Unknown Home

by Emily Barker (United Kingdom (Great Britain))

A leap into the unknown Netherlands

The bags and bikes are packed. The dogs are at the sitter. My sisters and I whinge our way into demolishing the cheese rolls before we even hit the M5. The margin by which we make the ferry is small enough that our parents collapse into an adrenaline-deficient ball once on board, leaving us to explore the shop and its bafflingly enormous bars of exotic chocolate, and get shooed away from the slot-machine room. It’s the next few, the French and Belgian, hours that drag. But, finally, with numb bums and groggy daydreams of any, any food that hasn’t come from a sandwich bag, we’re out the other side of Den Bosch and storming towards 'Nijmegen 47km.' We do the bare minimum of unpacking when we get there, just enough to stake a claim on a top bunk, or make our bedside tables a little less stark. My mum wanders off with her phone to tell Oma we’ve arrived safely. In yet another unknown holiday house, we are home. This ritual was at the core of my childhood. My parents moved to the UK the year I was born, and the annual trip or two back to the Netherlands since were at once a holiday, homecoming, adventure, and visit to grandparents. They were my identifier at school, which made our Sinterklaas trip my particular favourite. I’d jump back on the playground for just a day before Christmas break started – a skiving hero, bearer of chocolate letters and speculaas. Gradually, exams, school plays, work – life – got in the way and our trips dwindled. By twenty-two, I felt disconnected from my Dutch roots, and decided to spend a month between university years doing a Workaway in Amsterdam. I’d found a couple on the website who wanted to road-trip around Europe, but couldn’t take their rats with them. Thus began the sweetest deal of my life – free accommodation, a bike, even Euros left for food shopping, in exchange for feeding and keeping Betty and Boo company. Just one request: don’t clean their cage too much. It makes them uncomfortable. As adds intrigue to any story, I had recently met a boy. A Dutch boy, who happened to stay in the same Italian hostel as me some weeks previous, and was returning home, (about half an hour from the rat flat), three days after my arrival. I took the universe’s hint, and dropped him a message. This was how I ended up, through a series of festivals, parties and heartbreak, discovering that the country I considered a second home was a mystery to me. Tagging along with ‘Jack’ and his friends, I learned that visiting a city since birth does not correlate to knowing the first thing about life there, and that local subculture is the foundation of more banter than you would think possible. The disconnect went both ways; while trying to attract the attention of a lost member of our group across a festival camping ground, I instinctively added, ‘Alan! Alan!’ to the yelling. Nonplussed, Jack turned to me. ‘That’s not Alan. That’s Steve.’ No-one expects a non-native to speak a tiny language not taught in schools abroad, which seemed to intensify the fraudulence upon my, frequent, exposés. Slang became my nemesis. It does not have the courtesy to stay the same as in the nineties kids’ shows you grew up on, and gets even more dated when a disproportionate number of your conversations in The Netherlands are with Oma. Nothing betrayed my foreignness more than my Catholic pensioner Dutch. The dissonance was a symptom of a much larger unfamiliarity, which continually came to light in discussions about fashion, music, politics, relationships, career aspirations. When I told them I was studying creative writing, my new friends looked at me like I was downright wild. For a while after that trip I felt sadly lacking in Dutch-ness. But I now look back on that summer as the best of my life, for showing me how much I love the heritages that complete the patchwork. How lucky I am to be a slightly odd hybrid in both my homes. How much there is to discover in a place I thought I knew.