ending

I had certainly intended to leave my blog on a more conclusive note than this. But I don't know that I'm up for the task. And besides, I'd like to think that the rest of my blog speaks for itself in the sense that the combined wonder and joy and love that the castle experience gave me comes across in everything you've read so far.

I've been back for three weeks, edging on a month, and things are slowly settling down again. America - and by extension, Boston - is different than I remember it, but I guess I'm different than America remembers me, so there you go.

If you've made it this far, thank you for reading.

castle alstubleift beer brugge linden americannight tabledancing robduckers maastricht artclass carnival laughter beer meermarkt venlo venray nijmegen ryanair london countyhotel billyelliot bestfriends dublin jameson claddaghring buses paris eiffeltower wine champagne hotelmagenta tired chestersucks dulcia donerkebab berlin deventer lost trainrides don'tstopwigglewiggle ireland leige belgium fouramthissucks shannonennisdoolin seafoodchowder manslaughter cliffsofmoher huber computerlab facebookstalking travelwriting prague overnight easter nokafkamuseum cameras absinthe skype can'tremember spar allunderoneroof rene johnny dojna moulinrouge sexshow amsterdam ontime croatia disaster fuego dubrovnik tearsfightsfoodpoisoning late fresh beertowers lastkiss mileycyrus seaurchins karenlindsey barcelona bikeriding kabulhostel bunkbeds sunburn southerncomfort laundrycoins italy rome colisseum sistinechapel yellowtwentysevenyearoldbraziliangirl deafchicks weezeairport bonfires finals dunes drunk gregorykatherinekevincollinallieracheldankuwellLOVE.

the end. :)

transit

I don't know if anyone is still reading, but I do promise one last post from home before this is over. Until then, I wrote these two snippets on the 23rd and 25th of April - the day we left Kasteel Well and the day we left Europe, respectively, and I thought they'd be a good addition to this. 

Written in the Munster-Osnabruck International Airport in Germany on April 23rd.
Leaving the castle was probably one of the most surreal experiences of my entire life. The water in the moat this morning was green-brown, sparkling with the reflection of the castle and the sun, moving slowly, slowly, still. The sun was bright bright bright on all of our faces and backs, heat steaming up our shirts and making the tulips down by the moat glow red. It made it all the harder to leave.

“I wish this place wasn’t so beautiful,” Allie said. “I wish it was a shithole so it would be easy to leave.”

I backed down the stairs, moving from our newly-minted picture all the way down to spring 1986 – you watch time pass backwards, know that in a scant few hours, you will leave this place, possibly forever, never ever to return.

I said goodbye to everything – goodbye dining hall, goodbye terrible coffee, goodbye hagelslag on every table. Goodbye main castle, goodbye Sophie’s, goodbye warm red couches. Goodbye moat, goodbye bridge, goodbye my room where I spent many nights warm and cozy. Goodbye computer room and laundry room. Goodbye barn, bridge, moat, swans, Bakkerij, All Under One Roof, Spar-formerly-known-as-Meermarkt. Goodbye Vink, bus stop, dunes, Well. Goodbye, Netherlands.

I am slightly less sad only because I am taking so much away from the castle. I am taking knowledge – of how to travel, how to be independent, of who I am and how I want to live. I am taking experiences – of ten countries, eighteen big cities, countless trains and planes and buses, of nights spent in the rain in a foreign country, of cross-lingual communication, of places mundane and magical. I am taking friendships - friends by necessity becoming friends I can no longer do without, friends who have seen the things and places that I have seen, friends who have lived the same unreal life I have lived for the past three months.

Written in the London Gatwick Airport on April 25th:
I’m sitting in London Gatwick airport, seventy-three other students – and Karen Lindsey – bustling around me. We’ve already lost five people and all of the other teachers. Yesterday, we spent the day in London, knowing in our minds and hearts that this experience was almost entirely over. I wish I could fully articulate the feeling I felt in my head last night at a loud, raucous London club, music blaring and strobe lights crackling. It was the same feeling I felt at the farewell dinner – one of fondness and sadness, one of delight in all these people.

Knowing that I am going to see my friends later is wonderful. It’s just this oddness, this strange and melancholy feeling of the end – not impending, not looming, not almost here but NOW, right NOW, I am leaving Europe in less than an hour and it’s hard to accept.

There’s so much waiting for me, though, and I think I’m excited to get back to real life. The castle is such an illusion, a falsification of life in Europe, and real life with work and family and Boston is waiting. Boston, with it’s modernity and the common and Anna’s and Dunkin’ Donuts, and the Lyric Stage Company and the Hancock Tower and everything else that I grew up with and that I know like the back of my hand, that I grew up knowing and learning. Knowing where I am going and how to navigate and being able to communicate without a hitch is going to be both disorienting and comforting.

