Student
Derek Pan

Tour de Holland in a Blink

Last Thursday I shuttled through the whole Netherlands within 30 minutes. How did I achieve that magnificent feat?

It was my supervisor’s last day in office before his summer vacation. After our meeting he went home. Many other colleagues also said ‘fijn weekend’ or ‘prettige vakantie’ to each other and left after lunch. Although I was physically in office, my mind was set in holiday mode; it’s hard to concentrate on work. Every other minute I took a peep at Facebook and somehow ran into a world map marked with places I’ve visited. A whim crossed my mind: to complete the map with the Dutch cities I’ve been to. I first tagged my internship places like Groningen and Arnhem, then the resorts of flowers such as Limmen and Lisse. Of course I also marked the big cities like Rotterdam and Eindhoven. Finally I jammed a Dutch map with more than 40 purple flags. ‘Wow, I really deserve a loyalty badge from NS!’ When I was narcissistically savoring the eternal glory of my travelling mileage, Niels, my knotsbal teammate, commented on my Facebook: ‘Doing a lot of quick travelling? :-)’ I didn’t get what he meant until I checked my page, where was suddenly full of statuses like ‘Derek Pan was in XXX.’ A few minutes later more friends complained that their pages were flooded by my posts. How come the places I tagged were open to others?! Some friends even teased me by ‘liking’ those posts, which made me feel more embarrassed. I was so repentant that I added up one more crappy post: ‘Stupid Facebook!’ I knew very well that I really was the stupid one. Instead of fighting to get rid of the Facebook Syndrome, I have a more practical way to avoid such embarrassment, that is, borrowed from the Dutch wisdom, to ‘kijken, kijken niet posten’. Vid of the Week Let’s take a review of this "cooooool" country.

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