I was not ready for war in my home country. I was not prepared to hear about death every day… Europe had not seen war in nearly 70 years, already three generations had been born without seeing war; it was a thing of the past, an abstract situation that was horrible yet would not repeat itself in our lifetimes, or, at the very least, something from a different world, a different country far, far away, something I personally would never be touched by.

“Happy girls are the prettiest!” captions a photo of two young ladies in my newsfeed, their two bright smiles indicating that they are, in fact, happy, overriding the cognitive dissonance with the appearance of severely scarred skin, and leaving the impression in my mind that they are, indeed, pretty girls.

Met de eindrapporten op de post gaan we ontspannen het weekend in. De surf-skills worden nog een keer aangescherpt in Big Bay waar een andere groep Nederlandse studenten verblijft.

I’d known my grandfather Vladimir Konstantinovich Terletsky to be a soft-spoken and kind man. He’s the reason why I’d developed impeccable borsch-cooking skills in early adolescence: he had to have borsch every single day for lunch, and it just wasn’t good enough unless it was prepared by my mother or myself or my sister.

Poetic impression by Bauke Steenhuisen of the dissertation ‘A critical perspective on microarray breast cancer gene expression profiling’ by Herman Sontrop.

De wekker gaat om 6:40u. Om 7:00u groeten we Arno en bestellen we onze vijf yoghurt met fruit, 3 ‘americano’ koffie en 2 cappuccino. Om 7:30u stappen we in onze blauwe Toyota Corolla om vervolgens om 7:45 onze laptops open te klappen.

With its long history, and plenty to see and learn, the Botanische Tuin, or Botanical Gardens, has more to offer than you might have thought.

This week’s StrongStory comes from Olena Stepova, a Ukrainian blogger writing from within the occupied territories of the Luhansk region.

In de loop van het project verandert het tijdsbesef langzaam van ‘we zijn hier nu al…’ in ‘we zijn hier nog maar…’. Zeker nu het eerste concept van het eindrapport worden opgesteld en via WhatsApp de klaagzang over de tentamenweek in Nederland aanzwelt, groeit hier het besef dat we nog maar twee weken in Zuid-Afrika zijn.

Verdichting door Jan Beuving van de dissertatie ‘Dam safety concepts’(Jasna Duricic), verdedigd op 11 december 2014.