I so look forward to the familiarity, but do not look forward to missing the unknown.

----

Please stay tuned. :)

leaving

I'm sitting here in my room, papers scattered around my chair, art study guide blinking away in Word, preparing myself for the next two days in which I take finals. I am sitting here, six days away from the end of the most exhilarating, thrilling and unreal experience of my life. Six days before I left for the castle, I was at work, fretting inside over the thought of three and a half months away from home, three and a half months of travel, three and a half months of change. It seemed like such a long time.

And now it's almost over.

The thing is, so much has happened this semester - I've stormed Western Europe, made some wonderful friends, and learned more than I ever thought I possibly could have. But it feels like there's still so much left to do, so many experiences unlived, so much magic and beauty left to see. And I have to board a plane out of this castle, out of this country, in four days. It doesn't seem right, somehow, doesn't seem fair that anyone should ever have to leave this place. It is such a bubble, such an isolated community of some seventy eight people who grow close and clash and laugh and cry and spend too much time together that it starts to feel like there's no one in the world but the castle kids. It feels like we've fallen off the face of the planet together, and now we have to scatter and go back to the familiar and the friendly and the mundane.

It's not that I don't look forward to Boston, don't look forward to my family and friends and sweet summer - but it's the magic of the castle, the intoxicating sweetness of a different country every weekend, of new experience upon new experience, of friends and memories and shining eyes and bright smiles and the unreality of calling this fortress of brick and stone my home. It's the sharing of this experience with such wonderful people, many of whom I'd never have known if the castle hadn't forced us together and bonded us forever with the memory of this place.

Time here is different than time at home - you can't really hold it, and the end can hover away from you for so long. You can delay the reality of going home by going on trip after trip, spending every weekend until your last traveling and going out and living life the way you do every weekend, and all of a sudden, it's here, it's less than a week away.

They say the castle changes you - it's so cliche to say that you come home a different person, but I guess they're right. It's not anything tangible, anything explainable - it's this role I've been filling, this new person I've been growing into, the things I've been learning, the way you've just got to do all of this on your own. The more relaxed, easygoing nature of Europe. I can't say I'm not still me - I'm still neurotic and insane - but I can say that I'm not the same me who left the States three months ago. And that's good. You hear enough about the readjustment woes of former castle kids that it makes you worry about the way the new you will mesh, the way the castle kid in you can live away from the castle - it seems such an impossibility, because you've fallen so hard for this place, for this life. I know it'll be fine - I know there's so much waiting for me at home - but I don't think I'm ready to leave all of this behind.

It's the knowing that this will never happen again, I think, that does it for us the most. We can come back to Europe, travel all we want, but this experience is so unique, such a blessing, that letting it end is hard. 

But a former castle kid gave me this nugget of wisdom the other night, and I've embraced it.

"You wouldn't want to stay there forever anyways," she said. "The transience is part of the beauty."

This semester at the castle was such an epic story, but lest we forget, it's not the whole book - just another chapter in life's sprawling novel. And damn, was it a good one.

I'm going outside. The air is cool and damp and refreshing and you can smell summer on the breeze.

Stay tuned.

:)

storm

It is raining. 

No, even more than that, is is a certifiable downpour, rain and hail streak down, bullets pelting us as we stand in the courtyard, eyes squinting, staring up at the sky above. The stars are invisible behind purple clouds, except when lightning streaks across the sky, flying faster than any bird, propelled on wings of crackling purple and blue. It is so clear that it could be a drawing, like a child is slashing the heavens with a thick neon marker. The lightning rends the sky in half, so forceful that you expect the sky to crack like glass and for shards of it to come falling down, pointed bits of sky mingling with the water and ice pooling on the ground.

The thunder that follows the lightning bellows. One one thousand, two one thousand, three one thousand. I count the seconds on numb fingers. Six seconds between lightning and thunder, six miles away, six miles up. It looks so close. 

When it flashes, it flashes, cloaking us all in pearly blue light, making our white skin glow like plums and berries for just a second, not even a second. You breathe in and taste rain. I am soaked, feel water seeping everywhere, drops sliding over my scalp, through my hair. My toes wiggle and slosh through the water gathering in my shoes.

My fingers tingle. 

This is awesome.

tour

I'm sitting here in the windowsill of my room, looking out at the castle. The clouds hanging over the Netherlands like an umbrella have parted today, and for the first time since we've been here, the sun is shining down on us. It's still on the cooler side - I can breathe out my window and have my breath billow back at me like steam - but the sun is out and the sky is a cloudless blue.

Kasteel Well is a fully restored castle dating back to the twelfth century - it's brick, not stone, and doesn't really look like the epic grey stone castle of children's imaginations. It's quieter, really, more welcoming and less imposing. It's not a Sleeping Beauty castle, turrets and walkways; it's more low-key than that, a relaxed sort of castle, with wooden saircases, brick paths and trees everywhere.

