Column: a time to come and a time to go

We are back home! It was very nice to celebrate Christmas in the Netherlands and to see our friends and family. Yet it is also very nice to be in Verona again, after we have stayed in 10 different beds in the past 7 days.

For the first few days my head could handle that, but after that I woke up every morning completely confused, because I had no idea where I was anymore.

It is now a big difference: in the Netherlands it was a party every day, fun days with friends and family and a lot on the road. Now we have the entire Netflix series from The Witcher binged and already cycled 70 kilometers twice in the first week of the year. Nice too, but quite a change.

We've experienced it before, that feeling of falling into a hole, so luckily we can deal with it a lot better. It helps to just accept that you feel this way and then it will pass. If we go back to work, we will probably be less bothered by it.

What also contributes to the strange feeling is that we know that we are going to move back to the Netherlands this year. Christo is almost done with his PhD and as much as we have come to love Italy in the past 3 years, we both see our future more in the Netherlands than here.

I would love to teach again and Christo would like to continue in photosynthesis, but then at the University of Wageningen. So we know that we are going back and that we will probably end up in the vicinity of Wageningen, but how and what exactly is not yet clear. 

"Where would we be next year on New Year's Eve?" we wondered as we wished each other a happy new year. In the background we heard a few loose bangs from the fireworks and from the window we saw the beautiful ornamental fireworks being set off in Piazza Bra in the center of Verona.

Fireworks really aren't such a thing here. Next year we might be somewhere in the Dutch bang fest again. Or would fireworks be banned in the meantime? Who's to say.

We don't even know whether we are really happy to go back. On the one hand, Italy sometimes makes it very easy for you to long to return to the Netherlands.

When we got back from the Christmas holidays there were two letters on the doormat. The first from the GP post: our Italian GP will stop working on January 1st and that's why we have to choose another one. This is not possible online, by telephone or by e-mail, but I have to take this letter and our insurance cards to the administration office to pass on our choice.

I've been there a few times, three times when we got our pass, the health insurance card, had to apply and once every year since then to renew. I've never been in a queue for less than an hour, so good luck!

The other letter is from a collection agency of the municipality: it took 2,5 years, but they found out at the last minute that we also have to pay waste levy.

Rightly so, we were already wondering why we had never received a message about this before, but all red tape and bureaucracy I would rather have spared myself that this already entails. So it's not really nice to come home.

On the other hand, Christo and I both had the same strange idea in our heads in the Netherlands. Every time we walked outside and looked at the sky, we saw snow-capped mountains. But after half a second or less we realized that that was not possible at all in the Netherlands and that the snowy mountains in our heads were just the Dutch white clouds.

Then it is nice to look up in Verona and see how the familiar snow-capped mountain peaks are silhouetted against the clear blue sky.

So just as there was a time to come and a time for us at Christmas, so has our entire Italy adventure. Are we happy about it? Not really yet. Will we still be? We will see.

What I do know is that the idea that we are almost leaving also makes us very aware of all the beautiful and pleasant things Italy has to offer and that we will enjoy it to the full in the coming months.