The Witty Side of the College Realm

I had another Bánh mì[1] at my favorite place in Da Nang, a city that kept me there indefinitely. If one reason to live in Vietnam was Bún chả Hanoi[2], another one would definitely be Bánh mì. After all this time in Vietnam, I must’ve had at least one thousand and one Bánh mì’s going in and out of my body, every single one of them different from the other. As another Bánh mì had just entered the history of all Bánh mì’s I’d ever eaten, the time felt just right for some retrospection. Some reeling in the years kind of thing.

Time can be perceived prospectively or retrospectively. When time is felt as it goes by, moment after moment, minute after minute and so on, the experience of time is prospective. When time is felt as a certain portion that already existed sometime in the past, the sensation would be retrospective. But enough technicalities for now.

It occurs at some point that one shifts from the prospective and dives directly into the retrospective, reeling through different sands of time. I do that from time to time, especially when I want to take a break from the present which for some reason feels static. Taking a break from the present? I guess that’s a way to put it. I usually do this either when I’m alone in some solitary spot of serene natural beauty, gazing through the distance where no human trace is met, or in some populated area where everyone else seems to be doing as much retrospection as I’m doing.

My favorite retrospective time span had to be college. The Dutch years. It already felt like a whole previous life even though it had ended only 5 years ago. From time to time, I fancied reliving different episodes from that period, or simply recalling the existence of some of the interesting characters I had met along the way. How can one forget the teachers? The gurus, the knowledge mystics information magicians who passed on facts, terms and formulas to ever generation, every year, in every classroom. Some of these guys were actually cool. Cool enough for me to remember them at least. And if I remember someone in such a retrospection then the person should be interesting at the very least.  

One of such characters was the head teacher of my university group, Mrs. Haart. She was an eccentric, yet funny lady coming all the way from Cape Town, South Africa to teach Dutch in the Netherlands. The Eastern Europeans and the guys coming from places like Africa or Asia used to love her. The guys from Germany in particular didn’t fancy her so much. They thought she was batshit crazy. And maybe she was. But my friends and I didn’t really care that much. She used to make funny voices sometimes and have some rather uncommon methods when teaching Dutch. We did role plays and I particularly loved those. University didn’t feel so boring all of a sudden when good old Mrs. Haart would pour her soul and heart into what she was doing in the classroom. She sure was character. And she had character too. Plenty of it and didn’t spare none.  

The boring, serious students who had a lot of dough and didn’t bother mingling with the poor Eastern Europeans like me and other lads from other developing countries didn’t really approve of Mrs. Haart’s methods. And it turned out she didn’t approve of them either. Reciprocal respect at its finest. It was funny in a way. We might’ve been poor, as we were riding to school cheap, old and rickety second hand or third hand Dutch bikes instead of brand new Audi or Volkswagen automobiles but we had the drip at least. And Mrs. Haart was aware of that. And she liked it too. She was one of us. We knew it and she knew it. And that made our interaction memorable. Every Dutch lesson had a unique charm that would probably stick with us indefinitely. Oh boy, I was hoping everyone was missing her just as I did as I was munching on that banh mi while I felt the breezy breeze breezing my whole being in the shadow of that umbrella. There sure was a lot of breeze that day.

Another fella that had a mix reception from various students was this Business English teacher from Canada, Mr. Scholand. He also had a reputation of being batshit crazy, but in a rather intellectual way. He was the mad genius artsy scientist type of guy. This dude was teaching some proper concepts concerning the structure of a text and he encouraged us to apply those concepts through creative writing. He urged us to really be creative and dive into whatever character we had in mind.

During Mr. Scholand’s lessons I wrote some of the craziest stories ever. And he liked them too. I think it was around that time when my aspirations of becoming a writer had been secretly spawned somewhere in my subconscious. He would offer us a random scene, as something taken from a play or a movie and would tell us to expand on it by using whatever structure he would teach. And oh boy, I sure expanded the living hell out of those things and read that stuff all out loud in front of the other peers. Some lads who couldn’t really write much because they were too focused on the structures and not on the story writing thought I was simply mad.

The structures were like a piece of cake kind of thing. Like a scale in music theory. If one tells someone who deals with music to play some improvisation in G major, then that someone would make a whole composition in that G major, strangle, twist and vibrate every single one of the notes in G major in some really authentic matter. It’s the same with what our lad Mr. Scholand asked us to do. Use whatever words, sentences, phrases but keep them within whatever structure. There were only that many words to choose from and around an infinite and a half ways to mix them in as many sentences, phrases, lines and paragraphs. So why not? I already had other subjects giving me headaches. I had the chance to make this one fun and that I did. I couldn’t do the same with statistics or financial accounting. No way in the deepest corners of hell I couldn’t. So yeah.  All those years later, I thought about it, and it was all Mr. Scholand’s fault. He made me realize I was about to turn into a writer when I didn’t even know it myself.

