My blog went silent in March. I posted once in April. Nothing went live in May and June. The biggest reason for that, as I've in my previous post, was my grandma's passing after four weeks in hospital and three weeks in a hospice. That wasn't the only reason though. There were other, more cheerful reasons, such as completing my first year of university. Making friends who kept me entertained with top-tier memes. But most importantly: I spent a lot of time traveling.

Let's go back to February. After visiting Paris, I chose the Dutch city of Dordrecht for my next destination of the Twelve Cities Challenge. I went there by boat on the first sunny day of the year. and explored the city center. In March, I took the train to The Hague and did the same thing there. We did the things a typical tourist should do: we visited a medieval jail and the Binnenhof, where the Dutch government resides. We were good stereotypical tourists.


I never got around to writing about Dordrecht and The Hague, because I had to survive my third block at university. Once finals were over, I got on a plane to Austria. I spent a full day in Vienna, where I watched the marathon and walked along the banks of the Danube in search of street art. The next day, I took a boat down the Danube to Bratislava, the capital of Slovakia. Bratislava became city number for out of twelve for the Twelve Cities Challenge, as well as the place where I added another scare to the collection on my knees during a mountain biking trip that one-upped my Lao cycling adventure in terms of bizarreness. It was an awesome trip.

Upon return from Slovakia, I unpacked my bag only to pack it again the next day for a trip to Ireland. I was going to meet up with a friend on the Emerald Isle, but things didn't go as expected. I ended up third-wheeling my way to Cork, then found myself in Belfast with two Slovenian girls whom I met on the day that we left for Northern Ireland. The three days I spent in Belfast flew by, filled with good music, bad ideas and endless shouts of "Oh, me wee legs! I need to rest me wee legs!"


I returned home only to rush to the hospital and visit grandma. Traveling was put on the backburner for a while, but I did manage to visit Ella from Ella Was Here in Ghent. We had a Eurovision viewing party in an Airbnb, I hid under a blanket as the results came in and did the "Mezdi dance" after watching too much Ex On The Beach: Double Dutch. City number five was firmly in the pocket after that weekend.

In June, I visited my only true friend from my college days. We spent the day in Breda, where I kept getting distracted by street art in the alleys branching off the main streets. It was a relaxed, fun day that brought me one step closer to completing the Twelve Cities Challenge.

In all those months, I didn't blog about any of these trips. Not even once. You know what that means: This blog is going on a digital trip all over Europe. Buckle up, it's going to be a weird ass ride full of random nonsense and bad ideas. In other words: Your regular Lost in Translation content will be back soon.

My grandma was hospitalized in early April. My family and I weren't too bothered; Grandma had been hospitalized quite often in the years since her younger brother's death, which pushed her into a state of apathy towards life in general. Yet every time she was hospitalized, she looked Death in the eyes and said: "I don't think so. Not today."

While my grandma was recovering from pneumonia, I traveled to Austria. Slovakia. Ireland, Nothern Ireland, Belgium. While I was in Belfast, my parents were called into the hospital to say goodbye to grandma. But once again, grandma looked Death in the eyes and said: "I don't think so. Not today."

May rolled around. I spent a weekend in Ghent with Ella from Ella Was Here. I woke up in the early hours of Saturday morning, thinking there was something wrong with Grandma. My parents didn't call me though, so that night I watched the Eurovision Songfestival with Ella as if nothing serious was going on back home. Australia's song struck a chord with me. Its lyrics were based on the singer's experience with postpartum depression. "It feels like zero gravity". In the weeks that followed, that line would describe my entire emotional state.

My grandma turned 86 on May 19th. She'd been transferred to a hospice three weeks earlier, her health deteriorating every day. I refused to say goodbye to her on her birthday, although grandma had already made up her mind. "You guys have to clean up well today," she told us, "because I won't be here tomorrow."

