Ekaterina Netchitailova

But let’s go back to Belgium during my student years there. In 1999 I had a bachelor degree in interpreting and translation, with distinction, and I was in total love with Belgium and Brussels.

Life was good there. Belgian people are very friendly and fun, food is fantastic, and Brussels is a very cosmopolitan city, due to the fact that some many important headquarters are there, including NATO and The European Union. Different languages are being spoken on the streets, there are international parties each weekend, and the whole city of Brussels is culturally diverse. I loved being there.

After getting my bachelor, I did a master’s degree in international politics at the University of Brussels, ending up working there part-time, and also interpreting at the Belgian Commissariat for refugees and stateless persons. I was happy and fulfilled. I made many friends, and lived in a small studio overlooking the cemetery, which was a much better place than my first room in the student house, with weird shower’s facilities in the basement.

However, I was a Russian citizen and there was always a problem with my visa if I was planning to stay. And I did want to stay. I loved the idea of a unified Europe, I loved different languages and cultures, and when the news came that I had won a bursary to do another master’s degree in Amsterdam, I decided to accept the offer. My mum and her husband lived in the Netherlands then, and having so successfully settled in Brussels, I assumed that it would be as easy in Amsterdam. I was very young, very curious about the world, and very naïve.

And so, on one sunny day in August, my mum and my stepdad came to collect me from Brussels, to drive me to Amsterdam where we had somehow managed to find a room, in one of the suburbs, as the renting market was tough. But I would share the house with my classmates at the master’s at the University of Amsterdam, and I would be able to spend more time with my family. It looked like a win-win situation, especially that I proved to be good in studying and a bursary in Amsterdam: who would refuse it really?

And so, we left Brussels in a rented van, carrying my belongings. I was leaving five years of my student life. I was leaving a city I fell in love with, very nice friends, and where I felt like it was home, after so many years.

It was right when we left Brussels that I started to cry. It downed on me then that I was leaving something very precious. I was already, technically an immigrant, was I really fit to make it in another country? What was I really thinking when I had accepted the bursary offer? Shouldn’t I have tried to rather continue making it in Brussels and somehow to prolong my visa there? Would I enjoy Amsterdam as much as Brussels, since, well, they didn’t speak French on the streets? Wasn’t it rather for my love of the French language that I had left Russia in the first place?

Yes, I was crying, but the way back was cut off. My Belgian visa was about to expire and there was nothing I could do to reverse the situation. I was moving to a new land.

Yes, I was crying, but I stopped crying once we entered the city of Amsterdam in our van. It looked so gorgeous, welcoming and sunny, and I was about to experience yet another incredible adventure in my life.

Who knew that this adventure would culminate in a spell in a psychiatric hospital when I turned twenty-seven years old, in my first ‘psychosis’?

But let’s start from the beginning in my next post: Welcome to Amsterdam.