The Exchange Legacy

During my senior year of high school, my family hosted an exchange student from Italy: Annarita. This is something I recommend to everybody, just as strongly as I recommend actually going on exchange - although I don't mention it as much. You get to share and learn, and of course you disagree and there are hard times but in the end everybody is usually a better person for it.

This week, Annarita came to visit me in Middelburg - the first time we had seen each other since she left Portland in June 2005.

I met her at Schiphol, and it was almost immediately clear that neither of us had actually changed all that much. Despite my exchange to the Dominican Republic and the last few years in the Netherlands, and even though Annarita has studied at universities in both Italy and England, we are both more or less the same as we were at 17. Perhaps slightly more mature.

But only very slightly.

We spent Wednesday afternoon walking around Leiden, which I hope to one day call home (although in these last months in Middelburg, I am really beginning to dread the day I catch the intercity train out of Middelburg and leave for good, never to return except as a visitor). It was a beautiful, sunny day, and Leiden, although not the most beautiful Dutch city, has some very nice views, buildings, canals, and windmills.


Thursday was spent around Middelburg - a good cup of coffee at Ko D'oooooooor, a walk to the Oostkerk, the library, and the nice used bookstore, and stopping for a tasty tosti and cup of coffee at St John's Coffee House. Then to market to buy a few things for the house dinner, a pack of the obligatory stroopwafels (if there is one thing you HAVE to eat when you come to the Netherlands, that's it - herring is a close second, but stroopwafels get top priority), and general browsing.

Thursday night found us at the student bar, enjoying Annarita's favorite beer (Heineken) and RA society.

Friday I spent in school, and then a cup of tea at Honeypie, dinner at the Pannenkoekenhuis with some of my housemates, and a night out with some friends at Schutterschof.

Today was, sadly, her last day - how quickly three days go! - and we spent it having coffee and appelgebak at Ko D'oooooooor, walking along the canal, and visiting the Abbey. We stopped for a bakje of the best frieten in Middelburg, picked up a souvenir pack of stroopwafels for Annarita to take back home, and waved goodbye from the platform of the Middelburg station and the 3 o'clock intercity train to Amsterdam.

It wasn't what we did, though, that was so nice. It was the simple fact that we did it, that we did anything. That we saw each other again.

Minutes before the train came, I had said to her, "Do you think that way back in 2005, when you left, we would ever have believed that the next time we saw each other, it would be in the Netherlands, as college students?"

It's pretty remarkable. These exchanges create extra branches on our family trees. I know members of my aunt's Dutch host family, and my French host mother was my grandparent's "French daughter". My brother recently spent a year in Ecuador. And I have to tell my sister (for the hundredth time) how lucky she is - she just found out about the host family she'll be living with next year, near Naples.

If I could do it again, I would. In a heartbeat.