The adventures of Trent

First email home from the Netherlands

G'day all,

what's doing? Just to start, check out this website, its got a few photos from a reception weekend that I went to in Nijmegen a couple of weeks ago. http://www.andrewdeveaux.com/red.php. Check out this guys commentary, he's a trainee from Canada, who i'm going to Belgium with this weekend.

Ok so i've been here in Utrecht, the Netherlands for almost 7 weeks now and its rocking big style. My official role is Congress Committee Vice President Finance of AIESECs International Presidents Meeting 2006. for information about the conference check out http://www.ipm2006.org/ as it explains exactly what I'm doing.

so what have I done so far? Well as soon as i arrived we went to a National conference down south of the country like 2 hours south of Utrecht (which is a very long time in the netherlands which was held in this really old monastry which was really nice. The coolest thing was that when we sat down to lunch and dinner, they served soup to start off with, one person would serve everyone some soup and no one would start eating until everyone had a bowl of soup. Which i thought was cool and really felt like a family meal....but thats just me.

I've also travelled out east to Den Haag, travelled North to Groningen, Gone south west to Nijmegen and most recently up north again to Sneek. We went to sneek after going to Groningen for Suus' (team mate) graduation party. We then went to sneek the next day to see SinterKlaas arrive. SinterKlaas is the original Santa Clause (which was aparently a product of Coca Cola marketing to promote christmas) but Sinter Klaas is explained as a turkish priest who lives in Spain and has black helpers that come to the Netherlands on December 6th to give kids pepernoten (small ginger bread biscuit things). Check out an explaination of him here
http://encarta.msn.com/media_461518996_761579679_-1_1/Sinter_Klaas.html


Here is a picture of SinterKlaas with one of his "black peter's".


Work is going well. Yesterday we stood at teh point where we had 25,000 euro confirmed with a sponsorship target of 250,000 euro, so basically in the shit. First thing this morning we got an email from ABN Amro confirming a sponsorship of 100,000 euro....which bloody rocks and definitely makes this conference achieveable now. But my role here is quite big. My main responsibility is finance, but i'm also responsible for IT, visa's, legal issues as well as that i'm helping out in raising money.....so its starting to get quite busy here.

So yeah, thats sort of a quick sticks update of where i'm at now. I heard that Australia has made it into the world cup which is cool to hear and everyone here knew about it before i did because of the dutch coach. But apart from that, I'm extremely busy, doing alot of travel and already starting to think about whats next for me. But I'm sure that I will involve staying here in Europe for a bit before going on a traineeship.

So yeah, just a few things that I've noticed so far here in Utrecht:
- dutch people are really blunt and straight forward people (which i like)
- dutch people do so much in such a short time. eg. they will see 3 lots of friends and do 3 different things in 1 night
- everything here starts so late. eg. going out to the pub starts at 12am, and thats early
- things happen every night of the week, monday - sunday there is a party.
- its blloody cold and sometimes really wet here and its getting colder
- alcohol here is sooo bloody cheap and you can get it everywhere
- there is constantly a distinct smell of pot.
- Coffee shops here are everywhere and are totally different to coffee shops at home as here they are used specifically for smoking pot

So thats about it from me for the time being, let me know how things are going in Australia and please don't tell me about the nice hot weather and beautiful surf that I'm missing......it just wouldn't be cool.

anyway, have a good one hey,
Trent

posted by Trent @ 9:15 PM