Well I’m not getting anything out of this economics lecture, so I may as well break my blog silence. Since my last post left off with the line, “…tomorrow I’m emigrating”, I have indeed done just that, so here’s a post in a similar grain to my I Live In Manchester! post from 2006. I now live in the beautiful Dutch city of Leiden, with a masters course on European Union studies at the oldest university in the Netherlands to keep me occupied.

The city itself has a little bit of an ‘Oxford’ feeling to it, with the ancient university dominating things, and plenty of old-fashioned bicycles everywhere; the rest of Holland, at least what I’ve seen of it, seems to be rather Dutch, much as one would expect.

The experience of becoming an expat is an interesting one, quite difficult to prepare for. The wonders of the European Union have made things a little easier, what with my right to live, work, and study anywhere in the EU, and all; Dutch bureaucracy seems to be determined to hinder me though. Despite being here for over a month now, I’m not, officially speaking, a student of Universiteit Leiden yet, nor do I have the luxury of a bank account. I have faith that it will all work out though, so eventually I’ll be properly settled; hopefully I’ll still be here when that happens. Thankfully, I think the worst thing I was warned about before moving here has already happened: culture shock. It’s difficult to measure whether it has or hasn’t happened, but I certainly know that I had the feelings of novelty about the Netherlands for a few weeks, followed by an unexplained dislike of the place, and now I’m pleasantly indifferent to it, much as I am when I’m in the UK.

Anyhow, since I started writing this, the professor seems to have been able to draw four complicated economic graphs on the blackboard, and somehow chain them together with baffling dotted lines: am I allowed to fail this course?

On the 17th of September 2006, I wrote a post on the first edition of this blog titled “I Live In Manchester!“. For the past three years that has remained true, but as of Sunday it will no longer be so. I finished my last exam on Wednesday morning, so while I’m still a student, I’m liberated of any studious endeavours. It is quite an odd feeling to have no revision, dissertation work, or essays looming over me; of course I would never normally have revision or essays to bother with during summer holidays, but what makes this especially weird is that I won’t be coming back to lectures and seminars at MMU in September. If all goes to plan, it will be in exotic Leiden that I next have a stab at being academic.

I’ve said it before, but it still rings true to me: I won’t miss much about Manchester; my department at MMU, the many charms of Didsbury—especially The Art of Tea and Silver Apples—and the Cornerhouse cinema are probably the things that will be most disappointing to leave behind.

So, time to start packing those books up, giving notice on services, and figuring out how to squeeze the contents of a reasonably spacious flat into my comparatively small bedroom in Edinburgh.