Presentation 'Once when I was in...' - 'England'

MY JOURNEY INTO MEANING: THE MEANING OF MY JOURNEY

When I was young, I thought it was a normal custom to go on holiday to the Veluwe in summer. The Veluwe is one of the most afforested areas in Holland and my parents loved it to be among the trees. I found our holidays very boring; every day we had the same program. We went walking, cycling, fishing, shopping and swimming. Especially the cycling tours were awful and after the first ten kilometres my sister and I always started to sing: ‘A tall tree, a small tree, a tall tree, a small tree, tree, tree…’, to my parents’ great annoyance. But every year, I survived the holidays and went back to school, relieved.

When I started the Athenaeum 4 class at secondary school, I had an uncomfortable feeling in my stomach. This was the year of the England journey! Because I had never travelled abroad before, I didn’t know what to expect and I thought it to be very exciting. The trip was planned in May and in March I already started with my preparations. And not only me; my classmates did the same. We checked our identity cards and some of us made a new one, only for safety. We were champions in buying new bags: ‘you really need a solid one, lots of space in it, good safety, many zips’. Every two weeks we bought a new one and after two weeks it again turned out to be unusable. Our parents had gone mad four weeks before the date of departure, but we were in a state of upper suspense.

Our travel to England was a school travel, so we had to do some exercises for our study. The underlying subjects were of course English, but also Art and Culture. Two weeks before we left Holland our teachers started to explain the purposes of the journey and we got our travel books. We spelled the travel program and decided that there was little free time and that we had to work really hard to do all the exercises which were in the reader. But we were not discouraged and the time of departure approached.

But one week before, real panic broke out! ‘What do they eat in England?’ was the frustrating question of one of my classmates. ‘Do they have sprinkles for my slices of bread?’ asked another. ‘What about their evening meals’? ‘And do they really eat bacon and eggs for breakfast?’ At once, everybody called the journey in question because of these questions. How could we survive without sprinkles for our bread or with something indefinable for evening meal? And our English teacher made us really upset: ‘Yes, boys and girls, it’s bacon in the morning, pepper for evening meal, damp bread for lunch…’ Sprinkles for bread? They even don’t know what we mean by that.’ The first tears appeared.

Our parents, never been in England, knew the solution for our problem. ‘Take your own packet of sprinkles with you and eat Sultana cookies for lunch. If your evening meal is disgusting, ehm… well, maybe you can bake pancakes, or buy potatoes and endives anywhere.’ The sprinkles and Sultana were OK and we started to buy lots of it. But the evening meal remained a problem: how could we influence our host family to cook ‘normally’?

We were very nervous when the great day came, finally. In the very early morning - six o’clock - we arrived at school. We inspected and slashed each other’s bags - too small, too big, too heavy, too many zips, etc. - and we checked for the last time if we really had our identity cards and copies of insurance papers. We got on the bus with plumbed feet and waved a little bit pitiful to our parents. Would we ever come back? And would we really survive without Dutch food?

However, when the bus was in the neighbourhood of Calais, we became calmer. The boat trip to England was beautiful, and we were really enthusiastic when we discovered the first glimpse of the chalk-cliffs. Some of us became seasick as a bad presage, but our whole trip was too excited to pay much attention to it. We arrived on the other side and were surprised when it turned out that cars really drive left in England! It seemed that we all had thought that was a book story or fairy tail, because the first ten minutes there was total silence in our bus. Maybe we all thought that we were going to hit Dutch drivers, driving on the right sight of the English road…

