Not Everything in Holland is Flat
And I leave that title as that, free for your interpretation.
But yes, indeed, most of Holland is flat. And some parts of Holland are even lower than sea level. Thanks to the dykes and canals, they somehow managed to prevent floods from happening. The last great flood happened about 50 years ago in the 1950s.
Today, I visited the town of Leiden, location of the oldest university in Netherlands. Its like Oxford and Cambridge where the whole town is full of University buildings. The moment you arrive at Leiden Central, you can see one huge building with is the University Leiden Medical Centre. And yes, the whole town is full of students and I can imagine it being empty during the summer holidays like in Boston.
I’ve meet up with a friend of my father, who is a lecturer in Leiden. Bapak Suryadi hails from Pariaman in Sumatera Barat, and has been living in Leiden for the last ten years. It became a history lesson walking around with him. He told me that Bung Hatta, one of the founding fathers of Indonesia, used to live in Leiden as he planned for Indonesia’s independence. We even talked about of the failed Silungkang rebellion in 1927, of which many who ran away to Singapore and Johor in order to flee the Dutch persecution. One of them is of course my grandfather. Bapak Suryadi is also helping me in finding out a certain Ambassador from the Acehnese Kingdom who died when he was in The Hague, and was accorded a Royal Burial. His grave is somewhere in The Hague’s Royal Cemetery, which a friend of mine told me to visit when I am in The Hague.
And of course we talked about the Dutch education system. I was proud to hear that there is a special Chair for Malay studies in Leiden. However, not many Malaysians are willing to study in Leiden. We could learn a thing or two from Leiden. Like Cambridge who keeps the original copy of Sejarah Melayu, Leiden too keeps manuscripts and letters from the Malay Sultanates. And walking around Leiden, you will find a lot of poems written on the walls, and a certain Chairil Anwar wrote one.
Well, after the visit to Leiden. I do miss my student days in London. But I guess, I do have to remember that there are other places that I could go to study apart from the UK. Or even the US. Indeed, not everything in Holland is flat. For even the wealth of knowledge here could be higher than the Everest!