The next day, my grandma passed away. She passed away in the town where she was born, on her own terms, on the day she had in mind. And we were left behind. I cried in lectures. I missed seminars. I addressed almost 50 envelopes with mourning cards. I arranged the pictures for the funeral. I wrote a eulogy. I did more to organize the funeral than my family had expected. I floated through the days. It did indeed feel like zero gravity.

Time stood still for me, but moved on swiftly for everyone else. I remember standing next to grandma's coffin, more than 80 pairs of eyes on me as I read the eulogy out loud. I remember my nose starting to drip and tears streaming down my face as I told about grandma singing me songs about horses and saying "So!" when she was proud of me. I remember falling sick after the funeral. I remember breaking down from exhaustion.

Three weeks after the funeral, I was far behind on all my university assignments. Once I'd finished those, I finally had time to cry and mourn. It didn't help much. My grandma and I had a strained relationship. She never truly acknowledged my achievements, instead changed the topic to those of my cousins. I never truly tried to connect with her, because she preferred my cousins anyway, I thought.

Almost all of June was spent in my zero gravity state. I was angry. I tried to forgive my grandma for the way she'd treated me, because I know she was a product of her time. But I spent nights crying and asking an empty room why, just why couldn't she tell me that she was proud of me, that she loved me, that I mattered. Why?

I crashed down to earth after handing in my final university assignment. It signaled the end of the ordeal that started in April. So here I am now, not knowing how to start over again, where to go, or how to deal with all the unresolved issues that grandma left me with. I guess, as always, that this just means I'll continue posting on my blog to escape life. I guess, for now, that that'll do.

It's 2005. I'm nine years old and I love athletics, especially the high jump. Today, it's not going as well as I'd hoped though. I'm doing something wrong, but I have no idea what. My trainers are nowhere to be seen. An older man comes up to me. On his jacket, the logo of athletics club Ilion from Zoetermeer can be seen.
"Try to start your run-up from this point instead," he advises me. I put my marker on the spot he's pointing at. In my next attempt, I jump to a new personal best.
"Well done!" the Ilion trainer says when I tell him I just jumped a new PB. I go on to find my own trainers. When I tell them, I hear that it's "cool, but Kimberly jumped ten centimeters higher".

It's 2008. I'm 11 and my interest has shifted to the long jump. I'm not the best jumper around, but I've improved a lot over the past year. For once, a trainer of mine actually sees me jump at a track meeting. "If you jump over 3.5 meters, I'll buy you ice cream," he says. I'm elated. He's often made this deal with his other pupils. Never before with me. In my next attempt, I fly to 3.52. I never got my ice cream.


In 2009, I meet Lisa in the pouring rain. Like me, she does not have a big group of girls to train with at her club, AV'47 from Boskoop. We become good friends in no time. Soon, I'm dumping my spikes and clothes near her stuff and often sit with the AV'47 group during track meetings. I feel welcome there. I've never felt that way with people from my own club.

2011. At fourteen, I join the training group for older teens. I regret it within a month. Whenever we have to do something in pairs, I'm always the one left alone. Everyone is focused on the shot put and discus, so I'm always doing my long jump exercises by myself. At track meetings, there's no one there to give me advice. No one, except a trainer from AV'47. Sometimes I wish I was a member of that club.

It's now 2013. I've been practicing with the javelin for the biggest track meeting of my season: the heptathlon on my home track. I break the magical barrier of 20 meters that summer. Suddenly, the trainers are very interested in me and my progress.
"You did so well today!", one of them says.
"Thanks," I say crudely, knowing this interest is temporary. At the next track meeting, my javelin falls just short of 20 meters. No one even looks at my final attempt.


Two months later, I twist my ankle while playing soccer at school. I can't run, but I can throw a javelin if I wear my high top sneakers, no problem. When my trainer notices, he says: "What are you even doing here?"

