Happy Holidays!
The holiday season is upon us once again! One of the fun things about being an international is that you get to celebrate not only your own traditional holidays but also those of your adopted country. I must admit, that 14 years ago, I had never even heard of Sinterklaas. Now, I get just as excited as the children when the boat comes sailing in from Spain. I can eat my weight in pepernoten and I try to write (most unsuccessfully) rhymes in Dutch. I even made a speculaas pie for my Thanksgiving dessert this year!
Everything from Halloween and Sinterklaas parties to Christmas borrels, baking Christmas cookies and the annual holiday dinner are included on the TIC “holiday season” agenda! These are just a few of the reasons I enjoy being a part of this great club. It makes me realize how lucky I am to have made so many friends from around the world.
Also, being so far away from home is a bit easier and a lot more interesting with TIC. I hope you have plans to join us for some of the many things we have planned and that TIC has helped make your life abroad a little more enjoyable. No matter how or where you spend this holiday season, I wish you and your family good health and much happiness for 2017.
Happy Holidays,
Yolonda
Movie review: The Light Between Oceans
by Anne van Oorschot
On Friday, 11 November, we had our first #TilburgInternationalClub movie evening of the club year at Cinecitta to see the film The Light Between Oceans. This beautiful film is based on the debut novel by M. L. Stedman and tells the story of Tom (Michael Fassbender), a Lighthouse keeper in Western Australia and his wife, Isabel (Alicia Vikander). Tom, a WWI veteran, is damaged by the atrocities he has seen as a soldier and feels his past will prevent him from having a happy future, so accepts the job of lighthouse keeper on a desolate island. He is surprised by the affection of Isobel, a lovely girl who lives on the mainland and they are married and head off to the island where they create a solitary, yet happy life together.
To their joy, Isobel becomes pregnant, only to suffer a miscarriage…and then another. Isobel is bereft, but one day, a small boat washes up on shore containing a dead man and a crying baby. Isobel sees it as a gift from God and convinces Tom to bury the dead man and they raise the little girl, whom they name Lucy, as their own. The little family leads a charmed life on their island and Lucy is nurtured and loved unconditionally. Several years later the family returns to the mainland for a celebration, and Tom meets a grieving woman (Rachel Weisz) who is desperately searching for her daughter who was lost at sea in a small boat with her German husband…
The 3 main actors were excellent, giving convincing and emotionally true portrayals of their characters, and the cinematography was absolutely stunning!!
While Tom tries to honor his family, he also tries to secretly reassure the grieving mother that her daughter is safe and well loved. In spite of his best intentions, that – of course – goes wrong and leads to emotional heartbreak and near disaster…
What I found most memorable about the film was a comment made by Frank, the German father of the 
lost little girl. Via a flashback, we learn about him through his wife as she remembers her lost love. After the war, Frank is very discriminated against and shunned due to his German heritage and his wife marvels at his seeming inability to become angered and resentful of the prejudices he encounters. He tells her, “You only have to forgive once. To resent, you have to do it all day, every day. You have to keep remembering all the bad things.” A good lesson from a stunning film!
Watch for more TIC movie nights in the New Year and plan to join us for a good film followed by a drink and snacks to start the weekend off in a relaxing way.
Back at home… sort of
by George Oeser
In 2013, my husband, Rick, and myself got on a plane and flew to the Netherlands. We had no idea what to expect, we had signed a lease for an apartment we had never seen in person and we were moving to a city we didn’t know existed a few months earlier. The one thing we knew for sure is that we didn’t know a single person in #Tilburg. We were excited and frightened in pretty much equal amounts.
Within just a few weeks we had learned (more…)
Book review: The Heart Goes Last
by Coree Forman
On 3 Nov, 7 TIC members got together for a cup of tea and a book club discussion of The Heart Goes Last by Margaret Atwood.
Those of us who had read the book enjoyed it, but all agreed it was a bit “all over the place,” with story beginning miles away from where it started: from a dystopian community project gone awry, to Elvis impersonators and sex-robots in Las Vegas. Luckily, Anita had done some research and was able to inform us that the book was originally written and released as an ebook serial, which may explain why (more…)
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