I didn’t realize how much I had bonded with some people here until I had to say goodbye. Most of them I will probably never see again. Maybe I will have some email correspondence with them. A few people asked me if I had any plans to come back. I told them that I had no such immediate plans but that I would like to come back sometime, which may have been partly a way to make it seem as though I was not saying goodbye forever.

The two people at Buildium who currently would need to approve my vacation requests both suggested that I take a few days off at the end of my last week. I hadn’t planned on this originally, but I took them up on it. It actually seemed a bit natural the way my main project is going. I had a few more things I wanted to see and do, some of which were in Delft (go inside the Oude Kerk, where Vermeer is buried; visit the Museum het Prinsenhof, whose walls still have the bullet holes from when William I of Orange was shot). Also, there were a couple of other touristy sights on my list which were nearby – going inside a windmill in Nootdorp and seeing the Verdespaleis in Den Haag. Instead of doing any of this, I spent extra days in the wood shop at Stichting Stunt. This was driven primarily by a self-imposed imperative to finish the prototype of the iPhone charging dock I had been working on all along. I wanted to leave them with a demo model that Hein could take to the street markets in order to see if it generates enough interest in order to justify producing more. Also I had given Hein orthographic projection drawings of the design, but there are so many interior cuts that said orthographic projections are quite hard to understand, so I hoped that the physical model could also clarify the design, should anyone else be tasked with producing more.

Honestly, I am doubtful about whether the product will be successful for them. It’s quite difficult to manufacture as it is. Hein came up with a smart way of making the process easier – namely making all the interior cuts while the piece of wood is still flat and then cutting the angle at which the phone reclines later out of the bottom. However, even with that, the interior cuts involve controlled depths with very tight tolerances – otherwise one drills through to the other side, which looks like an obvious mistake. It could still be simplified though. And the people there will be best positioned to do that.

Another factor in choosing to spend more days at Stunt was the opportunity to simply have some more time with the people there. I actually took breaks with them every hour. The fellow who always wears the blue shirt and gray sweatpants and complains about being there, whose name I still don’t know, told me about his YouTube channel. I asked what kind of material he posted on it. At first, he said porn. Then he more seriously told me about how he recorded and edited a screen recording of the South Park video game that he structured to be similar to an episode of the TV show. He told me either his YouTube username or his channel name, and when I told him that I would be looking on YouTube for his work, he immediately began downplaying it.

Lunch was another Friday get-rid-of-the-leftovers hodgepodge, featuring a quiche with meat, pasta salad with meat, some sort of saucy dish in which meat was the main component, a leafy green salad with meat, and bread rolls. The leafy green salad was easy enough to pick the meat out of, so I had some of that and a bread roll and then said goodbye to the group and made a point to thank Tom for fixing my bike. Then I made my own get-rid-of-leftovers dish which involved scrambled eggs with broccoli in between two pancakes that were about a month old. The pancakes were a bit dried out, but otherwise everything was surprisingly not bad.

I packed for a bit and then went over to the Feedback Fruits office. They were hosting after-work drinks for all the YES!Delft occupants. Ewoud (the CEO of Feedback Fruits) referred to the event as what sounded like a “burro”. I emailed him to let him know that I would be packing in the afternoon and then heading over for the “burro”, at which point, he corrected me and gave the proper spelling of “borrel”. It was nice to think that it was the Spanish word for donkey for a little while, but so it goes.

I made chocolate chip cookies for the office as a thank you for lending me a desk and including me in their picnic lunches every day. Credit to Em for the idea. It was actually a bit of a challenge because my kitchen was a bit of a bare-bones bachelor kitchen, lacking any implements with which to measure ingredients aside from the liter markings on the side of the electric tea kettle. I still have never seen any measuring cups in the Netherlands. One difference that surprised me was that people here measure ingredients primarily by weight rather than by volume. When I looked up an online recipe and converted the units to metric , they changed from cups to grams. So I borrowed a food scale from Lily at Feedback Fruits a couple of days prior. One thing that was actually somewhat convenient about measuring by weight is that before I started combining ingredients, I could weigh the bag of brown sugar and the container of granulated sugar and the bag of chocolate chips to see how much remained without having to transfer anything into another vessel. Otherwise, it was quite annoying. Also, there was only one baking sheet which was maybe .75 meters in each direction. It took me about four batches to use all the batter. The first batch came out flat. I found some online suggestions to chill the batter first in order to correct this. I put the batter in the freezer for about 20 minutes. The second batch was still flat. I left the batter in the refrigerator while the second batch was cooking. I also rinsed off the baking sheet to cool it and scooped the balls of dough onto the baking sheet and then put the entire baking sheet into the freezer (into which it barely fit) for 20 minutes. The third batch came out flat. I left the batter in the refrigerator overnight. The fourth batch came out flat. They tasted good though, and my new flatmate, Francesco confirmed this. He seemed to be genuinely impressed rather than just polite.

Everyone flipped their shit about the cookies. I was quite surprised. It’s as if they had never experienced chocolate chip cookies before. The receptionist for the building (whom I haven’t seen in the past four weeks or so once I had been able to get into the building on my own) sought me out to thank me for them and jokingly told me that she heard I would be staying for another six months. Two people asked what they were. I think that may be partially because they looked more like coasters than cookies. Ewoud told me that it was so American to make chocolate chip cookies, which I hadn’t considered, but I suppose that’s true. I had seen and eaten some cookies at coffee shops, but perhaps chocolate chip cookies are the cultural inverse of pancakes. Many people asked me for the recipe.

