December Highlights

The end of my time abroad was a bit hectic, so I fell behind in writing blogs weekly. In this blog, I recap some of the best things I got to do during my last month in Amsterdam.

One day was extremely foggy, and when I left a class that cold evening, I was thrilled to run around with my camera. I hadn’t been excited to take photos for some time since I was having a mental creative block, but being from such a dry climate, a foggy night was magical to me. Light displays such as the blue bridge had just been put up for the Amsterdam Light festival so the streets felt extra Christmassy. 

I took over the NAU’s official Instagram story for a day and answered tons of questions about studying abroad. I had been taking photos and videos about living abroad for months, so I had plenty of content to share. I loved getting to share my experiences on such a large platform (they have 70K followers) since this was such an important part of my life. 

I got to watch the USA vs The Netherlands World Cup game from a bar in Amsterdam. Every bar in the city was standing room only and everyone was wearing orange head-to-toe – the national color. It was fun to experience the World Cup in a European country because football (soccer) is a much bigger deal there than in the US. The ironic part was how I ended up in a corner of the bar full of very stereotypical loud Americans who were chanting for the US. Despite their pride, the Netherlands obviously won.

I got to learn a lot about Christmas traditions in the Netherlands during my time there. The Netherlands have Sinterklaas rather than Santa Claus, but the Dutch are very adamant about how they are completely different people. Sinterklaas lives in Spain for most of the year and has an assistant named Black Pete. There have been debates about how people dress up as Black Pete in blackface and traditions have been altered in recent years to be more PC. Sinterklaas also checks to see if the children have been naughty or nice, but instead of receiving coal, naughty children are taken back to Spain in Black Pete’s bag. There is a celebration when Sinterklaas arrives on a steamboat from Spain in November and there is a large parade after the boat docks. 

December 5th is considered Sinterklaas day where chocolate letters are given as gifts and children leave a shoe outside their door overnight for Sinterklaas to fill with gifts. I went to an international student event with a few friends on this day to experience a few of the traditions. Some of these traditions included writing poems and eating kruidnoten and pepernoten which are gingerbread-type, bite-size cookies. We were also given chocolate letters in class!

After spending 10 weeks going to hip-hop class every Saturday, I had a final performance with the beginner and intermediate classes combined! My entire friend group came to support me which was so considerate of them. I felt incredibly lucky. We did two dances and then watched a few other classes from CREA perform. Afterward, my friends and I went and played pool at the PoolBar, one of our favorite places in the city. This was the last time we all hung out together as a full group.

I lived in the Netherlands for 4 months before I finally went to see some windmills. It was cold and foggy so I couldn’t see them very well, but regardless, I was just happy to finally be there. The windmills were in a place called Zaanse Schans which was just a 15 minute train ride north of Amsterdam. We also stopped at Zaandam – a neighborhood known for its unique, green architecture and quirky, stacked-house hotel. I went with my friends Viola and Finn from Germany and Viola’s friend, Georgie, from Australia. We got to go inside an old paint windmill and climb to the top, then we went to a pancake restaurant that felt like a grandma’s house and played cards while drinking hot chocolate because it was too cold to explore outside. 

One thing that was on the Amsterdam bucket list for me and all of my friends was to go to a jazz bar. We found one called Jazz Cafe Alto not far from Museumplein and made it a point to go together before our time abroad was up. We got there early to make sure we got a table up front and listened to the band for a few hours. Afterward, we all went back to our apartment building, ordered pizza, and I taught them my favorite card game called Egyptian Rats. The next day I saw many of them in the common room practicing the game so they could beat me the next time we decided to play (they never did). 

I discovered that my friend Viola had never been to an arcade before and there was one less than 5 minutes from our apartment building so we randomly went one night. I taught her how to play air hockey, skeeball, and introduced her to classic arcade things like the basketball stuff, racing games, and the people who are gods on the dance dance revolution machines. We collected a bunch of the tickets and picked out tacky prizes, as you do at an arcade. It was entertaining to introduce something so common to me to someone who found it so fascinating. 

Towards the very end of my time in Amsterdam, I went to a big Christmas fair called Het Amsterdamse Winterparadijs with some friends. We rode lots of rides which were all mostly ice related and went ice skating. All of the rides were included in the price so we rode some multiple times. It was my last day with Silje which was really sad because she had become one of my closest friends here. My good friend from NAU, Ell, arrived in Amsterdam that evening to spend the next week with me and we met her at the train station near my apartment. Silje had to say goodbye to everyone and we stood in the hallway outside of another friend’s doorway in our apartment for a long time, delaying the inevitable.