Returning from America

After almost a month in the States we had to return to the Netherlands so that Gearoid could get back to work and I could look for a job with my shiny new residence/work permit. It was bittersweet to leave- bitter for me and sweet for Gearoid.

In preparation for our departure we made a list of essential things we had to have and made numerous trips to Wal-Mart, Old Navy, Target, Kohls, and other American consumer hot spots. Yes, we could get most of what we bought in the Netherlands but shopping in the States is cheaper and more familiar. Both of us needed some new pants due to our bikes wearing strange horizontal shaped holes in our favorite pairs. In the 6 months that I have lived in the Netherlands, I have not bought any clothing for myself due to the scariness of European sizes. I already have a complex about my American size but to buy clothing in which the sizes begin in the high 30s/low 40s caused too much emotional distress. In addition to pants, I threw in some new shirts for myself and we both got some new workout gear and shoes.

I also loaded up on deodorant, razors, shampoo, dental floss and other “essential” items. I like the brands I’m used to but made a promise to myself that after these items are finished I will adapt and discover Dutch brands that I enjoy. The pile of books I brought back with us was absolutely essential, I told myself and Gearoid because of how expensive English books are in the Netherlands (Disclaimer: I have an extensive home library and the actual library in town has an English section). 

"necessary" books

assortment of "essential" toiletries

The purchase of multiple French’s yellow mustard bottles had my brother and his friend questioning if the Netherlands even had mustard. Of course there is mustard there, I told them. I just prefer French’s. Surprisingly, the only other food product we brought back with us was a couple of packages of Reeses. By the time we made it to the grocery portion of Wal-Mart for our final hurrah, I was over shopping, tired, not hungry and didn’t think twice of forgoing all of food products I miss from the States when I’m in the Netherlands. There was also the problem of our limited suitcase space and the growing pile of purchases. Luckily for me, Gearoid is an excellent and efficient packer and everything made it into the limited luggage.

Admittedly, I was sad to leave. The goodbyes were difficult without catching Gearoid trying to suppress his giddiness of returning to his European routines. At one point, I asked him to be less obvious in his excitement because I was genuinely sad. He asked why past the obvious reasons of leaving our friends and family. I couldn’t explain it more than just say it was difficult to leave the comforts and familiarity of my country. However, the truth is that despite my devotion to America, I don’t want to live there right now. The economy is a mess, jobs are non-existent, and after seeing how well the Netherlands takes care of people with benefits, health care, education, etc, it makes sense for me to take advantage of this opportunity to live in Europe. Neither country is without its faults, but having a choice, right now I sadly choose Europe.

I don’t want to give the impression that I’m choosing the lesser of two evils. I have it good and I’m fully aware of that. I just now realize how much I fully appreciate being an American.

The goodbyes were sad and I was slightly depressed. It didn’t help that flying standby on the return leg of our trip was a lot bumpier than when I came to America. We arrived at Charleston airport before 10 for our 11:40AM flight. We were supposed to fly to Atlanta and then catch a 3:10 flight to Amsterdam.  We watched flight after flight leave without us. At 1:55PM we were told there was only one seat. I urged Gearoid to take it because he had work on Monday. He urged me to take it because in his exact words, “as soon as I leave you’re going to call your mom and leave the airport.” A valid fear but I promised him I would behave like an adult and wait for a potential flight. Worried about me defecting to my own country, Gearoid reluctantly flew first class to Atlanta while I stayed in Charleston. At approximately 3:15 PM, drama ensued. My Delta buddies suggested I try to leave on Sunday instead but the gate agent told me I had a seat on the 3:30PM flight. My choices were to hang out with my mom another night eating cookies and watching Twilight movies or fly to Atlanta and maybe get at seat on the same flight as Gearoid to Amsterdam at 5:30PM. What was I to do?

I said another goodbye to my mom via text and headed to Atlanta. Despite the short time frame, being on the other side of the airport, and an extremely rude and dismissive gate agent, Gearoid and I experienced a standby miracle by making the flight and enjoying first class all the way to Amsterdam. Unfortunately our bags decided to fly on Sunday but nevertheless, we made it back.

