My husband is a professor and has just gotten his sabbatical green-lighted. He’s been offered to work in the Netherlands.
On the one hand: Yeah! I’m so happy and excited!
On the other hand: Yikes! I’m so scared and nervous!
I’m sure I will end up posting on various aspects of this until you are so sick of hearing about it.
But here is my first dilemna: We have 4 kids (ages 5, 7, 9, and 11). We can just stay in the Netherlands for the summer, and come back before schools starts up again. This would be easiest and cause the fewest complications.
Or we could stay thoughout the whole fall semester, returning around Christmas. This might cause some problems with schooling, but we would stay for long enough for the kids to learn the language more thoroughly and get a real taste of living in another country.
Dopers are all brilliant, so give me your thoughts.
Nijmegen. I’d never heard of it, but it’s a mid-sized university town near the German border.
He is eligible to take off until Christmas. If we decide not to stay in the Netherlands, there are projects he can work on here.
P.S. Oh, I just noticed you are in Holland, so I guess you know where Nijmegen is.
I totally vote for staying. What an opportunity! IMO any difficulty with academic material in another language will be outweighed by the advantage of living in another country for a longer period of time. (I’ve done it, so I’m not just making my opinion up, but I am biased in favor of adventure and skipping US school time.)
It’s very exciting. I remember that when I was 12 my family went on sabbatical. It many ways it was rewarding and enlightening, but it was also hard because at that age you HATE being different from your peers, and in another country you for sure are.
I think my oldest will have the hardest time adjusting and fitting into his new environment.
I would go for the entire time. Think about it – when will you ever get such an amazing opportunity? The Netherlands is a wonderful place with lots of interesting attractions, museums and centuries of culture, as well as being very close to France, Germany, etc for short visits.
Also, while your kids may bitch about it now, they will most likely thank you later. The longer you are there the more time they will have to develop friendships and really immerse themselves into the experience.
I’d vote for staying,you’ll give your kids a wonderful life experience,great memories and a broader view of the world.
It will be a great education for them.
Here is a website you might find useful. It is a tip off to the nature of the town of Nijmegen that they have a webpage devoted to expats available in at least five languages other than dutch. In March the city government opened a special expat desk to help people with exactly the kinds of problems you will be looking at. So look at the wegbsite and send them an email asking any old questions you like. Between NXP Semiconductors, Royal Haskoning, UMC Radboud and the Radboud Universiteit Nijmegen, they are to the rafters in expats. Or would like to be, anyway.
For at least the two older kids, I recommend to you the plan my mother used when my father was sent one place and another by Uncle Sam for months at a time: she went to the schools, got the work we would need to have done, and had us do it. I think your kids will be fine with it as long as it is temporary. We moved here one June and it was not until that December that my kids really began to have adjustment issues – that was when it first became palpable to them that we were not going back. The first six months were all honeymoon really, other than the inevitable " I don’t eat weird food" thing which passed shortly after it became apparent that weird food was all the food there was.
This assumes that your kids do well in school and so on.
The children in Holland are thehappiest in the world, I hear, so come on over! You are close enough to me and to Maastricht (the Doper and the town) to have a three person DutchDope, after all.
Yes, of course, email away. Either here or at the email in my profile.
Kids start learning English around fifth grade-ish (which is what they call groep 7 here) so even your eldest is unlikely to randomly encounter a large number of english speaking peers. However, you have to bear in mind that the place where I live is not nearly as cosmopolitan as Nijmegen – and even here there is an English Club (consisting primarily of Brits of various stripes and plaids, with one token American which is me and one token Aussie). There are about 15 members and about twelve kids of various ages related to them. There are also several South American folks of various origin, all of whose children speak English as well as Dutch.
The thing is, you cannot count on randomly meeting people even if you are fluent in the language. You have to make up your mind that you will have to seek out folks and circumstances for your kids (and yourself) to socialize. The circumstances are there but you will have to find them. You will have less of this than I do because of the nature of Nijmegen; but it may fairly be said that one of the realities of living in Holland is that they expect you to seek any help/support you might need.
I think you would do well to take at least a crash course in basic conversational Dutch with your kids – the fact that everybody studies English in no way means that they do it *well *-- and the natives are quite appreciative of any efforts on your part while pretending and loudly proclaiming that you really shouldn’t bother because of course they speak english as does everybody. But no worries if there is no time; I had an American tenant who lived here for at least 14 years without ever learning a single word of the language as far as I could tell. The thing is that not speaking the language is quite isolating, which sort of defeats your purpose.
Much of the TV and radio is in English with subtitles, which your kids will likely make use of without really knowing it.
