My Year of Peanut Butter: June 2011

Today I said goodbye two the first two of my good friends in Maastricht to leave – forever. The mass exodus of Maas has begun. One by one, over the next 6 weeks or so, we’ll drop like flies, at least until I head home in 39 days. We all knew this time was coming, but it comes with mixed feelings now. There’s not a single one of us I’m sure who isn’t excited for some reason or other to be heading home soon (some are looking forward to seeing boyfriends or girlfriends [maybe even Mum and Dad!], visiting a favourite restaurant again, hearing TV ads in English once more or regaining easy access to vegemite). But I’d wager there’s also a part of all of us that kind of wishes we could stay here forever (our friends and family could all move here right… we could import Vegemite right?). Not just physically (because the weather would eventually drive me mad) but in some metaphysical way I’m sure most of us have at least one moment from our time in Maastricht that we could “be in” forever. Some of mine may be soaking up the sun on my roommate’s balcony and finally feeling “at home” here, watching snow fall for the first time outside a classroom window or racing along in a posse of fietsers (cyclists) to a party in town. Of course these moments are different for all of us, but I’m sure a lot of them are also shared memories.

In the coming weeks people will leave, almost every day, and the guesthouse will begin to empty again. In a strange way, for those of us here for the past year, this place is starting to revert back to how it was when we first arrived. The weather is getting back to those late August days, there are just as many bugs in the air and flowers in the ground, there’s people moving in and out of the guesthouse and every last experience of something reminds us of the first time … but instead of buying bikes and toasters and bed pillows everyone is trying to get rid of them. Instead of “hi, my name is … and I’m from… where are you from?… what room are you in?” the talk around the guesthouse is now “how do you think I can get all my crap home?”, “who wants my flour when I leave?”, “where do you fly out from?” and of course “what day do you go?”.

Every day I have a little panic attack about something I still haven’t done here – quintessentially Maastricht things that I’ve always said I would do but have put off in favour of some buitenland (or other land) adventure because Maastricht would “always be here”. But now, like sands through the hourglass… Maastricht’s days are numbered and there’s still so much more to be discovered. Just tonight we walked past two bars that looked really cool and I’d never either seen or thought about going to before. Every time I cycle past the vrijtof square in the centre of town I’m reminded that I must climb to the top of that church and see the view everyone is talking about. It’s similar with people. Despite being in the same guesthouse for the whole year (or even half a year), there are plenty of people I’m only just starting to get to know better. And now of course I don’t want them to go!

And when everyone is gone (and they all pretty much will be by the time I’m packing my bags) this place will literally feel empty. For at least a couple of weeks right at the end of my stay there will only be one or two friends left with whom to do all these things still on my Maastricht bucket list. I fear it will be a tad lonely … especially as the homesickness increases. Tonight, some of us were debating the merits or otherwise of going early vs being the last one standing. Those who go early might feel like they’re missing out, or a pang of jealousy or nostalgia at hearing what we’re still getting up to over here, but those of us who go last have to go through so many goodbyes and the unsettling feeling that something is missing. We had a goodbye celebration for one friend tonight, but by the time I leave it's looking like an intimate dinner for just two as Nakita and I say au revoir before leaving on the same day.

For me, in the meantime, I spend a little more time each day thinking about home as it gets closer and closer. Sometimes I imagine what it will be like to emerge at the airport, looking like the black “luggage turtle” who left last year, into the no doubt cold Adelaide morning and be “home”. Sometimes I wonder if I’ll bring my children to Maastricht one day, like how my parents showed me where they lived in their 20s in London. Other times I dream about the day I can chuck out all the crap in my flat here, pull down all the photos, pack up all the clothes, strip that God awful mattress/block of foam and jump on the first train to Amsterdam airport! However, I imagine it will be a weird sensation, to say the least, when all that is done and I look at my flat and it appears just as I found it – four white walls, a bare bed and a hotch-potch assortment of IKEA furniture.

When I left Adelaide for this big scary adventure my biggest fear actually was not missing home, the language barrier or losing my passport – it was worrying I wouldn’t make good friends. Reliable friends. Real friends. Thankfully, as usual, I worried for nothing. While no-one can replace the people in my life back home, I was lucky enough to meet a group of people here who have made it just that little bit less horrendous to be away from everyone else. And as skype/facebook/TNT post have helped maintain the relationships on hold back home, when they resume, I have no doubt we Maastricht Alumni will put those methods of communication to use in reverse. From long-distance relationships to Australia to ‘doing long-distance’ with friends scattered all over the world. (And of course, knowing I always have a bed for the night in Scotland, Canada and Sydney at the very least :P)

This post has clearly been my most “mushy” so far – and this blog is not intended as a personal diary – but I wanted to record (and share) these thoughts because I believe they are a crucial part of the “exchange experience”. Let's see how things pan out over the next 38 days...

Last post I complained about the unpredictable weather.... and it has continued. At the moment the sun and rain seem to alternate one day on, one day off! Nonetheless, on the sunny days, I've taken to exploring our surroundings. Each day I'm reminded of how little time I have left here, relatively speaking (the first of my year-long friends leaves in a week and then they drop like flies about once a week from there until in 6 weeks I'll be gone myself! - last (wo)man standing!). So, I'm trying to make the most of the sunny weather and explore parts of our neighbourhood previously unaccessible due to snow!

It really is a wonderful little part of the world we live in here; a neighbourhood of cute rows of identitcal little houses with manicured front gardens, parks and playgrounds dotted in amongst big conrete 70s looking apartment blocks (the Dutch are particularly good at creating useable open space but particularly bad at making mass housing look good), sprinklings of shops (or winkels in dutch - love that word!) and then BANG ... cow fields! it's so weird, you walk up the street and then at the end it might open up into a corn field, or a horse in someone's front yard, or cows just chilling in a paddock by the river. The dog walking continues as people traipse out into fields with their dogs... and everywhere you go you can see either a church spire or a wind turbine on the horizon. It really is a mix of suburbia and farm life in such a small area. It's a wonderful feeling to have so much open space around but also be so close to the cosmopolitan centre of town.

While cycling is definitely the preferred mode of transport here there is something nice about walking, which we tend to forget as we hurtle off on two wheels to uni most days. Being able to tromp through a field or find a little dirt path behind some Belgian houses that opens into an expanse of daisies... it's very easy to explore but almost impossible to get lost! The only downside... NO ONE picks up their dog poop here! so its EVERYWHERE :(

Some of the more memorable things I've seen/experieced on recent walks include being asked what country we were in (standing on the Dutch side of a river that divides Maastricht from Belgium) - never had that one before, the surprise of coming round a corner and being confronted with a rolling field ending in a majestic group of four huge white wind turbines (I honestly think they're quite graceful, just spinning round and round, but never frantically, just big and slow and quiet), seeing a mother cow and calf in a field I found down a little farmers lane ... and generally, the fact that there are flowers all around, be it poppies, little daisies or rose bushes :)

I guess this is bit of an effort to explain to those of you back home who are interested,what it's like to live in Maastricht. So, to help paint a better picture... here are some pictures :P