Sylvia's Journal

I left on the 3^rd to fly to Holland to be at a reunion of friends I studied with. My showing up from afar pulled in others who would otherwise not have come. The occasion was the annual reunion of people who had joined the student clubs during a period that included 1971, when I had started my studies.

I flew in a very full plane to Amsterdam. The plane was so full that people were offered money to give up their seat in a clever reversed auction system – you bid an amount you want Delta to give you in order to give up your seat. You can ask for $100, $200 or even propose you own amount.  The approach is full of delicious anticipation, possibly followed by disappointment.

On long trips we are allowed to overnight in Europe, a perk I never use since my trips are often too close together. But this time the timing was perfect. I reserved a small hotel close to the action in Leiden. It is funny that people who go to Holland always want to go to Amsterdam while the provincial cities are so much more pleasant, as interesting and much less a tourist trap.

As it turned out the hotel was a tiny (5 room) boutique hotel on Leiden’s main canal, where the original university still stands. I was given the room under the roof in a beautifully restored old ‘grachtenhuis’ (canal house) that was probably built in the 1600s. The hotel was even nicer than I had imagined from the already very nice webpages. I gave it a five star review on Tripadvisor.

The room wasn’t ready when I arrived early in the morning and so I missed the chance to take a little nap or even shower and change before my brother and sister in law came to pick me. They had organized a nice side trip that included a visit to a delightful museum in Wassenaar (Voorlinden) I had heard about. It is located in one of the old mansions in the, a wealthy suburb of Den Haag, the former home of a wealthy art collector, now open to the public.

Afterwards we visited my nephew and his young family in Den Haag for tea and catching up. And then it was time to go back to Leiden to my charming little hotel which I was anxious to show my brother. There we would meet up with another friend before going to the festivities that had triggered the stop in Leiden in the first place.

I arrived early in the morning in Amsterdam, got my rental car and drove to a hotel in Leiden where I claimed my nearly free night from booking our hotels in Southeast Asia through Hotels.com. Today was the Inaugural Address of my little brother as Full professor in Law at this oldest of all universities in Holland. All my siblings, their spouses and several of their kids had converged onto Leiden, not only to witness this amazing achievement but also to celebrate the 100^th anniversary of our father’s birthday on the 23^rd of June in 1916.

I found familiar faces sitting on a terrace across from the old Leiden University building, waiting for the ceremonies to start. It was a beautiful sunny day with Leiden at its best.

We filed into a special room in the old academy building from where we could see a closed on a TV screen the official welcome of my brother into the elite community of full professors. We all learned about what was on his CV, pages and pages, things I didn’t know about and we were all very proud. After that we proceeded to the old auditorium with its creaking floors, wooden benches and very high pulpit (much like a church) already filled with his current and past colleagues, professors, students and friends. It was all very formal and laden with tradition, with professors in full black robes filing in and sitting in the side pews. I should probably have known the title of the chief black robe but can’t remember. He is the one who holds an enormous silver staff which is put in a holder next to the pulpit and heads the line of professors in and out.

The nearly one hour speech was mostly about dilemmas and challenges in private and corporate law that many of us know little about. The room perked up when he gave some examples of how we as humans, even if we have studied Law, are full of biases that get in the way of objective conclusions when judgments are made. He referred to the Twelve Angry Men film as illustration and made public his own internal reasoning about seeing someone yawn, check a phone or close his eyes in the audience. I felt a surge of energy and recognition around me. We had talked about him weaving this into his speech while I was in Cape Town and I was happy to see how well he’d done this and the effect it had.