Goodbye

I say goodbye to my Orionis friends and the Winkle team before I welcome my family to Amsterdam.
This Wednesday I participated in my last 'borrel' (weekly party). It was a good night, although it began in a strange way. Julian and I went to visit Bas, while most of the Jaarclub (a temporary group for first year members) had dinner with the Vloot Dek (a group that you can stay with throughout your membership of Orionis). We met at his place and the only thing missing was Bas himself. Julian and I stayed there and had a nice chat with some of his roommates, but nobody knew where Bas was. In the end we simply left to go to the borrel. We later learned that he had fallen asleep in his room and slept for three hours, through the noise of his phone ringing, the doorbell and even knocking on his door.
Anyway we all met up at the borrel and had a great time there. To me it was a special night, because I was saying goodbye to everyone, but it was also just a good party. I promised a lot of people to come back in the spring and I won't forget that. The trip is not that long and I'd like to see them all again.
Thursday I had a small goodbye party at the office. My internship would end the next day, but the office is always quiet on Fridays, so we chose to say goodbye Thursday instead. Before the party I had a final thing to do for work. I presented my word clustering macro to the team. I have improved it quite a lot since the last time I spoke of it and I now consider it my best Excel macro so far. It's quite a useful sorting algorithm for sentences that compares the contents of all responses and reorganizes them into groups based on similarity. It was well received by the Winkle employees, so I was happy to see my final project turn out a success.
At the party I served herring on homemade rye bread with curry salad. I didn't really expect them to like it, but I wanted to show a danish traditional dish. To my surprise they seemed to like it and it was all eaten, although I think the bread was way below the standards we are used to here. It was my third attempt at making a rye bread, but I had a lot of trouble finding the right ingredients, getting the sour doe correct and also baking it. Anyway, there were also lots of other snacks and drinks, so we celebrated my leave in style. To my surprise they had a lot of presents for me, including a Genever, chocolate, and a tile (I perplexed at the sight of that one: what would I need a tile for? but I have since learned that it has a use in the kitchen)
On Friday I handed in my keys and computer at Winkle. I had dinner with Boris before welcoming my family to the hotel at half past ten. It was a happy family reunion and they were in a good mood despite the long travel (8 hours by car). We did some catching up over a beer at the hotel bar.
The next day we walked around in Amsterdam as tourists and experienced a lot of things including: a Swarte Piet demonstration on Dam Square, the small museum Lord in the Attic and shopping in Jordaan. All of this (except the shopping) happened to shape an overall theme of the visit together with the event I had planned for Sunday. It was the arrival of Sint Nikolaas in Amsterdam. This event is anticipated by many children, who wait for the famous giver of gifts to arrive from Madrid by steamboat with his black helper (slave) Swarte Piet.

It was fun to see the boat arrive and the 600 Swarte Piets were very entertaining. I especially liked the ones who danced 'Gangnam Style'. All the little children watching were in awe and their parents enjoyed it just as much. The Amstel river was full of ships. The steamboat of Sint Nicolaas was surrounded by police in one layer. Around it and ahead of it were a lot of boats with Swarte Piets and in an outer ring and trailing after the convoy were other boats filled with parents and their children, who wanted to be as close as you can get to the show. On the shore there were thousands of bystanders who had come to watch the show and Swarte Piets on roller skates. They came ahead of the steamboat to make sure it was safe to open the bridges and as a little taste of what was to come. From our position on a bridge we watched the show unfold in front of an excited crowd. It was quite spectacular and I felt like I understood why it is so important for the Dutch to keep this tradition even if it seems racist. The tradition will probably change over the next few years though, as public protests against the oppressive symbol of Swarte Piet gain in strength.
On our way back from to Denmark we took a small detour to cross the dike that keeps the Ijzelmeer separate from the north sea. We had our lunch there, before proceeding to drive for seven hours and arrive late in Aarhus.
This concludes my travelogue on my stay in Amsterdam. I hope you liked it. If you want to read more I can recommend the blog of my friend Pernille at http://whiteriverlife.com/. It is an honest self portrait by one of my friends from the university, sprinkled with good advice for how you ought to do stuff/get a job (oh so serious!). Happy reading.
Goodbye and thank you for following!