On the Monday of this week I had my final part of assessment for my "Dutch Multicultural Society" module. Unfortunately this involved a presentation, and to make matters worse it had to be given to a class of Dutch students. This was a daunting task and I was not looking forward to it however while doing it the Dutch students seemed pretty interested and once I was done I was pretty pleased with my effort. Our tutor even told us that we did well so that always helps.
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| Just a casual string quartet |
Apart from this, the week was to carry on as normal until King's Day (Koningsdag to the Dutch) on the Wednesday. Nicki had to two visitors over from home and a friend of ours, Kim who is also on Erasmus in the Netherlands, was making the trip up from Nijmegen. This was shaping up to be a good day however we didn't realise that celebrations actually started the night before for King's Night. There turned out to be a small festival organised at the Wilhelminaplein which is beside the train station which we decided to cycle down to, and the best thing about it was it was free. Everybody was celebrating and dancing this was just a taster for what would be happening the next day. When King's Day finally arrived on the Wednesday we were all excited. Dressed in our finest orange t-shirts, the tradition on King's Day as orange is the royal colour, we made out way into town to attend the markets. For what I would have considered a small town the whole place was busy with people and stalls. Everything was being sold but the most important thing was the food. The streets were lined with different food stalls and trucks and I had an amazing kibbeling lunch which is a traditional Dutch snack of chunks of fried fish and tartar sauce. After buying tickets to attend a festival at the Oldehove in the evening we spent the rest of the afternoon relaxing in the park listening to a live band doing covers of all the most popular music right now. In all it was just a great day.
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| Bridge hindering our progress into town |
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| Centre of town packed with people and stalls |
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| Relaxing in the park waiting for the band |
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| King's Day at the Oldehove |
After having a long day on the Wednesday we were thankful to have the Thursday off class to catch up on some much needed sleep. Nicki said farewell to her visitors and we all said a goodbye to Kim before she headed back to Nijmegen but I'm sure will meet up again in the coming months.
Friday came along and we made another excursion with our "Places of Memory" class. This week we made the journey to a Frisian art museum to answer the question, is there such a thing as Frisian art? Allow I did do art GSCE it appears all my artistic tendencies have left me as I could not make sense of most of the artwork. However it was another good trip and it gave us another chance to see the Frisian countryside as the museum literally in the middle of a field.
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| This was my favourite piece of art. It's a duck. |
"Art is anything you can get away with." - Andy Warhol
On Sunday I made the trip to Maastricht however as this falls under my May Vacation travels I'm going to save this tale for my next blog which promises to be reminiscent of Amsterdam as it will be excessively long, which I apologise for in advance.
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