Anish Diwan
- Nov 19, 2022
- 4 min read

Delayed reactions

It had been a solid few months since I had read something as vivid as the thing I read today. Now, allow me to shamelessly use that vividness in an attempt to keep you interested in the rest of this article. Only after the trapeze artist is safely on the ground again do you realize you were holding your breath the entire time.

I’ve been in the Netherlands for 94 days now (it isn’t a perfect 100 yet because I’ll be quite busy next week and will not have the time to write stuff on the internet, but I find that quite funny). Coming back to the profound little line from the intro; I have only recently come to the realization that the things I believed to be normal are not quite fully normal. It was my understanding that I’d have absolutely no issues moving to a new country and living with a bunch of strangers. To clarify, I was absolutely right! I’ve more or less cruised through life for the last three months. But now that I’ve found the time to relax a little, I can’t wrap my head around the fact that that has happened. I can only assume that the part of my brain that was supposed to keep track of conscious thinking was, for some reason, hibernating for the last three months and has now suddenly woken up from its slumber, hungry for its share of brain juices. And as long as the juices are flowing, I’d love to sit back and reflect on what the hell has been happening around me while conscious me was asleep.

Can’t believe I met such nice people

I’ve met some really nice people in Delft. The house is a bit shitty but I think the people greatly make up for it. It’s almost certain that you come back home from a long day and then end up chilling around playing board games or discussing random things. I know some of these look like stock images. I think that's a good sign.

I’ve learnt to open beers with other beers!

I wasn’t expecting alcohol to be as commonplace in my life as it currently is. Back in India, grabbing a few beers after work is a custom you only adhere to if you’re a borderline alcoholic. I guess the borderline is just in a different place in Dutch culture. There’s a bar in almost every building at my university. At the risk of sounding like an alcoholic to my Indian audience, I have to admit that I really like it. I speak from nothing concrete but my experiences when I say that back in India the image of “decency” is quite strongly linked with one’s social interactions. While I believe that social interactions are a big part of your behaviour, I don’t really agree with the idea that personality traits such as “decency” are a function of factors such as social alcohol consumption. Further, dropping these ideas can lead to much more open discussion about addiction and overdose. In any case, I can now open beer bottles with just other beer bottles!

Delft is smaller than Vellore

If you don’t know what Vellore is then I feel both happy for you and sad that you missed out on the experience of a lifetime. Nevertheless, all you need to know is it’s a tiny ass town in India. Delft happens to be even smaller! I guess I still haven’t wrapped my head around the incredibly low populations of European towns. But don’t get me wrong, Delft is far prettier. Between the two huge churches, the museums, and Ikea, Delft pretty much takes the prize for “most compact pretty town” in my books. I added Ikea to that list because it is a magical place full of pretty little things. Plus, you can easily kill a whole day roaming around in Ikea (kind of like roaming around in a museum in my opinion). While we’re on the topic of historic things, it’s insane how well some of these monuments have kept their shape. I guess fewer invasions, political stability, and the lack of colonization do help keep architecture intact.

India has amazingly responsive businesses

I guess it was ignorant on my part to boldly assume that European cities will have a much better customer experience. But sadly, most shops here shut down at 5 PM on the dot! And delivery services take longer than a week for most products. Now, I wouldn’t go so far as to say that being the opposite of this makes India better – after all people only do late night shifts because they have limited options – but, I really do miss the freedom to not plan my grocery runs. I guess that’s the price you pay to live in the "first" world.

I eat lava on a daily basis

I didn’t normally think of myself as someone with a crazy high spice tolerance. But boy was I proven wrong. From the looks of it, I can handle spice that mere mortals like my flatmates cannot even fathom breathing around. It’s the most awkward interaction when you offer someone really delicious food that they would have absolutely loved had it not been for their immunocompromised taste buds. The drawback of my god-level tolerance seems to be that I cannot really taste the difference between two completely different non-spicy foods. The current theory among my friends is that my high spice diet has rendered my tastebuds insensitive to subtle nuances in food. I don’t really agree with that hypothesis but I guess different types of bread do have noticeably different tastes. On a side note, I absolutely love trying food from different cultures – especially Iranian food, which I believe is the perfect middle ground for a lot of different palates.