At 6PM I had myself down to the on-sight restaurant for an 8PM meeting. I used this flight to catch up with the world but also get some food, since I hadn’t eaten since that morning. The menu was nice and I was advised by the bartender to have my room keys visible in order to qualify for the discount, available to people who are staying at the accommodation. I ordered a chicken pizza with a diet coke and it came to about eight euros which isn’t too bad.
I wasn’t too sure how many people were going to turn up for the meeting so by 7:45PM I was expecting some people to have been in the restaurant too, but obviously it is difficult to determine too. The next minute I see a gentlemen take a seat on one of the three long tables and he placed a piece of paper at the centre. I was already aware and recognised it was Bart, our course coordinator and creator of the material on Learndutch.org. I took a look around but either there was no one in the restaurant who was taking part in the course, or they were waiting for somebody else to make the first move. Well sure enough I did! I grabbed my things, walked over to the table and introduced myself, “Ik ben Conor!”. It wasn’t long before more people were appearing and we were introducing ourselves. For the first time it is very daunting but soon enough more and more people were happy to have conversations with the other course participants.
We all discussed our reasons for wanting to learn Dutch and there were so many unique reasons for wanting to do so which is so interesting to listen to, as well as the many different countries people had travelled from and the many languages that they speak. By the time that everybody turned up, there were around twenty of us all engrossed into conversation, getting to know more about each other. After all, we were going to spend two weeks working together, so this was an important part. All of the waiting finally came down to this moment, and it was a very special moment.
We were given the opportunity to purchase our text books that we would be using over the two weeks. Most of the people took the opportunity to buy their copy of the text book that thy needed for the course. ‘Nederlands in Gang’ is offered to students studying Dutch between Level zero – A2, and ‘Nederlands in Actie’ is offered to A2-B2 students. Since I was following the A2-B1 course, I purchased ‘Nederlands in Actie’. I didn’t want to take the plastic seal off! 😀
I did however to look at the type of grammar we were focusing on. It looked fairly difficult but it was good to know that someone else in my group looked at it in the same way also. It is part of he learning process though, so hopefully we will be more confident by the end of the week.
At about 10:30PM, people were beginning to say goodnight and most we would see tomorrow for the city walk in Amsterdam with Martijn. Although, a few of us felt as though we were only starting to get to know each other and the night had only begun. By the time the bar was closing, Yasbe, (from Mexico, living in Norway) and Liza (from China, living in Belgium) and I were still wide awake. But, it did not take very long to make some lifetime friends who will make the two weeks an even better experience. We took the time to check out some of the facilities of the student hotel. I also needed to make the relevant checks to my bike before I was ready to use it. The bike basement was huge and absolutely full of bikes, hundreds and hundreds of them. Being able to find my bike was a mission.
It was 2AM before we finally made it to our rooms, but what a fantastic day to reflect on, and it has only just begun!
Tomorrow we will be taking a tour in Amsterdam with Martijn and our fellow ‘cursisten’ – Dutch for course participants. It will give us more time to get to know some more people.
Ik Ben Conor 