We arrived to our house and were welcomed by the smell of a cucumber that had been left in the fridge. We spent the day battling jet lag (Gearoid successfully and me not so much). Sad, tired but not tired, and hoping my French’s made it in my missing luggage, I laid in bed and tried unsuccessfully to sleep (my body screamed it’s only 7PM!). Gearoid, still afraid I might defect slept holding my hand and anchoring my feet with his leg. I awoke the next day at an unrespectable time to a text that said my luggage had arrived. Risking my defection once again, Gearoid had me return to the airport (almost 2 hours away) to retrieve the bags and only breathed properly when I texted that I had the bags and was on my way back to Nijmegen. He spent the rest of the night smiling more than I had seen during our trip to the States at being back in Europe and me having not bought a last minute return ticket to the States while retrieving my already packed luggage.

Surprisingly, I am happy to be back in the Netherlands. The sun is out and I got to enjoy the beautiful scenery with my 4 hour train ride back and forth from the airport. I had my taste of America and although I miss my country and my people, I am happy once again to enjoy my Dutch adventure. 

Coming to America

I never realized how much I loved my country until I had been away for so long. Tears literally sprang to my eyes when I found out that there was even a possibility of coming home. Before leaving the Netherlands, I shared with a friend how much I missed driving my car and Wal-Mart- both things that irritated me when I lived in the States. The vastness of the country beckoned me. English everywhere and the occasional Spanish excited me.  Promises of free refills and cups filled to the rim with ice refreshed me. Ah, America.

The adventure to return home started significantly on July 4^th. I said goodbye to my last awkward Dutch experience (after buying some breakfast at the store at the train station I answered “no thanks, I don’t need a bag” in response to the clerk telling me to have a nice day. I totally deserved the “you’re an idiot look” she gave me) and travelled to the airport. I was flying on a Delta buddy pass which meant flying standby. Despite the uncertainty of even getting on a plane, I ended up having a really smooth experience, in first class nonetheless. For those of you haven’t flown first class internationally, I recommend that you don’t do so unless you can afford to do it forever. It was such a luxurious experience that returning to coach is going to be near impossible.

23 hours of cumulative travel later I arrived in Charleston, SC just in time to enjoy some fireworks celebrating my return- I mean America’s birthday. Despite my earlier desires to experience America, I fell in love with a book and lying in the sun. I was so addicted to this book that my dad called to see if I was in the country and ask why I hadn’t called. (“Sorry, you know how I get with a good book.”) 500 pages later and the beginnings of a sunburn on my face, found me in my Honda Fit driving to Wal-Mart and cursing out bad drivers just like the good ole days. The enormousness of Wal-Mart totally overwhelmed me after 6 months of tiny elbow bumping stores. Two and a half hours later, I left with 3 bags of missed toiletries, veggie bacon, and kraft mac’n cheese, having spent way more time and money than intended. It was a true Wal-Mart experience.

After 2 days of reading, sun burning, and a Wal-Mart coma, I hopped in my car for a road trip to Knoxville, TN. I spent a long weekend there with good friends and their new babies and of course attended the beautiful and classy wedding of the friends who got us a Delta buddy pass (unfortunately the pizza stone I got her, does not convey even a fraction of my gratitude for getting me home). Gearoid met me in Knoxville with his own buddy pass and between wedding activities we drove the car, shopped, and caught up on love affairs of American food (blue berry pancakes! Arnold Palmers-the drink!).

Wedding reception

After Knoxville, we had 3 weeks of greatness with family and friends in Charleston, Orlando, Vero, and Coral Springs. We wholly enjoyed seeing everyone we could and were sorry for those we couldn’t see mostly due to time constraints and the hugeness of America. Between family visits, we saw many movies (i.e. Harry Potter!Crazy, Stupid, Love! Horrible Bosses!), caught up on food and drink (i.e. Starbucks! Mexican food! Margaritas! Thai Food! Chili’s!), cooled off in the ocean and my dad’s pool, and were surrounded with English (the language not the people). I baked with an oven (lasagna! Spanakopita! Cookies!) and enjoyed the giant portions at restaurants. I thoroughly enjoyed getting saturated in AC for a few hours before thawing out in the intense 90 degree heat. The giantness of parking lots, intersections, and stores astounded me. None of this was new after over 20 years of living in the States. However, the familiarity was refreshing.

