A Dutch Education

Law is absolute—and yes, changing times and attitudes lead to changes in law (Internet law being one of the most fascinating unfolding areas), but this too has to be done in a legal fashion, adhering to definite rules.

Back before I knew all the things that I know now (whatever that is), when I was just some kid from Newfoundland applying to law school, I liked something about the systematic way the law worked, but also how it responded to change. I had no idea how the law of the Internet worked, lawless frontier territory that it is, but I figured the thing was cool enough to warrant mention in my personal statement.

I wrote that personal statement sometime in the fall of 2012. Not a hell of a long time ago when you look at the date, but also an incredibly long time ago, when you consider that the statement ended with me talking about how I was going to go to New Zealand in a few months time, and also that I started my third and final year of law school on Monday. Wouldn’t you know it, Amsterdam is a long way from Fredericton, and wasn’t even in my contemplation at the time of application, but I’m finally going to tick off that box and learn something about Internet law—that was my first course at VU University this week.

Don’t get me wrong, myself and Kayla have been learning a lot since we arrived here a few weeks ago. For example, we figured out that buying popcorn is not an undertaking to dive into headfirst without surveying the scene. Otherwise, you might end up assuming that there is no real difference between zoet and zout as far as the Dutch language is concerned, and you might accidentally buy sweet popcorn instead of salty. Unless you’re really curious about what Cracker Jack tastes like when it’s heated up and matted onto the side of a paper bag like something you find on the backseat of a car on a hot August day and decide to eat it anyway, you’d probably want to avoid that l’il debacle.

We did some last minute cramming at the Amsterdam Museum on Sunday, a building that in the past has been a monastery and an orphanage and now hosts an extensive history of this city, dating back from the year 1000 when early settlers erected poles to keep buildings solid in the quagmire of the land surrounding the River Amstel. The displays took you through those early days, to the city’s denouncement of Catholicism in 1578, which segued into the Dutch Golden Age, when Amsterdam’s merchants dominated world trade and when the art in this country exploded.

We’ll come back to this famous Dutch painting

Amsterdam’s history, like any settlement spread out over several hundred years, has darker points. The Netherlands was neutral in the First World War, but Germans occupied this country from 1940 to 1945, when the Canadians liberated it. During the Second World War, three quarters of the city’s Jewish population—about 60,000—died. Anne Frank is the most obvious representation of that horrendous period, although the Amsterdam Museum also screened an unsettling film that was made by other Jewish hideaways in another part of the city, as well as other related exhibits.

Amsterdam today is far from the city during the War—rightly so, it’s regarded as a capital of freedom, with its infamous tolerance of soft drugs, legalization of prostitution, and notoriety for being the first country in the world to legalize same-sex marriage in 2001.

As per the apparent European convention of having interactive displays, as you go through these stages of history you can also raise a horse from the mud with a crank shaft and dress up as Civic Guard.

This Flickr album shows that not every visitor quite 

figured out how to work the automatic camera  

Leaving the museum, our last real day of summer vacation (at least for me), we chanced on the nearby Begijnhof. Blink and you’ll walk right by it, but just by entering a little gap in the wall are you sent to a secret garden that was originally the residence of the Begijntjes, a Catholic sisterhood who took no monastic vows but were otherwise similar to nuns. Today, single women still reside in this little hideaway that was buzzing like an amusement park that afternoon.

Onwards and upwards, back towards Amstelveen and criss-crossing the rings of canals, we browsed the Bloemenmarkt, a flower market that actually floats on the canal, although it’s all accessible by way of a cobbled footpath alongside. Here, the smell of fresh flowers is in the air, and you can find all the wooden clogs and knockoff Delft Blue souvenirs you could possibly want. There are also a string of cheese shops alongside—picture those waxed wheels of cheese, and then picture shelves and shelves of them, in weird and wonderful flavours like coconut and pesto. We bought a little snack pack made up of mixed cubes and some mustard for dipping and grabbed a bench.

Not far was another Rembrandt statue, looking down on an array of statues making up one of his most famous pieces, “The Night Watch.” The spot is significant—Rembrandtplein is a city square where the painter lived in the mid-seventeenth century. Actually, around about the time he painted “The Night Watch.”

I told you it would come back up!

  

But I’m digressing—summer is over as far as the academic calendar is concerned, and the whole reason I’m overseas until December is to try to learn something. Back to reality . . . well, sort of. 

There are a lot of exchange students studying at VU University—that was obvious during the first orientation I got at Uilenstede, but even the makeup of my first few classes reinforces that. A handful of Canadians too, more than just the three of us that came together from UNB.

Semesters are divided into periods, which leads to a different approach to time management. I have two courses in period one, which lasts until the end of October, and then three courses in period two, taking me up until Christmas. My two courses now—Internet Governance and Human Rights and Migration: The Border—are piled into seven weeks, which is immediately daunting but it’s also kind of nice to have something tangible to direct my energy towards.

Classes run for just under two hours, but there’s a pretty generous break thrown in the middle. And, of course, they’re all in English, so I’m not scrambling with a translator mid-lecture. I do wish I’d paid a bit more attention at the Parlamentarium in Brussels, to give myself a better sense of how the government of the European Union functions and how the various courts and tribunals work with each other, but I’ll hopefully work the bugs out along the way. The course on the Border has already put the fear of God into me about traveling to another country and having screwed up some visa requirement, and I can only expect that my excursion, as part of that course, to the Rotterdam The Hague Airport, where the Royal Military Police will show us how border control works at that airport, will somewhat legitimize that fear (and hopefully not send me back to Canada).

On a serious note, migration to the EU is in the news lately for all the wrong reasons, so I expect this course will take on a very contemporary, very relevant tone over the next few weeks.

Here I am, back in the world of assignments and readings and classrooms, but a long ways away at the same time. I suppose the 2012 version of me would be happy to know that his curiosity itch is finally getting scratched. Then again, that personal statement goes on:

Travelling to the other side of the earth cannot help but lead to the formation of an entirely new perspective on home and the self. That doesn’t mean I’m going to be finished my personal development. That doesn’t even mean that my naivety will be gone (where else is curiosity born?). What it does mean is that I will be as comfortable with myself and the world as anyone in their early twenties can be, and ready to apply that, along with the practical reasoning skills from a university education and a strict work ethic, to being a part of the incredible process that is law.  

So he’d probably be just as happy to know that there’s a floating flower market right next to a cheese store, and they’re just down the road from me. Happy to know that law school didn’t make me completely stunned after all.

Cheers,

rb