When, while trying to describe the amount of people present I told my collegae dining hall girls in Oxford ‘you could walk over the heads’ they stared at me with blank, slightly polite faces.

And when the students asked me to ‘please come over some time’ I very soon found out it meant ‘please don’t!’ The differences in culture between Dutch and English people are beyond understanding.

That same spring I fell in the river Thames with my bike. While climbing up the hill where my college was situated, a female student walked up with me. My skirt was still heavy with water, my legs were scratched and I had lost my clogs so I walked bare foot. She chatted away how I liked to be in England and Oxford, did I like my job, what did I do at home etc. At the end of our walk I told her what had happened.

She smiled at me, friendly, and said: ‘Yes, I thought you looked a bit funny!’

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