Making friends at school 🤝

All the Ukrainians I’ve met are incredibly hospitable and easy to talk to. My fellow language students are just as friendly. All in all, the vibes are good — helped along by a bit of stroopwafel-diplomacy. Let me explain…

Not just nerds

This summer’s language course starts out with twelve participants. Some are repeat apprenders — they already joined a session last year and wanted more conjugational visits (rightfully so). Others are doing this course for the very first time.

The participants are really diverse. We have a post-graduate student and paralegal, multiple retirees, one veteran who fought near Bakhmut, someone working for foreign affairs in the USA until Elon Musk (by the “DOGE” initiative) fired her along with 60,000 other employees.

Some are from the USA. Some were connected to the russian world, such as being married to a russian or studying its history. Someone else has a Ukrainian wife already, and is now learning the language. I’m the only one from the Netherlands this year.

In the current geopolitical context, there’s enough food for conversation. Most importantly though, what connects everyone is a genuine wish for Ukraine to thrive on its own terms.

Dropping Dutch candy!

When I left the Netherlands, I made sure to load my car with everything I might possibly need but also what I might possibly give. While Dutch cuisine is not that glorious, we seem to excel at the mundane things. I couldn’t bring bitterballen or cheeses (lacking adequate cooling capacity on the road), but I brought many other things — stroopwafels, Wilhelmina-pepermunt, liquorice, speculaasmolens, hagelslag, chocovlokken.

I’ve been giving out stuff to my co-students and Ukrainians whenever the occasion asks for it. Everyone knows and likes stroopwafels. Some people have heard about hagelslag but have never actually held it in their hands. The pepermunt, chocovlokken, speculaasmolens are all novelties to them.

And then there’s the liquorice — or ‘drop‘… 😈

There are three kinds of people — those who know drop and love it, those who know it and hate it, and the uninitiated who don’t believe me when I say they won’t like it. Take, for example, this young American co-student… She took a dropje like any other candy, despite my warning. Perhaps she thought I was joking and I was just trying to deny her candy. Perhaps she saw someone else eat the drop without issue and simply thought there was nothing to it. Perhaps she was just curious and assumed it would taste like stroopwafels or the other cookies I brought. Regardless, she was wrong and would soon learn that herself.

She put the liquorice in her mouth and smiled at the first taste, almost taunting me as if I’d been wrong and she actually did like it. But then she saw my lips slowly curl into an evil smirk, as her smile slowly melted into a face of desperation over the next five seconds. As the unstoppable aftertaste of liquorice starts to kick in, panic breaks out. Her lips tremble, her face morphs for each of the five stages of grief, her eyelids flicker so frequently they might as well signal SOS in Morse code. Soon after, she reaches for a paper wipe to get rid of the drop….

Anyhow, she recovered quickly and was unharmed. Apparently drop tastes like ‘cough syrup’ to most foreigners. I was surprised that the vast majority of the people actually liked the liquorice — the bag was soon empty!

Tulips

People love tulips but fake ones are the longer-lasting gift. And I can tell you that Ukrainians are truly happy with the wooden blue-yellow bouquets I bought.

A big shout out to De Hollandse Klompenwinkel. They provided the flowers in good quality and donated some stylish pencils to be given to the children in Ukraine. (Dear Betsy & Jan: I gave your package to one of the course organisers who works with children; thank you!)

Going out with the students and tour guide

We’ve been given many tours by Ivanka — an amazing person, tour guide and much more. After one of her tours, some of us wanted to have dinner together and we invited the tour guide to join us. Luckily she said yes!

Funny story. When we were ready to order food, we ordered for four people. Dinner was only served for two people — two simple dishes. That’s weird, but perhaps our plates (two complex dishes) were still coming. We waited five minutes before I asked “Should we ask where our food stays?” The response from the other person waiting was “No, it’ll come! Service in Lviv is slow and dining is about the togetherness”. OK, then — I’ll park my Dutch directness and exercise patience.

So, we literally waited for more than an hour before I ‘bluntly’ stood up around 22:00 and asked if my food was still coming. I needed to leave soon for curfew, so patience was up. Surprise, surprise — they completely forgot about the two other dishes. They offered a 15% discount. Also, the kitchen was closed they couldn’t even make me anymore what I ordered. By that time, I was fasting so long I wasn’t even hungry anymore. I just wanted to go come, so I said no. Suddenly the dish became free, but I declined again. They repeated their offer until I relented, so I ordered something after all — and had it in 10 minutes.

Going out with the class

My group mate and I have a teacher and a tutor with whom we work very intensely — for hours every day. Because my group mate won’t be with us next week, we decided to celebrate our two weeks of working together this Friday. There was some cake, some nice little gifts and we went out for dinner and wine.

We had some great conversations during our dinner. It’s fascinating to learn how (young) Ukrainian people experience life, their country, and the world. What struck me is how their views and mine differed so little — our information spaces seem to be effectively the same already. That by itself is already a huge accomplishment for a country that is fighting the masters of disinformation, and given that Ukraine was locked behind a soviet curtain for so long.

In conclusion

After our evening together, I walked back from the Lviv city centre via the park. As I walked, I thought about how easy it has been to make all these new friends in less than two weeks. In the fourth week new faces will join the course — and I’m sure I’ll make even more new friends

At 21:00 it was still light and I could make beautiful pictures of the park. I now leave you with these.