Our first stop was in Canterbury, where we visited the old and beautiful cathedral. We had to do some exercises in the cathedral and we went inside, armed with bloc notes and pencils. We had to make photo reports too, so we had digital cameras with us. A few seconds after our entrance, a uniformed lady came to us. ‘You are not allowed to make photographs in this cathedral, except when you pay for a ‘photo button’. We were staggered, but we went to the information point to get a button, because we wanted to make photos to show our Mum and Dad the striking parts of England. But a great frustration was waiting us. The woman behind the counter told us a button charged 2 pounds! Our Dutch mind converted this price to guilders and the result was shocking: nearly seven guilders! We decided not to buy a button - ‘Dutch people are economical, aren’t they?’ - and we went into the cathedral, still discussing this daylight robbery. Because we needed our photographs, we underhand take some; constant looking behind us if somebody was watching us. Our photos were a bit dark coloured, because we couldn’t use the flasher of our cameras…

After viewing the whole cathedral, hearing the story of the Black Prince and Thomas of Beckett, we went to the coach park in the centre of London, where our host families were waiting. Resigned, we took our place in the right cars and drove to houses of the families. The first night, we couldn’t sleep at all. We were thinking about how the breakfast should be and we checked thousands of times if we really brought our sprinkles and Sultanas with us. The next morning we got toast with pasta for breakfast and in fact, of course we didn’t admit it, we were a bit disappointed. But the relief dominated.

During our week in England we visited all the famous sights, like Windsor Castle, the Big Ben, the Tower Bridge, the London Eye, Westminster Abbey, the Claremont Landscape Garden, the Victoria & Albert museum, the Tower of London, we sailed on the Thames and of course we watched the changing of the guards. And some of us dared to say, while watching the guards, that such kind of a ‘puppet theatre’ doesn’t exist in Holland… Every day was an adventure, because of the unknown factor we were faced with. What shall the food be? Are the English able to understand our broken English? Every morning, when we met each other at the coach park, the first question was ‘What did you eat? How about your Sultana stock?’ Our lunches were beautiful to see: white bread sandwiches, with lettuce, tomatoes, and slices of cucumber. But there was also something on it we couldn’t place: it was no cheese and it was no sausage: it seemed to be a combination of those two. But after a few bites, we decided not to eat our lunches: the bread was damp indeed, and the cheese-sausage combination tasted awful. London’s homeless were very glad with our visit.

Of course we enjoyed the sightseeing element of our tour and with great enthusiasm we did our exercises every day in the cathedrals and museums. But, strangely enough, our enthusiasm became bigger when we found something ‘Dutch’ in England. We were able to talk for more than an hour about a car with a Dutch registration number and while shopping in Oxford Street we bought things that were all ‘a little bit like it is in Holland’. We stumbled at the high prices and our total of purchases was low.

But the high point of our journey came nearly at the end. It was on Thursday that we visited St Paul’s Cathedral and after that, we rested a few minutes on the stairs in front of the famous building. The sun was shining - very special, most of the time it rained - and some of us closed their eyes as if they would take forty winks. But then, suddenly, a loud cry reached ours ears. Some of the other students stood at the bottom of the stairs and they were waving and shouting at us: ‘We have discovered a McDonalds! Come and see!’.

Sleeping was over, and we ran down the stairs. In a couple of minutes we reached the McDonalds and we ordered fifteen Mc Flurries. They were twice the price of the Dutch Mc Flurries, but we didn’t mention it. We were all laughing and the atmosphere felt comfortable. We ate our Flurries slowly, enjoying its taste. When the paper cups were empty, we built a ‘Flurry Tower’ and made photographs of it and of each other, sitting on ‘an English McDonalds chair’. We left the McDonalds with a spiteful feeling, but also very, very satisfied.

During the way back to Holland, we had a retrospective view on our journey. We discussed the sights we visited, but most of all we discussed our host families, the awful food, our decreased stock of Sultana, the English lack of sprinkles, the high prices in Oxford Street and of course our McDonalds visit and the Flurry Tower. And then one us expressed our feelings in one simple sentence: ‘How nice would it be, to eat a meal with beans, potatoes and a meat-ball, all cooked by my Mum…!’