Giant chimichanga with delicious margarita

My homemade veggie lasagna

Gearoid, however, had a different experience. My joy met his impatience and annoyance for all things American. Things he thought he missed about the States, were forgotten after sweating from the short walk from the house to the car or the lack of “real” news on news programs. 6 months in the Netherlands has returned Gearoid to his roots- he is truly European. We agreed to disagree on the wonderfulness of my home country.

All good things must come to an end though and after almost a month of America we had to head back to Europe so Gearoid could work and I could find work. The day before we left, we went to the theater to see one more movie. We walked in the cool lobby after the brief but intensely hot walk from the parking lot and I took a deep breath. The air was saturated with the buttery aroma of popcorn. Gearoid commented that it smelled good. My response without thinking was, “It smells like America.” 

Good times with my brother Josh

It all comes to an end

Summer is here and in full swing. Many of the projects, classes, etc I have been working on the past 6 months have ended and much of the country shuts down as people use some of their abundant vacation time. Gearoid is technically still working but won’t have to teach until September. There are no Dutch classes offered during the summer putting my tentative grasp on the language at risk.

1)      Socks- I tapped out at knitting 7 pairs of socks and have already distributed my prolific efforts. My hands could no longer hold the needles without a very scary potential of early arthritic ache. I was happy to finish though and the presence of Angry Birds on my phone keeps my hands busy.

My Florida Parents modelling their cozy new socks.

1)      Dutch Lessons- Dutch lessons are over for the year. I took 4 tests (reading, writing, listening, and speaking) to assess my knowledge of the language and did pretty well. My lowest score was in listening but honestly I would have the same difficulties in an English language assessment test. I am happy to report that I have exceeded level one and am now considered in a level 2. I have no idea how many levels there are but I’m happy to have passed the lowest level. To celebrate our success at not dropping out of the class (there have been several casualties), my fellow students and I took our teacher Carla out to eat at a boat restaurant that served Brazilian food. Gearoid and I ate our strange pancake wrapped vegetables while my omnivore classmates ate chunks of meat off of dangerous looking skewers. The food left much to be desired but we were in good company and my side of the table was the farthest from my teacher so we whispered in English.

Dangerous meat skewer.

Weird pancake wrapped vegetable burrito like thing.

1)      English with Asian Ladies- My ladies treated me to a Japanese All-you-can-eat lunch as a thank you for volunteering my time to speak English with them. It was an over 3 hour lunch and my English was pretty strained at the end of it but I enjoyed myself.  It was pretty amusing the way the all-you-can-eat restaurant differed from American versions. You only had 2.5 hours to order the food. You could only order 5 items at a time up to 5 times (so total you could only eat 25 items). If you didn’t eat something, you had to pay extra for it and wouldn’t be allowed to order anything else. All these rules to eat lunch! It was good food and I couldn’t order anything after the 4^th round. In fact, the Asian ladies had to eat my 4^th round so we didn’t have to pay extra. Hopefully, when we meet up again in August we’ll have more topics of conversation. 

"All you can eat"

1)      International Refugee Day- I helped plan this day of fun at the local refugee center and eventually just became in charge of the children’s activities. My plans for outdoor relay races were literally rained out and the children had more fun popping the balloons for the races rather than racing. At one point I just dumped the balloons on the floor and 6 seconds later the popping fun was over. My afternoon art table ended up being more successful. I don’t blame the kids for not being interested in my activities when there were awesome drum groups, football games in the rain, henna and make up, and belly dancing going on. Despite the rain and the small space, it ended up being a nice event. However, there seemed to be more Dutch volunteers than refugees present.

1)      Bike Lessons- We ended the bike lessons with a small reception of juice, grapes, cookies, and certificates. Almost all of the ladies have to come back in the Fall to finish the lessons. Some of the ladies still had to master indicating with their hands and others needed to learn to break without using a bush as a stopping device. However, with only one lady refusing to have both feet on the pedals, I think we were pretty successful.

So what was I going to do with my summer? I thought about going to the volunteer center again to see if there were any summer projects I could help with.  I got a library card so I could borrow Dutch books and keep up with my language. I had a standing appointment with my language buddy to practice speaking once a week. Gearoid and I were also planning a long camping trip that involved the northern Netherlands, Norway, Denmark, and Sweden. Instead we came back to America.

                A friend getting married offered us some Delta Buddy Passes so we could make her wedding as well as visit family. It was too good of a deal to pass up so we exchanged a sleepy summer in the Netherlands for busy America.