The Netherlands, Take Two

I've just about complete my move. I used to live in Zeeland, now I live in Zuid-Holland. I've left Middelburg for Leiden.

After graduating from the Roosevelt Academy, I was accepted to do a one-year masters in Book & Digital Media Studies. The program starts tomorrow.

The last time I posted I was still in Portland - quite a while ago. I can say that it was very, very hard to leave this time, easily the saddest goodbye since I left for six months in France when I was 15. This summer in Portland, something happened. I've always loved my hometown, but never minded leaving it before now. Now, there is no where I would rather be (that includes Leiden).

Hopefully that will change a little over the next year, because I like to be happy wherever I am!

A lot has happened since Portland. In sum, I attended, volunteered at, and presented a paper at the 2009 PALA Conference in the last week of July. My paper - on Catherine Sanderson's blog, Petite Anglaise, and her book of the same name - received a lot of interest, enthusiasm, and generally the response was very positive. The same went for the other undergraduate presenters, my friends Isabelle and Annemijn.

It was also a great experience for bonding with other classmates, older and younger, as well as teachers. I met a lot of interesting students from other schools as well, and actually lost the attitude I always had regarding Ph.D.s. You know, that I would never get one.

Now it's sort of like a very slight possibility at some point far in the future.

After the conference, I spent a week bumming around Middelburg, crashing in different rooms of different houses with different friends, and looking for a room in Leiden. I found one at the end of that week, but couldn't move in until August 31.

The following week, my brother arrived with his friend Taavi, from Estonia, and Taavi's sister Miina. They had been traveling around Europe, mainly in Germany, France, and Spain. We had a busy week, going to Brussels, Gent, and Amsterdam, and carting most of my belongings up to a garage in Voorburg, near the Hague.

Taavi and Miina left a week later, and after a few days together in Middelburg, Simon and I went to Voorburg to stay with some family friends. We went go-karting, and I spent most of the rest of the time in Leiden, attending the international student Introduction Days. Which were not extremely stimulating, though fun.

That weekend - last weekend - we went to Apeldoorn and stayed with friends, who took us to the Kroller-Muller museum. This was a really amazing experience; I think I may have been there once before, when I was nine, but that was a long time ago. Now I recognized many Fernand Leger pieces, and after my Dutch presentation last fall, I know a lot more about Piet Mondriaan and Jan Toorop - though I hadn't heard of Toorop's daughter Charley, whose work I really liked. And then, of course, there is the huge collection of van Gogh paintings, which was quite breathtaking.

Monday we moved my things into my room in Leiden, and spent the week together doing everything from carrying furniture and running boring errands, to dinner at Marius in Amsterdam and visiting friends in Utrecht.

Finally, on Friday, we went down to Middelburg to spend the night. I still had some things to gather, and Simon was flying out of Brussels on Saturday, and Middelburg is much closer than Leiden. Friday night we went out for really good fries with my housemates and had a lot of fun.

Simon and I got up at 5 on Saturday so Simon could catch the 6:21 train with time to spare. It was really sad to see him leave, he had become such a regular presence after three weeks, and it was so nice to have him here while I was making the transition from Middelburg to Leiden.

But now he's gone, just in time for me to begin my program. I start tomorrow.