Back 2 skool
The time has finally come around to start my studies in Enschede (see Google Maps). Of course, things were bound to start with a wee tiny bit of a fuck-up; in this case it was that I needed to bring my bike with me for a class trip around the town (not to be confused with a Class A trip), and only discovered during the evening before I intended to travel that you can’t take your bike on the train during peak times. Although the university were able to organise accommodation, the office was closed by this point and I needed to be there by 10am the next morning (it’s a 2 hour train journey). So, here were the options, in decreasing order of sensibleness;
- Go the next morning without bike and beg/steal/buy one when I arrived.
- Leave after peak time in the morning and just be late.
- Go tonight with the bike and find a room in a hotel etc.
- Go tonight and take a tent, find a place in the middle of nowhere and camp. Hope that there are no bulls/angry farmers/crazed rapists about.
Which one did I go for? You know me well enough by now, folks. Tent it was.
Everything went more or less according to plan, actually, except for the fact that I was feeling like shit having been ill for the last few days, and to top it off I had ended up with an eye infection. I only have contact lenses at the moment, no glasses, so the only option to avoid constant agony was to have just one contact lens in. I am really quite short-sighted, and so it was in a state of semi-blindness that I reached Enschede just after 1am on Wednesday and began cycling out of town in search of the wilderness. To avoid too much hassle in the morning I picked a spot not far from the university, and after quite a lot of struggling about (of course I had forgotten the torch) I managed to get the tent up and tried to get some sleep.
This was easier said than done, since due to not being able to see every moving shape in the forest looked like something out of Sleepy Hollow and every twig had me wide awake and staring at every nothingness in the dark. Finally got to sleep, however, but did shit it a little bit when I awoke to see a huge bloody digger coming towards my tent!
It was only the international students who were starting this week, and our introduction was thankfully quite easy on the brain in the form of a tour by bicycle of the town and a visit to some museums and galleries before a bit of Indonesian (I think) food and a short film.
Next day consisted of a trip to Rotterdam, which to my shame I had never previously visited. Very enjoyable visit to the Museum Boijmans van Beuningen, complete with huge sculpture of Father Christmas/dwarf/whatever holding a huge dildo/butt-plug/whatever.
Here he is again, from behind.
After this we enjoyed some delicious Surinamese takeaway atop some multicoloured metal turds. The folks in this photo are the other international students (Polish, Georgian, French, Swiss, South Korean and Canadian – quite a mix).
Finally, visited a few galleries in Witte de Withstraat; it’s kind of the centre of the art scene in Rotterdam (or so it appears). A nice touch is the temporary covering of the whole street in pink spots.
Well, that was enough culture for me for one day, and so back it was to Amsterdam – but not before getting a lecture from some NS (Dutch Railways) wanker about trying to take my bike on the train before 6pm – yep, that damn peak hours rule again. Fuckers.
