What I Learned from Abroad

At my row class this morning, I chatted with a woman who recently reconnected with some friends in Luxembourg after having studied there twenty-five years ago. On this recent visit, she recalled that the easy-going life-style she keenly observed years ago still remained as prominent as ever, even with all the advancements in digitizing our lives. Newsflash: People in Europe know how to take it easy.

This conversation immediately triggered memories from when I studied in the quaint town of Nijmegen in the Netherlands during my junior year in college in 1991. As a naive 19-year old college student thrust in a foreign land abound with bikers and canals, I was awe-struck by the breezy Dutch way of life. Cooking with friends, drinking coffee or going to a pub were normal day-to-day activities. After lecture students would meet for coffee at a koffiehuis (not to be confused with coffee shop, though worth a visit nonetheless) to discuss the day's lesson. Sometimes the professor would join us. These casual, cozy gatherings embody the heart of Dutch culture, which can be captured in one word "gezellig" (heh-sell-ick). Netherlands had me at gezellig. And it didn't end at the cafes. Let me tell you about the home life of a foreign exchange student.

I lived in flat (known as a "gang") with 14 other Dutch students. We maintained a rotating dinner schedule where you could volunteer to cook for everyone on a specific night. On your cooking day, you rode your bike to the Albert Heijn grocery store to buy the groceries for that evening's meal. Sitting down for a meal with roommates on a regular basis was a wonderful way to connect and to cap off the day. And we actually talked -- to each other. We chatted about the day, the news, life, the world, our studies, and those crazy Americans. Maybe a little gossip got sprinkled in now and then. Sometimes we got distracted by bad TV like the Eurovison song competition, or a world music crisis like when Freddie Mercury died. I remember we played Queen for weeks. So yes, we did get distracted but for good reason.

Once dinner ended, things got a little more serious. Someone had to volunteer to make the coffee.  In the Netherlands, coffee is really important. After all, the Netherlands is the top coffee drinking country in the world. After dinner and clean-up, you retired to your room to digest a bit, then waited for someone to roam the halls, clang a spoon on a cup and yell, "de koffie staat klaar!" (coffee is ready). As the vocal alarm reverberated, you jumped right in for round two discussions, like deciding if a visit to the student pub made sense a later in the evening (often, it made perfect sense). Either way, gathering around the couch in comfy clothes, stirring your coffee with a tiny spoon, and munching on stroopwafels with your gang mates was nothing but perfect. And very, very gezellig.