My Diary

It’s indescribable and mixture feelings: happy, proud, scared, and sad when I departed to Holland for 3 weeks. At 07.45 pm Malaysian Airline Service 724 brought me to Netherland from Jakarta. I was lucky to have a seat beside the window. However, everything looked dark outside. But when my flight was about to landing at Schipol International Airport or only about 500 feet above the sea level, I saw the night lights emitted from different parts of Amsterdam looked like gold-colored pearls, scattered. Painstakingly amazing! Wow! Unbelievably beautiful, the city-plans as well as the infrastructures are well-designed.

MAS landed at Schipol at 6 am Holland time. Even though it’s Summer time and supposed to be bright, the weather looked gloomy. The chill air temperature seemed like winter approaching. The huge, busy airport of Schipol confused us a while. A taxi was ready to pick up. The driver said that it takes 2 hours from Schiphol (Amsterdam) to Enschede a small city 2 hours from Amsterdam.

Enschede is really quiet and no shop open on Sunday. Our hotel which is located at Drinersborgh, University of Twente was almost no guest. A female middle-aged receptionist welcomed us and explained especially the hotel rules, facilities and the entrance door system after eleven p.m. It doesn’t really look like a hotel. It’s much more similar to my student dorm. The laundry facility is quite expensive: 1 piece of clothes costs 6-7 Euros or even more depending on clothing fabrics. The Hotel does not provide the mineral water, so I drink tap water in my room. Due to tiredness and insufficient food (No shop open and no food provided by the hotel on Sunday) I fell asleep and woke up shivering. I tried to cover myself with a sweater and a thick quilt and switched on the room heater. But when my friends planned to go out for dinner, I forced myself to join. At the city center, we walked around looking for open cafe or restaurant. For some hours we didn’t find cafe and I was getting weaker walking with little energy. Ah……feeling desperate! Suddenly we smelt something yummy from the small cafe with “BAR” on the Banner. Some of refused to get in because BAR means negative to some of us. We come to disagreement. Some wanted to get in and ask whether or not they had food we wanted. I forced to check the food since I was starving, I don’t think that defending our own argument was worthy in such situation. The bar was crowded inside and we had very long queue since this was the only shop opened on Sunday. We had to wait for long before the waiters gave us the menu book. And after checking the menu, they had mostly ham and pork!! Farkhen! And as a Moslem, we are not allowed to eat pork. Ahh…..!