Dispatches
from the North

The journey from Belgium to Leeuwarden on Monday 9 March was our first real test of endurance. Several train connections, hours of watching the Dutch landscape flatten and open up, and the slow weight of luggage pressing on our shoulders all reminded us that we were heading somewhere genuinely new.

When we finally stepped off the train in Leeuwarden, the late afternoon light made the canals shimmer in a way that felt immediately cinematic. The architecture was unfamiliar, the streets quieter than we expected, and the air carried a crispness that Belgium rarely offers in early March.

After checking into our accommodation, we wasted no time exploring. The city revealed itself gradually, block by block, through narrow streets lined with historic facades and bridges crossing still water. We found a restaurant for dinner and stayed longer than necessary, not because the food required it, but because none of us wanted to cut the evening short.

Leeuwarden, we quickly understood, was not simply a place we were visiting. It was already becoming a place we were inhabiting, at least for the next five days.

Wednesday began indoors, which proved to be exactly the right decision given the weather. The AI Experience Center at NHL Stenden offered a curated look at how artificial intelligence is being applied across sectors far beyond the ones we typically study. Several of the demonstrations were genuinely unexpected, particularly those exploring AI in creative and social contexts rather than purely technical ones.

The intercultural workshop that followed brought together students from multiple countries in activities designed to challenge assumptions and encourage dialogue. These sessions are often described in programme brochures with more enthusiasm than they deserve, but this one worked. The conversations felt real, and the differences in perspective that emerged were illuminating rather than merely decorative.

In the afternoon, despite steady rain, we joined the city tour of Leeuwarden. The guide moved us through the streets with easy confidence, stopping to discuss the city's connections to M.C. Escher, its role in Dutch royal history and the quiet resilience that defines much of Frisian culture. Rain, it turned out, has a way of making certain stories more vivid.

By evening we were tired, slightly damp and considerably more attached to the city than we had been that morning.

The train back to Belgium on Friday felt different from the one north five days earlier. The bags were just as heavy, the connections were just as many, and the landscape reversed itself outside the window at the same pace. What had changed was us, or at least our understanding of what the week had been.

Leeuwarden is not a large city, but it is an honest one. It does not perform significance; it simply has it, quietly, in the way its streets are arranged and the way its residents move through them. Spending five days there, attending lectures, exploring the city and working alongside people from other countries gave each of us a different reason to find it meaningful.

The cybersecurity sessions deepened our professional understanding in ways that purely academic environments rarely manage. The intercultural elements broadened our thinking in ways that classrooms are not designed to provide. And the informal parts of the week, the dinners, the walks, the conversations that ran longer than planned, formed the kind of memories that do not appear on any rubric but remain nonetheless.

We returned to Belgium with sharper instincts, stronger professional curiosity and a team dynamic that five days of shared experience had refined considerably. The programme ended on Friday. The learning, as it tends to do, continued.