My friends Kim and Martijn are in Nijmegen, Netherlands, along with their daughter Myca. You may recall, Myca was my illegal immigrant baby-sitting charge when I was unemployed in Cali for a few months. I had Myca when she was 10-14 weeks old a few times a week. She is MUCH bigger now! We had a fun day at the park my last day there, feeding the ducks and playing on the slides:
At the start of my trip, Kim met me at the station then we left Myca with Martijn and she showed me a bit of the city. I got to try out the local raw fish delicacy, and then we sat outside at a beer garden and did a tasting of the local brews.
Had some good chats. She's finding it socially different being at the uni in Nijmegen than it was back in California. Now that she's a Prof (or essentially a prof), she can't really just hang out with the PhD students and post-docs. The other profs and staff have their own families and friends and lives, and their extended family is all back on the west of the country. So they spend a lot of time traveling on weekends, and feel a bit isolated in Nijmegen still. It takes time. It's how I felt at first in California, before I met Carolina, and then all the Stanford people. So she'll figure it out, but she was also very glad to see me, and that was nice.
Other fun things we did: 25 km hike on Sunday. Watching some WWII movie in the evening (it was the "Day to Honour the War Dead"), and Monday had a number of parties scheduled since it was Liberation Day - the day they got rid of the Nazis after WWII. I hadn't thought of having a big party, with bands and festivities, to mark the end of a war before, but I guess it does make sense. If you're country had been over-run by Nazis for years, you'd be pretty happy when they were gotten rid of, and celebrations would indeed be in order. I'm glad to live in Canada.
So it was an excellent trip to visit Kim and Martijn and Myca. Next was a quick stop in Aachen again, before.... EuroVision!
No comments:
Post a Comment