I fall off my bike in 2016. My toenail turns blue and wearing shoes hurts. I start a 3000-meter race anyway, because I love to run. I've given up on jumping, as no one wants to be my trainer. No one wants to train a runner at this club either, so my dad has taken that upon himself. I have to be fair though: there's one trainer who would train me, but my college classes make this impossible. Secretly, I don't mind. I remember the way the group treated me in 2011 and this trainer hasn't even asked what's up with my current injury.
My toe makes me give up on the race after less than 1000 meters. The only person who asks me what's happened is, once again, a trainer from AV'47.

July 2018. I've decided that enough is enough. No one wants to train me, no one wants to train with me, no one respects my decision to stick with running. Why am I still a member of this rotten athletic clubs? Go where you're celebrated, not merely tolerated, right?
I decide to switch clubs in April, so I can run one last 5000-meter race in October, possibly attack my PB. I never run that race, since I'm still recovering from the antibiotics that ravaged my body after my wisdom tooth surgery. Six more months of being a member of a club that won't even acknowledge my existence. I count down to April 1st. I buy a top with the AV'47 logo on it. I fill the forms on their website out. I tell Lisa we'll soon be members of the same club. Mentally, I distance myself from my old club as much as possible over the course of the winter.

Today. April 13th, 2019. I've officially run my first race in my AV'47 jersey. Where, you might ask? On the track of Avantri in Schoonhoven, the club I joined 14 years ago, the club that treated me like shit for 14 years. I took the bronze. It felt like I'd given them the finger. I'm moving forward, away from Avantri's arrogance and cliques, and I'll never look back.

Source

The Charleston Church shooting, US.
Bataclan, Paris, France.
Zaventem, Belgium.
Manchester Arena, UK.
Christchurch, New Zealand.
It's happened often this decade: a brainwashed madman picks up a firearm and shoots people like fish in a barrel. Sometimes it happens close to home, sometimes a bit further away. But it never happens in your city. Right?

On the 18th of March, I get on the bus at 7.39 am. I'm annoyed. I usually catch the 7.22 on Mondays, but the bus drivers are striking and this is only the second bus passing through town today. I'm going to be late for my 9 am lecture at Utrecht University.
After 20 horrible minutes on an overcrowded bus, I get off at the subway station to catch the B-line to the train station. I'll be able to get on a train to Utrecht at 8.15 am. Then I see that the subway personnel is on strike too: the next subway won't leave for another 17 minutes. I think about my options, my two Monday lectures, the 4.5-hour break between them. Then I do something I normally wouldn't do: I turn around and go home.

It never happens in your city. After all, your city doesn't even make the news often. If it does, it's because the local football club is doing well, or because the university has won another award. Sometimes there's an article about chaos at the busy Central Station. Your city is doing quite well. Good things happen there.

"There's been a shooting in Utrecht," mom tells me, her eyes fixed on the screen of her phone. We're having a coffee at the kitchen table. I desperately need it; I've been working non-stop since my failed attempt at going to my morning lecture.
"Oh," I say, not too surprised. I'm used to Rotterdam, where shots are fired every now and then. "Where?"
"24 October Square," mom says as she looks the address up on Google Maps. "Is that close to university?"
"No. Uni is here." I point at the screen. "Quite far away actually."
Mom puts her phone down. "Maybe you should call grandma."
"Why?"
"She'll get worried when she hears about this."
"You think?" I know mom is right. Grandma does worry a lot about me whenever something like this happens. "Okay, I'll give her a call."

When the news breaks, you don't think much of it. Of course it's awful, but your city is still a big city. Shootings sadly happen. You just hope this incident wasn't inspired by Christchurch. More news trickles in. The situation is more serious than it first seemed. The shooter gets away. People are dying in the streets. The T-word gets thrown around: was it an act of terrorism? Do we have a terrorist attack on our hands?

