Orientation: The Middle Third

It has certainly been a while since I last posted. Of course, Farrell has written a few posts, but they have been necessarily short due to time constraints, nevertheless, they have certainly communicated the hectic-ness of life since we left home. Fortunately, everything is finally beginning to settle down a bit. After nearly two weeks here in Nijmegen, we were finally able to do some grocery shopping today. It is sad to say, but prior to today we were mostly living off the few packs of Ramen Farrell brought, the free meals incorporated into our orientation program, and the three loaves of bread that I took (as they were going to be thrown away) from the program this past weekend, which was a lot of fun.

All, or I guess I should say most, of the international students headed out on a weekend trip to Putten, a lovely village in the Dutch countryside. There were a lot of activities planned, but for the most part everyone just relaxed and worked on making new friends. Oh, and we stayed on a working farm, which made it even more interesting – Farrell has several pictures of the goats, I think, and all should be posted fairly soon.

We arrived back in Nijmegen around noon on Sunday, at which point I headed straight back for a nap (as we all did), a four-hour nap to be precise, followed by a solid hour of unpacking, which is happily completed. Today, was a fun day: we met some friends at noon and went downtown to do some shopping. I finally introduced Farrell to my favorite Dutch food “friets speciaal”, which are fries with mayonnaise, curry ketchup, and onions. True, it sounds like it should be gross, but it is really fantastic. The mayonnaise here is remarkably different and is really more of a sauce (in texture and taste) than the globby, fatty mess that we have back home, not to say that it is not good on some things... Anyway, we are now mostly settled in.

Tonight there is another dinner that has been organized (and paid for), and then all that remains in the way of orientation is a packed day tomorrow, and a few meetings for our individual colleges on Thursday. After all that, we have some time off to make final preparations before school starts on Monday or Tuesday. Hopefully, during that time, our classes will be approved, we will be issued student IDs, allowing us to get bank accounts, cell phones, and all those other necessary items. Ultimately though, all is well!

Until Next Time,
Jessica