viktoritilburg

I’ve got lots of stories of my adventures waiting to get told, the only thing that prevents me from telling them to you here on the blog is lack of time. So now I will tell you about my first Saturday in the Netherlands. While we’re on the topic of stories, I will write a guest column in the second issue of the I*ESN Magazine. Keep your eyes open for that. Possibly there might be an appearance of some sort in the student magazine in Tilburg, Univers, as well in the future.

Saturday, August 20 was my second day in Tilburg. I didn’t have any friends here, and few necessities to encounter. What do you do in such a situation? What would I do? The people who know me know that I would try to catch a football game. That was also what I did. The most important thing that day was buying a bike so that I could participate fully in the upcoming TIK-week. I managed to find a nice bike at the weekly Saturday market in central Tilburg. I paid € 100 for the bike and a lock. A little bit expensive, yes, but I don’t regret it for one second as the bike is still perfectly functioning.

The football game this Saturday was in Breda, a city situated 15 minutes by train from Tilburg. Rat Verleigh Stadion was unfortunately not very close to the train station as I had to take a bus to reach it. When I arrived to the stadium I remembered something hidden in my mind. After an absurd amount of FIFA and Football Manager games in my life I have come into contact with the club a few times. What I remembered after some visual stimulation was that NAC Breda is a team that wears Yellow and Black and they are proud to call themselves rats! The rival team of my beloved Djurgårdens IF is called AIK, and they could practically be a twin club of NAC apart from that the black color is more important than the yellow in AIK’s case.

I managed to buy tickets although you needed a club card to buy tickets. The man who was before me in the line let me buy a ticket connected to his card. NAC was playing Groningen, a club from northern Holland. Sometimes together with Heerenveen called Southern Scandinavia by Dutch people, for their tendency to buy Scandinavian players. Groningen had a few now as well, but only one Swede, their captain Petter Andersson. Munten was needed to get drinks within the stadium, I later discovered that this was a common phenomena in Holland, but it was strange to me then. The atmosphere in the stadium was surprisingly good. It reached its climax while the home team went from 0-2 down to a 2-2 draw during the second half. I really liked the experience there even though people at the stadium weren’t impressed when I told them that I am an exchange student in Tilburg. The rivalry between NAC and Willem II is strong.

Since were speaking about Black and Yellow rats, I would like to give you a short report on the situation in Sweden. Djurgårdens IF and AIK are two of the biggest clubs in Sweden in both of our national sports, football and ice hockey. The derby is called Tvillingderbyt, the Twin Derby since the two biggest clubs of Stockholm were founded in the same year, 1891. There was a Twin Derby in football yesterday. Djurgården were before the game 13^th in the league while AIK were 2^nd. We won 1-0 after a great goal by Kennedy Igboananike, and made AIK lose the title to Helsingborgs IF. The Twin Derby of hockey takes place tonight.  Unfortunately we’re one down in the first period as I write this, but that is not likely to be the result. I‘m going to the mentor dinner followed by the 80’s and 90’s party now, more coming up tomorrow.

Houdoe.