Somehow, four months has come and gone, and now I’m once again looking at a very large and empty suitcase sitting on my floor.  My semester abroad is coming to an end, which probably means that yours is too (at least it is if you’re an exchange student – you Master’s students have another several years of Rotterdam ahead of you).  The next time that I go to Schiphol, I’ll be flying back to Arizona, not to Ireland or Italy.  Cliché as it may be, it’s definitely a bittersweet feeling – I’m ready to go back home and get settled back into life in the US, but I’ll miss so much about Rotterdam and Erasmus.

I figured I’d refer back to my first blog entry and list a series of things that I will and won’t miss about the Netherlands.  Odds are good that you’ll probably share my feelings about several of these.

Things I’ll Miss

1. Biking everywhere.  A very small part of me is secretly glad that international students don’t get to take the metro for free – I feel like I’ve seen so much more of Rotterdam because I’ve had to bike through it than I would have on the metro.  I’ll also miss bike lanes and drivers who actually stop for bicyclists.
2. The food.  Yes, there is good Dutch food and bad Dutch food.  The bad is really, really bad (like herring), but the good is super good (anything that is sold for Sinterklaas).  A very large part of my suitcase will be full of merchandise from Albert Heijn to smuggle back to the US.
3. Tuesdays nights at BED and the awesome ESN parties.
4. Taking a train to Germany on the weekend because I was bored and wanted a pretzel.
5. The little cookies that come with lattes at cafés.

Things I Won’t Miss

1. Biking in the freezing cold rain against the wind.
2. Converting my US dollars to Euros.
3. Hearing Dutch everywhere – yes, it is definitely awesome that everyone speaks English, but that doesn’t change the fact that I can’t understand half of the announcements about train delays made at Rotterdam Centraal.
4. Not having an oven.  It seems to be standard procedure that every Dutch kitchen has a deep fryer, but I only know of one person who has an oven.  Kind of weird.
5. Phone calls from T-mobile about all the roaming charges on my monthly bill.  Whoops.

I should probably put all of my awesome friends in the “Things I’ll Miss” category, but I figured I’d give them their own section of this blog.  To all the international students: Thank you SO much for making this semester unforgettably fantastic.  Be sure to stay in touch with the people who you met here – you’ll never know where you might end up on a vacation one day, and you could need a couch to sleep on.

Thanks for great semester everyone!  Send me a message if you ever find yourselves in Arizona – I’ll take you out for some seriously tasty Mexican food.

Oh yeah – it turns out that Marjan is actually a Dutch name.  Does that qualify me for EU citizenship?