Another guy that I really liked was this tall, handsome Dutch guy, Ruud Van Densel, who was teaching economics. Boy, did many of us like Ruud. His charisma was unreal. He was the kind of teacher that could’ve talked about anything and everyone would’ve listened to it, no matter what. He was one of those guys who could make any subject matter interesting. Give him any topic and he would turn it in a cool story. If he would talk about glowing frogs doing heroin in a trash can floating in a murky river, I would listen to every word about it, should it come from Ruud.

Ruud was not the teacher that the university wanted, but the teacher that the university needed. The legend said that he’d almost gotten fired once because he had become way too casual at work. Besides that, he would sometimes join dorm parties and get smashed with students, saying all sort of funny things, like calling some of the girls sluts and committing other assorted slander. And oh boy, it backfired on him. His authority status wasn’t worth two bits of ashes anymore in the eyes of many students after all the slander episodes and gossips went around campus. This guy from Spain had once met him on the hallway and said: “Hey Ruud! What’s going on, man?” To which, a visibly annoyed Ruud said: “What on Earth is wrong with you? I’m Mr. Van Densel to you, not Ruud!” And then the Spanish guy retorted: “Hey dude, I heard so much crap about you that I simply can’t take you seriously anymore.” Ruud didn’t get it and asked about what sort of crap he’d heard and the student told the man that if he would say it he would feel slutty about it.

However, Ruud’s wild days had already been gone when I had begun my student career. I remember inviting him to my birthday party in my freshman year. He politely refused, saying that drinking with students hadn’t always worked in his favor. You couldn’t blame the man. Still, seeing him as a teacher once or twice a week in the classroom and meeting him in campus was good enough for me.

One time Mr. Van Densel forgot his laptop with all his teaching materials and he couldn’t deliver the lesson. And what did the guy do? He started telling us stories about his travels prior to his career, like how he got lost one night in some national park while backpacking in New Zeeland and how he was hiking in some Norwegian island in the Arctic with a rifle, hoping he wouldn’t run into a hungry polar bear. You couldn’t get mad on that guy, really. One more thing that I should add about Ruud is that this one time my parents visited me all the way from Romania in my Dutch little town, they had the good fortune of meeting the man himself. My mother found him really attractive and told that at some dinner with me and my dad right next to her. She was like: “Danny, this teacher of yours… Ruud… he’s really handsome, you know??” She was smiling in a really funny way. My dad could see every bit of it. And you know what he said? He said: “Yes. He is really handsome.” And that was just it.

Another character that left a lasting impression on many of us was this German guy who was teaching statistics and business math. His name was Mr. Eselschteiger but he was nicknamed the Playboy man. He had that sharp look of a German gentleman who hit the gym and enjoyed the outdoors during the day, while going to a rave at night. If one would find out that his special lady had been on a date with Mr. Eselschteiger, one wouldn’t be angry about the date itself.  One would be angry because he wasn’t there to make a picture to see how stunning as a wild stallion would be the man himself next to the girl. If Mr. Van Densel was handsome, then Mr. Eselschteiger was nothing short but supercalifragilisticexpialidocious handsome. Fairytale prince charming type of lad.

He was smart and sharp as the blade of a guillotine too. No matter how insanely difficult an operation looked in statistics, he dissected it into tiny bits and explained every single one of them with precise logic and accuracy, making look like mere instruction of the average Lego set. And then the next thing you knew, statistics wasn’t so bad after all. Not with the Playboy man it wasn’t. Prince charming always delivered.

Concerning the other teachers, I couldn’t really recall much, other than the fact that they had either been bores, unrelatable, irrelevant or just massive phonies that spoke too much, yet said too little. I guess that was about it with all the retrospection. I really took my time with that one. If it weren’t for those guys in that university in the Netherlands, I probably wouldn’t have been in Vietnam and other corners of Asia doing all that random stuff. Without that retrospective time, the prospective one would’ve been so much different.

But for what was worth, I had just had one juicy finger licking hella good Bánh mì in Da Nang with breezy breeze breezing by my side and that was good enough for me. Having that in mind, I give my thanks to the fine teacher chaps mentioned above for making this possible in one way or another. Now, time to drink again with some fellow Russians in the 3$/night hostel place.

[1] Bánh mì: Delicious Vietnamese dish no.1. A little baguette bread filled with tasty heaven

[2] Bún chả Hanoi: Delicious Vietnamese dish no.2. A bowl of fish sauce with fried meatballs and tiny mango slices inside, eaten with rice noodles, some salad and leaves. It’s also heaven.