Being a foreigner in the Netherlands at this time of year is great; not only can I celebrate my own Christmas and winter traditions, I can also join in with the Dutch Sinterklaas festival. My coursemates had, what I think is termed, a Sinterklaasavond last night, from which I received a teapot and a lovely poem written by Sinterklaas and his helper, Zwarte Piet, which is reproduced below (the poem, not the teapot—though I’m sure there is a computer scientist working hard somewhere to develop a hyper-teapot transfer protocol):

“I’ll sing you one, Ho
Green grow the rushes, Ho
What is your one, Ho?
One is one and all alone
And evermore shall be (it) so”

But Tom,
You’re not alone
Though, in Leiden, you’re hardly seen
Dashing off to some conference green
With gay abandonment
Saving the environment
Cars and trains cross the land
So we can all understand
The dreadful warning
On the effects of global warming

But please, Tom, take a little hint,
As for earth you do your stint:
You see:
Hitchhike
Take a bike
Or, of course,
Like me,
Take a horse
But please, leave a carbonless footprint.

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?