I started my Dutch language course on Wednesday. I had to bike there of course, but the class started at 9am so there weren’t many people on the road at 8:30 when I left the house. In fact, when I got to the bike parking lot, there were about 4 bikes in the lot that probably holds 200 bikes. Of course, when I went back after my class, the lot was so packed full that I could barely extract my bike from the masses.

It was very windy on the ride to the class. So much so that I almost couldn’t go forward once I turned into the wind. You should see what a good gust of wind does to a biker. I was all bundled up in my rain coat pressing on (which is a good thing too because moments before I got inside, it started to downpour).

The classrooms for each day (Mon/Wed/Fri) are located in three separate locations. Two of them are in the same building, but my first class was in obscure building accessed from a small lane beside the main academic complex. Isn’t that always how it works? My first class in a strange place, and I can’t find it! I walked around for 10 minutes before accidentally stumbling into the right building and there was the classroom. It seemed like a miracle. At one point I wondered what I would do if I didn’t find it.

I was still 10 minutes early by the time I sat down, but only the fourth person to arrive in the classroom. There are 13 students total in the class, so either everyone else knew where it was, or else they were also confused. Two people actually came in quite late – at least 15 minutes after the class started. I learned later that one of those students actually knocked on the door of a stranger (and got him out of bed) thinking it was the classroom – that’s how hard it was to find.

The material that was covered on the first day was a good review of the things I learned in the course that Brad and I took last January. We felt very ignorant on the first day of that class, so it was nice to be a little more confident for this one. At the time, that course seemed so painful and slow, but I now appreciate how much I did actually learn in that course.

Thankfully this course has a text book with some English in it. And the teacher said she’ll teach in English for the first couple of lessons. The Vancouver course started out with the teacher only teaching in Dutch. We started to wonder what we had gotten ourselves into.

Sometimes we still wonder, but really it is “niet zo slecht”.