I have been spending the past few blogs writing about Colombia and what we did there as we were analyzing data, so now I am going to catch up on what has been happening in Nijmegen!
We arrived in the Netherlands on June first, and we travelled by train to get to Nijmegen. Our first mistake was to go with all our stuff up to the top floor of the bus. We didn’t realize that we were sitting in the Silent section, because the signs were pretty faded. So there we were chatting about everything we had to do, when a lady comes over and asks us to stop talking because we were in the silent section. Whoops!
When we arrived in Nijmegen, we knew that the office to collect our keys was closed for the day, so we had to find Erika and Jessica and Amy because they were supposed to have our keys. Unfortunately, we forgot that we wouldn’t have wifi unless we could find one to mooch off of, so we were stuck for a little bit. We knew the room numbers, but we didn’t know if they were there or not, and when we rang the bells nobody would answer. I couldn’t even remember what any of the girls looked like from our PIRE meetings, so I was really scared we would just not be able to find anyone. We thought of going into town to get wifi, but we had all of our stuff with us and wouldn’t be able to drag around our suitcases. So we waited it out, and eventually met up with Amy and got our keys. It was so nice to get into our apartments and see how nice they are! I am really impressed with the guest houses, and I think Radboud has definitely gone above and beyond with them. Those first few days were relaxing days as we were settling in, and figuring out how everything worked. We went to Rotterdam and did a walking tour of the city, which I absolutely loved because I like to learn more about the history of the buildings we see. We saw the cube houses, and took classic touristy pictures with them.
I managed to visit my family that I have in the Netherlands during my stay here. My grandparents live in Kollum, which is about a 3 hour train ride away, so I went up to see them. My nuclear family also came to the Netherlands for two and a half weeks so I got to see them when I visited my grandparents too. I met some cousins that I hadn’t seen before, and saw cousins that have doubled in size since the last time I saw them.
We got off to a rough start when getting the actual PIRE analyzing started, because we didn’t really know who we were supposed to contact. We knew that we would be working with Pieter Muysken, but we also knew he was in Ecuador and wouldn’t be able to help us for that first month. So we had a little e-mail communication, and managed to get the names of two Phd students that we were supposed to meet up with and talk to. We talked to both of them after a little trouble finding where they were. We also went to a couple talks relating to linguistics. Most of the work we do however is just analyzing on our computers, so I have been working on it in different spaces. I can’t believe our time in the Netherlands is halfway done, because I definitely am not ready to go yet! I can’t wait to see what else this trip holds.
~Lina Ruth Duiker