Surrounding the entire castle is a garden, populated by a smattering of birds - geese and swans and white birds with black markings that cackle and caw in the early morning, before the sun has even thought about yawning and getting up. Around the perimeter of the garden is the first moat, wide and strong - about half of it is covered by a thick mucusy film of green algae that hides the water underneath. There are trees in the garden, forest green and deep yellow, and those that haven't sprouted with leaves just yet. Once they do, I imagine an explosion of green, crackling up and down branches, spring spreading like wildfire. There is an old, crumbling ruined tower towards the back of the garden that hints at what the castle was like all those years ago. 

There's a bridge you have to cross, with arms of brick, and you reach the castle proper. The castle itself is divided into two main buildings - approaching it over the bridge leads you to to the Voorburcht first, which is where Greg and I live. The VB is shaped like a squared-off letter U, with the bottom facing the road from which you approach it. It frames a large courtyard of grass and brick paths - there are benches, and small stone walls to lean over and look artsy. You can enter the VB through a door within the entrance archway, which will lead you to mostly dorms - on the left side of the VB, in one of the two smaller sides, is the laundry room and computer lab. The blue flatscreen Dell computers stick out and look entirely out of place on the wooden tables, especially considering the two flights of creaking wooden stairs you have to climb to get to them.

There's also an entrance to the VB at the tip of the opposite side - the other side of the U. Walking through that presents you with another wooden staircase - you climb it, each stair groaning beneath your foot, and reach one of the castle's two towers. On the second and third floors are more dorms - including mine. Take a right upon entering that door leads to a lounge populated with a pool table, a television, and earthtones leather couches. At the far end of the lounge is another staircase that leads to the castle's two classrooms - one is long and white, adorned with colorful maps of the Netherlands, and the other is more stout, more sparse, with long tables instead of desks.

Standing in the VB courtyard, directly in front of you is the Main Castle; it's surrounded by the second moat, which flows around and around. The brick building rises straight out of the water - three floors of stairs and glass windows. It, too, is shaped like a square, with a small stone courtyard at the center. You cross a bridge over the moat and walk through another rounded archway into the courtyard, and there are glass doors in front of you and to your right. 

Turn to the right, you can walk through the doors and down stairs of brick to reach our cavelike dining hall. It is, for all intents and purposes, in the basement - peering out the windows brings you almost level with the surface of the inner moat. Everything in the dining hall is white - the walls, ceiling, tables, chairs. It is far more intimate that the Boston DH, with tall chairs and round tables for four and five people. At one end of the hall is a spread of bread of all kinds - sliced and in roll form, as cookies and crackers. Large glass pitchers of water and juice litter the table, and condiments like a thick chocolate spread and ground cinnamon live in a little wicker basket.

If you choose to walk straight through the MC courtyard, you are presented with - that's right, more stairs. Up a narrow staircase to the left leads to the second tower, more dorms, and the castle resource center, a library with bookshelves against every wall. Up a wider staircase to the right are the rest of the dorms, as well as Sophie's Lounge, a bright blue room with these vivid cherry-red couches. Along the walls of the staircase and the hallways outside Sophie's are group pictures of every group of students to come to the castle. At the top is a crisp picture of last semester's familiar faces, spiralling down, down, all the way to spring 1985, a picture of students whose bright, colorful smiles have faded, the photo worn down by twenty three years of wear and tear. You can climb the stairs and watch clothing change, watch haircuts come in and out of style. The students at the bottom look like miniature adults in slacks and sweatervests - the students at the top are in bright sweatshirts and jeans, the image of college kids that our culture has embraced and generalized in books, television and movies.

One thing is the same about each and every picture. Aesthetics aside, from each group, you can feel the glowing mix of excitement and disbelief that they are actually here, standing in a castle in Europe. They are all preserved forever in the state I now find myself in - curiosity, wonder, a sense of adventure, of recklessness, of not taking one minute of this experience for granted. It is something we all share, each of us, from myself, to my friends of this fall, of two years ago, to strangers captured in a photo years before I was born.

Wow.

Things have been pretty low-key around the castle for the past day or so. We're all taking things easy, sitting around with Eurail maps splayed out in front of us, computer screens glowing, trying to plan thirteen weekends traveling across an entire continent. It's not easy - common expressions are scrunched, frustrated faces, wrinkled brows, eyes widening at prices - screams of "We're never going to get out of Croatia!" echo through the castle.

This weekend, a whole mess of us are headed down to Bruges in Belgium to enjoy chocolate, waffles and beer, and experience the first chaos of traveling abroad from the castle. The next weekend is mostly one-night or day trips, as Carnival parades through Well.