Book review - 'What the Traveller Taught Me'

WHAT THE TRAVELLER TAUGHT ME: REACTION TO TWO BOOKS

When we decided to choose ‘Sense of Place’ as a topic for our sub-genre presentation I didn’t know what to expect from the books I had to read. The syllabus explained the matter with the words ‘Humorous comparisons of different cultures’ and a little bit curious I started to read How not to live Abroad by Shaun Briley. And it really was humorous. I have read the book in a few days, because I wanted to know how it would end up and Briley’s way of writing was really vivid and readable.

In How Not to Live Abroad Shaun and his girlfriend Helen are going on a trip to Spain. But what starts as an extended vacation - a last fling before the dreaded reality of taking respectable jobs back home - turns into a series of madcap, real-life misadventures for the naïve young couple. They fall in love with Spain and before they realize it, they have landed in Almería, a region of arid beauty tucked away in the rugged corner of the Iberian Peninsula. There, the goats far outnumber the tourists, and with good reason.

Nearly broke already, Shaun and Helen become infatuated with a lonely farmhouse that has one particular charm: its unbelievably low price. They are certain that living off the land and the literal fruits of their labour will be blissful. But their new home is lack of electricity and running water, and the challenges of rural life in a strange land, prove daunting obstacles for recent graduates who know more about history and computer science than they do about farming.

Shaun and Helen endure one outlandish encounter after another: nasty scorpions, ornery farm animals, felonious workmen, horrified relatives, the amorous attentions of a local farmer’s cross-eyed daughters, and a neighbour who is convinced that space aliens have been landing nearby, to name just a few.

The funniest part of the book is when Shaun describes the time when they just have bought the old and lonely farmhouse.

‘Before the ink could dry on the signatures, we were on the way to our very own farm. Never had I seen anything as wonderful as that gleaming white house set against rolling hills and a deep blue sky. Helen hugged me tightly for a moment and then excused herself to go to the toilet. While Helen was gone, I just stood there in awe while it sank in that I was part owner of this splendid house. I could hear her opening and closing doors inside. Staring up at the sky, I noticed a few tiles missing from the roof and thought it odd that I hadn’t spotted them before. I suddenly wondered what other faults I might have overlooked in my infatuation with the place. Then I saw her wave at me from a window and I waved back before she disappeared again. This drew my attention to the grill on the window, which I noticed was loose - and furthermore in desperate need of some paint. I was thinking that we would have our work cut out for us when I realized that Helen was dashing from one room to another at an ever-increasing speed.
‘Are you all right? Did you find the toilet?’ I called out. Finally, she appeared panting at an upstairs window.
‘There is no toilet!’

This paragraph shows Shaun Briley as a writer in a nutshell. He describes his adventures in a clear, humorous, ironical and still sober way. And therefore his book is so funny and easy to read.
In the end of the story, Helen and Shaun decide to go back to England and they also decide to break off their relationship. During their time in Spain, there are increasing tensions between the two and as Shaun writes ‘our biggest adventure turned out to be each other’.

‘Personally, I came out to Spain thinking it was a way to avoid work. I didn’t want to struggle with the rest of them. I certainly ended up with something more than I bargained for there. I’d never worked so hard in my life as I did on that farm. It wasn’t just the valley that lost some of its innocence that year. I learned that if you don’t chop that wood you’ll freeze, and you don’t even want to think about leaving the chemical toilet unemptied.
Strangely, it was in these necessary struggles that I finally found what I was searching for. While harvesting crops and making essential renovations, I accidentally discovered a sense of purpose that I’d sorely lacked. Although I was more than averagely incompetent at these things, I felt I’d still somehow managed to achieve something. Renovating a house with my bare hands, eating food I had grown, and working for myself in a foreign land gave me maturity and a sense of fulfilment.’

This passage is one of the last paragraphs in the book and those paragraphs give the book a surplus value, because of the shown worldly wisdoms.