The borrel was nice. I think the companies in residence rotate hosting these sorts of events. Davey from Feedback Fruits was DJ-ing and played some Red Hot Chili Peppers and some music I didn’t recognize, possibly because I am too old for it. I chatted with everyone in the office who was there for a good while. Some people were surprised to learn that I was leaving. A few people were also surprised to learn that I was not a student. I had been pretty clear about my schedule with some folks, but to be fair, a lot of people there are students and therefore work part time. In talking with people, I learned that the Feedback Fruits office used to be in Amsterdam, but they moved it to Delft because they would have more access to developers there. Still, finding developers is a challenge for them. Apparently, many of the developers who come from the university are really more interested in science. A couple of people asked me my impression of the Dutch people. I still have a hard time describing it – maybe this will crystallize once I reintegrate back home. But I mentioned something about how I thought they were a bit more conscious and considerate of strangers in their environment than most Americans are. Marie Louise said that she thought Dutch people are slower to make new friends than some other cultures, but I told her they are much faster to do so than New Englanders are. I said goodbye to everyone with a traditional Feedback Fruits high-five and in some cases, a hug.

Florian was also having a simultaneous borrel (though he didn’t call it that because I think more English is spoken in his office) for an intern who was going away to Belgium. I rode over I his office for the first time (we had talked of doing this earlier since said office is on the university campus quite close to YES!Delft), and he showed me around a bit. It turns out that his office is inside a machine shop with formula one cars, human powered vehicles with aerodynamic shells, three generations of the championship-winning solar powered car named Nuna (some with custom covers in the colors of the Ditch flag), solar powered boats, and a rocket with which a university team recently attempted to set a world record but failed.

I treated Florian to dinner (credit to Em for this idea as well) at a restaurant owned by a friend of his. Somehow, it was the first time I have had dinner with any of my flatmates here. The only other thing close to this was when I offered Florian ice cream and he accepted and we ate ice cream in the kitchen for about 15 minutes. Anyhow, during this adventure, I have felt the most alone when I walked or rode by a part of town with a lot of restaurants or bars and saw so many groups of people enjoying each other’s company while I went on to assemble some sort of makeshift dinner for myself. It was really a relief to have a friend with whom to sit down and have a meal on my last night here.

He asked what I was planning for my next trip. I hadn’t thought much about it, but I mentioned that Em said she wanted to go to Spain. Florian told me a bit more about the love of his life (whom he lost) and his trip sailing around the world for two years. He had this idea before he met her (Laura), and when he and his friend were planning the trip, it was quite intense arranging sponsorships, finding a boat, planning the route, and so on. He was also working full time, and all of his energy was wrapped up in this endeavor. Laura broke up with him. In his post-breakup depression, he thought of canceling the trip, but his friend / sailing partner convinced him to keep at it. Then he went at it full bore. At first, they were planning on going for nine months, but they extended it to two years. They got a documentary crew to film part of it. He and Laura tentatively got back together before the trip started. During the trip, Laura flew out to wherever they were to visit every six months. Florian’s sailing partner’s girlfriend came out to visit periodically as well. After the trip, there was still more work to do. They wrote a book. They did speeches. It was still consuming. Laura broke up with him again. Florian talked about the girlfriend after Laura and the girlfriend after that and the most recent ex-girlfriend, who came to visit just one week before I started renting the room. It was clear that his sailing trip was an experience of a lifetime, but it also caused him to lose the love of his life (he referred to her that way multiple times).

Florian suggested that my upcoming weekend should be all about Emily.

I told him a bit about how when Em and I were discussing this trip to the Netherlands, I wanted her to come along, but she didn’t want to do this while I would be working and she would have nothing to do during the day. She said she would be more into the idea after we had a kid though – that traveling with a young child would give her more of a purpose. On his trip, Florian had met a few other people who were on extended sailing voyages, and he said that it was actually quite common for them to have kids while on their trip since they were living a carefree life and kids don’t have to go to school for a few years anyhow. I asked him about how people support themselves on these sorts of endeavors, and he said that they just save up for it. While sailing, it’s pretty easy to get by on €15,000 per year since one’s boat is one’s home, and one can fish for food all the time. It sounded less intimidating the more he talked about it – definitely would require more savings and planning than what I did, but it’s absolutely achievable.

We said goodbye first with a bro-hug as we retrieved our bikes. Then we rode in the same direction for a bit next to the town center, and said cheers with a smile and a wave as Florian turned off and disappeared into the center.

So there are actually a few people I met in the Netherlands whom I will get to see in the next year. Jubal, the drum and bugle coprs from Dordrecht that adopted me, are doing a US tour in 2015. And this November, the cofounders of Feedback Fruits are coming to a conference in Cambridge. I’m trying to coordinate with them some activities they might enjoy while they’re around – like seeing the Buildium Boston office perhaps and/or some other startup-like things in the area.

Also in addition to a potential visit to Spain, I am dreaming of a bike tour (probably leaving from home), but maybe in the Netherlands – I had often wished that I could just keep riding when I went on day trips to other towns. It’s a nice idea, at least.

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So I’m back now. Some of the comforts of home are great, but we still have a lot of settling in to this new-for-me (slightly less new for Em) house to do. I have a few more retroactive posts to write about the Netherlands though. There is so much I want to document and share with you all. And I look forward to seeing you all in person of course.