There are now pillows light as air floating through the sky, white clouds in stark contrast to the blankets of grey that we've seen for the past five days.

I'm going to walk in the sun while it's still around, turn my face into the light and bake like a cold-blooded animal seeking warmth. You forget what the sun is like after days of rain, and - let's face it - I've got even more days of rain ahead, so I'd best bask and take it all in while I can.

life's what you make it.

(no, for the record, not every blog will end with hannah. it just fits here.)

arrival

It is 2:55 pm, Netherlands time. I have been awake for a good day, but 24 hours and 3444 miles later, we are here and it is wonderful. I warn you – this is going to be a long one.

Yesterday began with a frenzy of activity, as halfway through the pre-departure orientation, I realized – I don’t have my passport.

I was like – SERIOUSLY? First my ATM card, now my passport? But luckily, it was safely at home, and Billy drove it in to Boston for me. I spotted him looking confused, wearing the black track suit he wears every day (it’s the only thing that fits him – he refuses to buy bigger pants) on Boylston street around noon.

The rest of the day was harried goodbyes, chicken pesto paninis and a lecture on Anne Frank in a warm Emerson classroom. The air was hot and heavy and a good half of us were asleep.

Traipsing onto the buses that would ferry us all to the airport, I realized how surreal this all was. There were my friends, standing outside the bus, waving goodbye. I felt – just for a second – like I was on a different bus entirely, a big yellow one with green seats and a bunch of screaming children. It felt, quite honestly, as though I was just leaving for a really long field trip.

The buses peeled away, and, as is typical of Emerson College, they peeled off in two completely different directions. We all arrived at the airport, though, so it worked out in the end.

For the record, the last time I was ever really in an airport was when I was five years old, so my mental picture of airports came mainly from episodes of Friends – like the first season finale, or the series finale, where Ross chases Rachel to the gate with remarkable ease. My reentry to Logan Airport after fifteen years, then, came with images both extremely familiar and extremely foreign.

For instance, airports (or, you know, Logan, at the very least) really does have those floor to ceiling windows that those bidding farewell to someone can press themselves up against in passion, breath fogging up the glass. The architecture is very epic – square pillars and circular beams and fans that shine lights and cast shadows that move and are honestly kind of creepy. Thanks, Kevin Bright and Marta Kaufman. What I didn’t expect, and perhaps what I should have expected, was the cacophony. There were TVs blaring CNN reports on the Holocaust, and at the same time, male and female voices blared over the speakers announcing flights and delays and other assorted information.

Our flight began, naturally, with me seated smack in the middle of a row, and there were two crying children a few rows ahead. Yes. Two. I mean - really? I like children, you all know I do, but my god.

Then, a genius Emerson College student started playing with the remotes built into our seats, and this flight attendant with a bubble of red hair came over and said that she’d better explain how the remotes worked.

"This button calls me," said the flight attendant, gently reprimanding. "This one doesn't call me."

I guess you have to have a good sense of humor to be a flight attendant.

Airplanes boggle my mind. I mean - think about it. They are large cylinders with wings, and they float in the sky carrying people inside them. HOW DO THEY DO THAT.

Honestly. We were, at the highest, FORTY THOUSAND FEET UP IN THE AIR. THAT IS VERY HIGH AND I AM WRITING THIS IN ALL CAPS FOR EMPHASIS. HOW INSANE IS THAT. FORTY THOUSAND FEET.

I’d pee myself if I ever had to be a pilot. Because airplanes seem so flimsy. Metal and people, hanging out up in the sky. You rise, rise, rise, and the air pressure rattles your teeth and blankets the air so that when you speak, it’s muffled, the sound losing its luster, muted.

The flight itself was, on the whole, pretty boring. I watched Cars (cute movie), ate some chicken that was this milky shade of white and I was really concerned before taking a bite, but it was warm and solid and tasted like chicken, so I figured that was a good thing.

I’d like to share with you something I wrote on the flight, which I think sums it up very nicely:

“It’s 4:35, Netherlands time, which makes it 10:30 in Boston. I am sitting here on a plane over the Atlantic Ocean, listening to Hannah Montana. We’ve got the party with us.”

I love myself.

So we rattled to a landing at around 7:45 am over here, wandered into a hazy Amsterdam morning, only to be greeted by an H&M, Loreal and Heineken ads, and an elderly bus driver named Jacques. Three drowsy hours passed us by, with green expanses and black sheep and windmills and McDonalds flying by the windows, and I must have fallen asleep because before I knew it, here we were at the castle, red brick and troll bridges.

“Let’s be rebels and hang out under the bridge,” Katherine said, until she noticed the moat. It figures.

I have to go have a life. More to follow.

We’ve got the party with us.