My phone starts going crazy. My grandparents and dad have been called. They were very calm when I told them I was safe at home - that was before news outlets reported that the shooter is still on the loose. Now, everyone is worried. Classmates are checking up on each other in group chats. I get messages from the UK, Belgium, and of course Utrecht. My friends tell me how lucky I am that the strikes kept me from going to university today. Still, I'll have to go there today: I have an assignment to hand in during my afternoon lecture. I don't want to go though. I don't feel safe. I feel sick.
I text a friend who's in lockdown in a university building to tell her that I'll be coming over.
"Like fuck you are," she texts back. "You're staying home. I'll fight them if they penalize you for not handing a hard copy in while there's a shooter on the loose."
She's right. Of course she is. I'm staying home. I send my teacher a quick e-mail explaining the situation. Then I go back to what's most important now: texting everyone who's near and dear to me.

You sit down on the couch, phone in hand, and turn the tv on. You text your family and friends.
"Are you safe?"
"Where are you at?"
"Is there anything I can do for you?"
"Don't worry about me, I'm home."
Some reply immediately. Others, those who don't live or study in your city, bombard you with questions. A few haven't heard the news yet. You put your phone down a million times, only to pick it up the next second in hopes of seeing a reply from that one friend who hasn't answered yet.

Mom's skin is showing red patches. She says I have them too. We don't know what to do with ourselves. I guess we are in shock. We try to understand what's going on in Utrecht, but news comes slowly and half of it turns out to be false within 10 minutes of its being shared. The police are searching for a red Renault Clio. The license plate numbers are shared in a university group chat. The shooter is expected to head towards campus. Utrecht University officially closes its doors.

You slowly lose touch with reality. You're just sitting there on the couch, watching an endless loop of the Prime Minister saying that the situation is unsettling, that he's going to a crisis meeting. You see anti-terror units burst into houses, police officers pulling their weapons near a bank. There's talk of shots fired near mosques, multiple shooters, shouts of Allahuakbar. You just want it to stop. You become numb to the sight of the dead body under a white sheet next to the tram in which it happened. It's vehicle number 5014. You wonder if you'll find yourself on board number 5014 in the near distant future. You wonder what the shooter's motive was. You want to know more. You want to know less. You break.

Just before I can start crying, I get off the couch. One death has been confirmed, there are possibly as many as nine wounded. The city is in lockdown. I've been watching the news for four hours. I can't take it anymore.
"Mom, shall we sow some seeds?"
I just want to do something productive. Something positive. The seeds for our vegetable patch need to be sown anyway.
Mom and I fill tiny pots with soil. The tv is on in the background. We hear that the suspected shooter has been identified, but not found. We focus on our deeds. With every seed I sow, with every new life I plant, I think of the victims of the shooting. This is how I commemorate them.

You try to get away from it. You try to do something else. It doesn't work. You can turn the tv off, but your mind is still there, in the chaos of your city. You look out of the window and fail to understand how everything outside seems so normal. You ignore the news for a while, but you still worry about your friends in lockdown. You try to distract yourself. Nothing works.

At 6 pm I watch the news once more. Nothing has happened, nothing has changed. I see the deserted streets of Utrecht's city center. I hear my university's name. Sadness washes over me again. Then, in the middle of the news bulletin, the reporter is interrupted: the suspect has been arrested!
I sigh with relief until my lungs hurt. My friends can safely go home. We'll finally know what exactly happened.

As I go to sleep on the 18th of March, the suspect's motives are still unclear. Three deaths have been confirmed. I am still in shock. I don't fully understand what's happened, but I soon will. The shooting had characteristics of a terrorist attack, but the nature of the shooting hasn't been confirmed yet. It's a dark, dark say for my city, my people, my country.

It never happens in your city. Until it does.

On my second day in Paris, I woke up to find the city covered in a thin layer of snow. I immediately got changed, grabbed my camera and hopped on the metro. I wanted to spend my day among the dead, starting with a visit to Cimetière du Père-Lachaise. The cemetery was closed though: apparently the French are not fond of people visiting graves in the snow. So I went to the next best place: les catacombes de Paris.

