveler in the group mentioned that this was one of the better hostels she'd stayed in...I decided there that I would be staying in hostels only as a last resort!

We spent the next day in the city of Delft with our business class. I don't have much background in business, so I soaked up everything. We toured two floral factories, both which smelled wonderful. One plant produced thousands of varieties of flowers and auctioned them off for export, while the other specialized in a couple of varieties of potted flowers and experimented with their genetics. After the tours we visited the world renown Delft technical university where we met with a group of Chinese students and discussed marketing techniques to attract the growing Asian tourist populations to smaller cities such as Zwolle when they visit The Netherlands.

Only one picture, but the warehouse was filled with  thousands of crates of beautiful flowers! 

Today I spent the day doing some homework, which is a very light load compared to my science education at Dordt, and baking "American Brownies" with my host sisters :) What a blessing my host family has continued to be! All in all, a wonderful week here in Zwolle!