Bryson’s book, Down Under, was also a pleasure to read for me, but it was really different from How Not to Live Abroad.
Down Under is of course about Australia and Bryson travelled round the country in a fractured fashion, starting in Sydney and exploring the southeastern corner including Melbourne and Adelaide and much in between. He makes much of the fact that eighty percent of Australia’s population is concentrated in this peninsula and yet he can still drive for many miles without much in the way of anything at all. Few vehicles, animals or people caused him any detraction on his journey. He really gives the reader a true favour of what this part of the country looks and feels like.

Bryson really wants to share with us how perilous Australian Flora and Fauna can be. This is something that captivates most travellers to the country and one can’t help but smile at Bryson’s description of a seashell that will go for you.
The subject of Australia’s indigenous people, the Aborigines is touched upon and Bryson tries to understand how they have ended up in poverty, poorly educated and why it is not a popular topic of conversation with other Australians. He doesn’t really justice this topic, because this is a travel book and political observations should be left out.
The book is ‘as funny as ever’, as said in the Daily Telegraph and I can recommend it, just as How Not to Live Abroad.

Postcard 10 - Sub-genre - 'Irishness'

Dear John,

Last week I told you I was reading a few travel books written by Bill Bryson and Shaun Briley. The books were both very funny to read - especially How Not to Live Abroad by Briley - and some classmates and I are going to give a presentation about the sub-genre ‘Sense of Place’ in a few weeks. Marlous, Jennifer and Tessa gave their presentation about their sub-genre this evening and it was about ‘Irishness’. Well, I hadn’t ever heard about that, but their presentation was so much interesting that I want to give you a summary of it.

Those girls had read some books about their theme and they had done some research. They had read the lovely books Angela’s Ashes, T’is a Memoir and Jaywalking with the Irish, and they told us something about the content. Irish people are known for their friendliness and warmth and these facts were also shown in those books. The strange thing they detected during their research, was that Irish people often leave their country and decide to start a new life anywhere else. But, after years of discontent, they come back to Ireland and start to live there again.

This group of students wasn’t able to tell us if there is a reason for this phenomenon and they called it the ‘secret of the Irish’. If it will remain a secret I don’t know, but it sounded remarkable to me. Maybe it’s an option for you to go to Ireland and write a detailed travel book or story about the people living there. I’ll look forward to buy it!

All the best,
Neline

Postcard 9 - Presentation 'Once when I was in...' - 'Zeeland'

Dear John,

Do you remember my letters I used to send you during holidays ten, fifteen years ago? We always went on holiday to the Dutch ‘Veluwe’ during summer and because I felt very bored I wrote you piles of letters. And I think you still know the content: ‘We are back on the Veluwe and we have a nice holiday house. Our beds are a little bit soft and today we cycled 20 kilometres. This evening we’re going to swim.’ Two weeks, day after day, I wrote you this or a suchlike letter.

My holidays at the Veluwe were boring, most of the time. Making walks, going shopping, swimming, cycling… it was simply not my cup of tea. When we were cycling in the forests, my sister and I started singing ‘A tall tree, a small tree, a tall tree, a small tree, tree, tree…’, to my parents’ great annoyance. They loved it to be two or three weeks in their favourite holiday home, doing all the boring things I just wrote down.

Last week, I heard Maud’s story about her vacations in Zeeland, one of the Dutch provinces. Zeeland is the province with lots of water and sunny beaches and it is a very attractive place to be for many Germans. But little Maud thought it was awful to go there on holiday: she hated everything, while her family loved everything… I felt very sorry for her, because I know really well what she was talking about, because of my own awful experiences on the Veluwe, between the small and tall trees, trees, trees.

