Scavenging

As our last orientation event, the IES students were required to participate in a scavenger hunt with the other undergraduate international students. We were divided into groups and given a map, a mascot, and two hours to find the answers to a bunch of questions about the city. Nobody was particularly enthused about this task until the program directors told us that each member of the winning team would win a 25€ gift certificate to go out to eat somewhere (quite a lot when you consider that the Euro has averaged about $1.50 since we’ve been here). But even with this incentive to spur us on, the scavenger hunt didn’t seem like the greatest idea. Our groups were just a little too large to keep track of, and the time crunch combined with the heat of the afternoon sun made the task more stressful and confusing than fun. Nevertheless, we tried to find a couple of items on the list, and got to know each other a little bit in the process.

My group had nine students, including a girl from Sweden, a girl from Spain, a boy from England and… another student from Williams! That’s right. One of the girls in my group looked really familiar, and I concluded that I’d seen her on my college campus before. Williams is a small enough school that even if you’ve never actually met a person, you’ve probably seen them around or heard their name in passing. Sure enough, when I asked if she went to Williams, she said yes, and then, “I thought you looked familiar!” Her name is Annelise, and she’s studying with CIEE – another study abroad program that I had also considered. I thought it was pretty funny when our group got a cow as our mascot.

I disavow all responsibility for the poor quality of this picture. One of my groupmates took it.

In addition to answering questions about the city and finding all the buildings that will be useful to us as students, we were supposed to take pictures of our mascot with some hallmarks of the city of Amsterdam. Crazy decorated bicycles were one hallmark, tourists were another. Now, in America you can get away with almost anything if you tell people you’re on a scavenger hunt, but this doesn’t seem to be a universal truth. Most of the people we talked to, while helpful, were also really confused. Some of them were outright suspicious, like the group of tourists we asked to pose with us before we found this group of Spanish guys.

Dogs, apparently, are a third notable feature of Amsterdam. We were supposed to take a picture of our mascot with somebody’s pet dog, so we flagged down a man who was walking his dog and asked him to help us out. We tried to take a picture of the cow next to the dog, but the dog kept trying to bite it. His owner asked if he could put the cow in dog’s mouth, and we thought that would make a funny picture, so we said yes.

It did make a funny picture, but the dog thought his new toy was for keeps. He sat there with his mouth clamped around our cow, and absolutely refused to open up. We all thought it was hilarious, but his owner was clearly mortified. He tried to get the cow out of the dog’s mouth, to no avail.

After five or ten minutes of struggle, we decided to give up on the cow and go on our way. Of course, as soon as we did this, the dog dropped our mascot and we picked it up. It was only slightly worse for the wear…

We were nowhere close to winning by the time we made it back to base, but there was a barbecue for the international students afterward, so at least we got a free meal out of it. I also met by far the most stereotypical international student I’ve ever seen – a British girl who started chatting with us while we were in the line for food. She didn’t want anything from the barbecue, she said. Then why are you standing in line? We asked. “Oh,” she replied, “I just love a good queue.”