The metro quickly brought me to Avenue du Colonel Henri Rol-Tanguy, where I bought my ticket to the catacombs and started my underground adventure. A winding spiral staircase of over 100 steps took me over 20 meters down from ground level. I was all by myself already, which was good: it gave me the time to leave my sticker among the many others on the lamps that lit the way down. Soon I entered an old quarry. A few tourists caught up with me, so I lingered around for a while so I could explore the route all by myself. Usually the place is packed and lots of people choose for guided tours, but towards the end of January, I had the catacombs almost all to myself. Exactly what I wanted.


The first couple of hundred meters took me through the 15th-century quarries that provided the city with the stones it needed to build just about anything. I mostly paid attention to the stickers on the electric wires here (and left one of my last ones there too) while daydreaming about books I'd read that were partially set in the catacombs. In Michael Scott's books series about Nicholas Flamel, the catacombs were a prison for the Roman god of war Mars. In World War Z, the place was infested with zombies. None of that exciting stuff was happening during my visit of course, but thinking about those books added to the creepy ambiance.

I walked alone for a good 20 minutes, occasionally letting other tourists pass and get out of earshot again. Then I entered a big room that took me from the quarries into the domain of the dead. The catacombs weren't always a place to stack human remains in an "artistic" way: the started out as the simple quarries I'd just walked through and some of them always remained just like that. Others were turned into underground graveyards. Officially I should use the word "ossuaries", but that's basically a fancy word for a mass grave. The people buried here were for a big part buried in normal cemeteries right after their death, but overpopulation of both the city and its cemeteries plus health risks made it necessary for a lot of skeletons to be moved into the catacombs. You can still visit these poor souls there to this day: they're waiting for you behind the gate that says Arrête! C'est ici l'empire de la Mort.


Stop! This is the empire of the dead. I did not stop. I walked in while wiping my camera lens clean; the humidity in the catacombs made it fog up in no time. Some of the skulls around me were green with algae. It was a fascinating place that made me wish I could see more of the catacombs than what's open to the public. I'd already passed a tunnel that'd lead me to the lower catacombs, but it was completely locked off. For my own good of course, but I couldn't help but think about the things I could have discovered down there.

I roamed through the hallways, took pictures left and right until suddenly, from the deepest part of my soul, a voice screamed: "WHAT SICK BASTARD STACKS PEOPLE'S BONES LIKE THIS?!"
It was shocking, disgusting, but also morbidly interesting. Skulls formed hearts, crosses, weird house-like shapes. I can understand having to move a surplus of anything to a new place, but why were these people taken apart and used as pieces for a mosaic? They're dead, but still they're people... It made me feel so weird when I looked at the skulls, knowing they never chose to be part of this creepy display.

As I followed the route, I gradually felt more and more uncomfortable. I almost jumped out of my skin when I suddenly heard footsteps coming down the empty hallway on the other side of a fence. It turned out to be another tourist who was ahead of me on the route through the empire of the dead, but my mind immediately concluded that I was going to be killed by a World War Z zombie.

A bit further down the hallway, the poetry started. It was all in either French or Latin and all about death. The little bits of it that I could understand were quite depressing and since I didn't want to launch myself into my next existential crisis, I quickly walked past most of the poems. To be honest, I'd had quite enough of the place by then.

After almost two hours, I left the domain of the dead behind me. I hadn't come across Mars or any zombies, but I'd seen what I'd wanted to see for years: the skeletons residing in the catacombs of Paris. Call me morbid, but I loved it. Almost every second of it, until the walls started lecturing me about death and decay. The creepy vibes, the darkness... it reminded me of the Edinburgh Vaults. For someone like me, who got sick and tired of Paris' romantic clichés very quickly, the catacombs were a perfect place to go. Who know, maybe one day I'll go back and try to see more. I've heard there's a hidden movie theater somewhere down there. Care to join me on my search?