I haven’t yet felt more foreign in the Netherlands than when I mistook a board meeting for a drinking session.
After a weekday evening at an indoor climbing wall, I gladly accepted an invitation to join my fellow climbers for a drink. Arriving with a Belgian beer in hand, I noted with concern that mine was the only alcoholic drink in sight.
My new Dutch friends, fellow members of Tilburg University’s climbing society, were happy that I had arrived. With five of us at the table, the quorum was met; the chat switched seamlessly to English, and the planning of the club’s social calendar could begin. Events were proposed and discussed, venues booked and plans costed with diligence while I sat there bewildered and unproductive.
Cycling home, I considered the reaction in Dublin if anyone attempted to do anything productive at any table where a drink was sitting. Plans at home are fluid and often boozy, while in my new home they are carefully considered and usually delivered.
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Whether because of a Calvinist work-ethic, commercial pragmatism, or a history spent keeping themselves above water, the Dutch have developed an admirable ability to get stuff done.
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While their approach to socialising would get an unmerciful slagging in any Irish pub, there are perks to getting organised and occasionally taking things seriously. My trips home, where I arrive comfortably by train to Schiphol airport only to get rained on later waiting for an Aircoach in Dublin, never fail to remind me of this.
I left Ireland in October 2019, after two years working in a graduate job and living at home in Dublin.
With rents continuing to climb, I didn’t see the point of moving out and trying to make an adult life for myself in Ireland. I decided instead to fly out looking for excitement, hardship and a meeting with the unexpected.
A few months later, I was picking pumpkins in Western Australia when Covid caught the whole world unawares. I counted myself lucky to be stuck in this largely lockdown-free country.
Language skills aside, I like to believe that I am learning some of the Dutch virtues of organisation, straightforwardness and, occasionally, brutal honesty
Wary of booking a prohibitively expensive flight home, I stayed and made the most of backpacking life. For the following months, I laboured on farms and construction sites all over the continent, always keeping an eye on the case numbers and restrictions back home.
By August 2021, things were opening up in Europe and I made a move homeward.
I enrolled in Tilburg University’s master’s in data science to land closer to home and provide myself a runway back to a more normal working life.
My parents were surely delighted that I wouldn’t miss another Christmas, and relieved that they would only hear my rants on the housing shortage by phone once a week rather than daily from their kitchen table?
This year of mid-20s student life was made possible by cheap tuition fees and a course taught entirely through English. I now work in IT for a Dutch finance company in Rotterdam. Here, too, work is mostly conducted in English. Indeed, you could live your life entirely through English here, although I’ve picked up een beetje Nederlands. I use it mostly when ordering kapsalon in my local Turkish kebab shop. This marriage of chips, the contents of a kebab and molten cheese is to the Netherlands what the chicken fillet roll is to Ireland.
Language skills aside, I like to believe that I am learning some of the Dutch virtues of organisation, straightforwardness and, occasionally, brutal honesty.
Ireland is easy to romanticise, but I’ve lost patience with my country’s failure to make good on the practical details
Some local habits like sending Tikkies (electronic payment requests) for the price of a beer or a coffee take some getting used to. Yet here I am as a guest in this remarkably well-built country, so it’s up to me to adapt, not that that’s a very hard thing to do. Jobs are plentiful, public transport is easily accessible and a place to rent is obtainable. Like most migrants, I have ultimately left home seeking a better quality of life abroad, and I believe I have found it here.
Of course I get homesick sometimes.
I miss my friends and my family, the green hills on the horizon and hurling on RTÉ in the summertime. I often even miss the laid-back dishevelment which I’ve just been giving out about.
Most of all, I long for those few pints in the pub that help ease the chat into deeply comfortable nonsense and absurdity.
Ireland is easy to romanticise, but I’ve lost patience with my country’s failure to make good on the practical details. I’m gone from Ireland more than three years now and I find it difficult to see myself coming back within that length of time again.
But as I did once before, I’ll keep my eye on the news from home, waiting hopefully for things to improve.
Conor Murray is from Cabinteely in south Dublin. The Trinity College Dublin graduate left Ireland in October 2019 and works as a data engineer for an asset management firm in Rotterdam in the Netherlands.
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