But fortunately, both Maud’s and my story have a happy end. Maud went to France later on and started to love camping on mini-campings or camping at a farm. I went to Germany and its Black Forest and started to understand how nice holidays could be. And to show you I am really widely orientated: next summer I will go to England and Austria in a period of five weeks. So, I have really overgrown my Veluwe nightmare in the past years. But I still hope that there are few trees in these countries…

All the best,
Neline

Postcard 8 - Article - 'Spanish restaurants'

http://travel.timesonline.co.uk/tol/life_and_style/travel/destinations/spain/article1428639.ece


Questions

What does ‘high stools’ mean?
Hoge krukjes.
What is special at Joan Gatell?
There is no freezer: The restaurant is opposite the harbour, and the fish is brought over twice a day.
What does ‘frontrunners’ mean?
Koplopers.
Mention a characteristic of ‘Asadores’.
Traditional restaurants with wood-burning ovens.
What is ‘judiones’?
The delicious local variety of butter beans.



Dear John,

Did you ever hear that it is possible to make a ‘restaurant trip’? Travelling and eating, or better: eating and travelling? Yesterday I came across a short article in the Times, in which six restaurants in Spain were discussed. Each restaurant was mentioned because of one or two of its special features and each of them seemed worth to be visited. And a very nice idea came up in my mind: what do you think of a restaurant trip next autumn holidays?

I will explain my plans to you in some detail. At first, we can visit Inopia, a restaurant that uses top-quality ingredients. The sardine sandwich and the house wine sounds to be terrifically tasty and the restaurant itself ‘looks basic, but is one of the hottest places to eat in the city’. After visiting this one, we can go for a fish to Joan Gatell, a restaurant with no freezer. The restaurant is opposite the harbour, and the fish is brought over twice a day. So fresh fish for you, lover of salmon!

And what about Casa Salvador? It is famous because of its paella and its beautiful view over the lake while eating on the terrace. Taberna de la Daniela seems also worth to be visited, but the reasons for that are not clear. Maybe we have to find out ourselves…

A restaurant with a wood-burning oven… we can find it in Spain: Mesón José MarÍa. Its name sounds as a romantic melody and it’s the only restaurant serving ‘judiones’, a delicious local variety of butter beans.

These restaurants are the most famous ones in Spain, but the article told me there are lots more. I got hungry while writing you this; how about you? Ready for buying a ticket to Spain?

All the best,
Neline

Postcard 7 - Presentation 'Once when I was in...' - 'Japan'

Dear John,

I think you are surprised to receive a letter from me again. Till three weeks ago I only sent you a piece of writing when I was having holidays or when one of my cats had died. But since your (and my own) whim of travel writing I have been a consistent pen friend.

Last week I heard a travel story about Japan. Debbie told it to us during one of the evening classes and I must say that it was very interesting. Debbie grew up in Japan - I didn’t know before - and a few years ago she decided to go back to her roots. The time she lived in Japan when she was young, was a little bit strange. She looked different from all the other children around her and she couldn’t speak the Japanese language. Nevertheless, when she came to Holland, she felt like an outsider.

She had two reasons for going back for a year: indeed ‘back to the roots’, but she also wanted to teach English in Japan. And she has really taught English in this ‘land of the rising sun’. She taught it to students from five to seventy-five years old and unfortunately, her students didn’t learn a lot. Japanese don’t like it to make mistakes and therefore they say little in everyday conversation. Learning a language is a difficult task to do then, both for the student and the teacher.

But she did more in Japan than teaching English. She observed the community and came to striking conclusions. In Holland, the word ‘community’ is in fact a bit of a laugh. Individualism fits better. In Japan, the community is really what it is supposed to be: people live together and help each other where possible and needed. Besides that, Debbie discovered in Japan a ‘strive for perfection’ and as she entrusted us, she found in that phenomenon a declaration for her own perfectionism.

As a conclusion, in the year she lived in Japan, she got insight and understanding in the culture and she had a wonderful time. The only disappointing thing was that she couldn’t find the house where she used to live in. Her parents visited it years before, but when she arrived it had been removed…

It’s an interesting story, isn’t it? I can’t imagine how it would be to grow up in another country and go back after a couple of years - for the simple reason that I am born, grown up and live in still the same country - but I really enjoyed this story.

All the best,
Neline