Final Reflections

Banner: From 6/23, a picture of the windmills of Kinderdijk. 

Left: From 6/26, a selfie in front of one of the prettiest canals in Delft.

Where do I even start with this blog?

This class was so much. And I mean that in a good way. Every single day felt like a back to back onslaught of new experiences and information. Any class over two weeks could feel like that, but what makes this one so special is in how we learned. "Experience-based learning" is a phrase thrown around a lot, and I don't think I've ever taken a class that exemplifies the concept as well as this one. The experience of a lifetime. 

This class was my first time leaving the continent. I'd been outside the USA before, but exclusively to Central American countries (Mexico, Costa Rica, Nicaragua). And all of those trips happened before I entered high school. So really, this is the first trip abroad I've had since becoming an adult, and I think that made all the difference for the culture shock of everything. Not knowing the language was pretty intimidating at first, just as the prospect of biking 36 miles on our fourth day there! But what I learned, along with all of the information about bicycle infrastructure and the Dutch design philosophy, is that I am personally capable of living in a place I had never even dreamed of before. Although I was prepared for certain things to be better than the US, I couldn't have realized the extent to which things could be better. That goes for the cycling infrastructure, of course, but also for the food prices, for the restaurant culture, for the walkable cities, for the intercity transit. There's just so, so, so much to learn from the Netherlands that I feel like I could spend another couple of years there. 

Even knowing how short the total time we had in the Netherlands would be, I was never able to really conceptualize that. From our first, 30 hour day after getting into the the country, to the last day of scrambling to finish my group project in time for the presentation, I never felt like I could totally process that the trip would come to an end. There was always too much to see, too much to do, and most powerfully, I was simply having too much fun. All the time, every day.

I'm not normally into ranking classes from best to worst (outside of the student evaluations each term), but I have to say, that this class just blows everything else out of the water. Easily the best class I have taken at OSU and a genuinely life-changing experience!