Student Special on Erasmus: An Exchange For The Better?

Last week, I did something that I neverthought I would get to do: I left Ireland. I travelled abroad for the first time in my life.

I know this makes me sound naïve, and young, and probably a little bit stupid. That’s okay. Because I am, naive, and young, and almost definitely a little bit stupid. But that really is okay. I’m working on all three of these things. One baby step of experience at a time.

I’m sitting here by my window, 1,288.5 km away from my dog and my mum and our house and our hideous red front door, that’s chipping paint and mould. Apparently, there’s an hour time-difference between the Netherlands and Waterford city. I found that out last week after being an hour early to every university appointment I tried to make. Or maybe it was late. I am too confused to remember.

Back home, it’s about 5pm. My mum’s probably making dinner. It’s probably pasta. She’s probably yelling at the dog for pooing on the carpet, and the cat is probably sleeping on the couch, and the television is almost definitely on. My mum is almost definitely not actually watching it, but she likes background noise. Garlic is sizzling on a pan, my dog is slinking behind the couch in shame, and the doors are open, always, letting in air and light, even when it’s too cold.

Novelist Gustave Flaubert once said that “Travel makes one modest, you see what a tiny place you occupy in the world.” Maybe I’m not experienced enough yet to have a valid opinion on this; as you know, I acknowledge and have made peace with my own naivety. But what I do know is that when I think about my dog on a couch 1,288.5km away from where I am sitting, I feel like the tiniest being in the whole world.

GETTING CHEESED OFF

Things feel different here. Bigger. I mean bigger quite literally. The apartments are higher, the city is wider, and everyone is twice my height. Did you know the average height of an adult man in the Netherlands is officially is 182.5cm? Which is just a little under six foot. Because I do. I know it all too well, as someone standing at an optimistic 5’4 at the best of times. Maybe this isn’t the way in which Gustave intended this sentiment to be applied, but by God, it feels correct in a very literal sense.

The city is big. In Waterford, you can throw a stone out the window and it will inevitably end up hitting someone you have either shifted or someone you are distantly related to. Here though, it’s miles and miles of strangers speaking a tongue that I do not understand.

Which is entirely my own fault. I had a year to attempt to learn Dutch, but for some reason it didn’t seem like too urgent an issue until I reached my first Lidl in Groningen and realised I couldn’t tell which cheese was cheddar without Google translate. Fun fact: cheddar isn’t very popular here. Mozarella, brie, camembert, eat your heart out, but cheddar? For some reason, cheddar isn’t popular in the Netherlands. I don’t know how I’m going to survive. Gouda seems weirdly loved though. I say weirdly, but I mean, it is pretty good-a.

Sorry, I’m sad and miss cheddar. I’ll let myself out.

If it weren’t for the fact that nine out of ten people in this country speak fluent English, I would have quite literally died by now. Come to think of it, most people here speak better English than myself, while I am struggling to learn the words for ‘cheese’ and ‘thank you’ in Dutch. These are the most essential words any travelling student will need.

The thing about home is that even when you’re somewhere new, somewhere you haven’t been before, an area that you don’t really know that well, you probably actually do know it. Or at least, you have a general sense of it, because two minutes later you will walk down a street and recognise a Centra that you were in before, or a part of a street that you know connects to another street that will bring you somewhere familiar, or the outline of a field in the distance that you vaguely recognise because you’re fairly certain your aunty lives in an estate just behind it. Even when you’re somewhere new at home, you’re still home. Nothing there will stay very new for very long.

NOT SPEAKING THE LANGUAGE

Here though? Here, everything is new. Everything is fresh, and unexplored, and unfamiliar. Maybe this might sound exciting. In a lot of ways, it is. The kind of excitement you feel when looking at a crisp, white sheet of paper with your pen in hand, or when you hold your foot above a pristine blanket of snow. That moment when everything is still so untouched, when everything is still so full of potential; yeah, that’s a pretty beautiful thing.

But it’s also miles and miles of streets that I haven’t learned the names of. It’s the estates that I end up in, half-an-hour away from my apartment, because all the estates here look identical. It’s sitting at a bus stop for half-an-hour only to get the wrong bus home; and ending up somewhere in the middle of the Dutch countryside, trying not to scream in the face of an onlooking cow because you’re not sure if you’re even in Groningen anymore.

It’s being alone in the dark at 3am on a Friday night, in a part of the city that you don’t recognise, a little drunk and breathing a little hard because your phone is dead and you don’t know where you are and it’s just started raining and you thought you were smart enough to walk home alone but it turns out that you’re not.

Yeah, new is exciting, but new is also so very, very frightening. I don’t think my home is small. I mean, I know it is in a literal sense. But it’s big to me. It’s huge and important and the place that matters most in the world. When I was there, it felt smaller, and I wanted to get as far away as possible. But now that I’m away? Now, I feel like the smallest person in this too big city full of tall people and taller buildings. It was never home that was small. It was just me.

But, maybe it’s okay to realise you’re small. Realise you’re naïve. Realise you’re not as smart or big or bold as you thought you were. Maybe it’s okay to be 20 years old in a city, not speaking the language, not understanding the people, and not knowing the street names. Maybe it’s okay to be too small in a too big place.

After all, I have time to grow.
• Rose Keating was third-level winner in Write Here, Write Now 2018. Write Here, Write Now is a Hot Press initiative, in association with Creative Ireland, and supported by Canon and PayPal.