A TiU Christmas Story
Christmas time might be wonderful for most people, if you are an exchange student and you can’t go home it can be quite lonely. Univers is helping out with a heartwarming true campus story, that shows just how nice people can be towards each other. Merry Christmas everybody!
In Vietnam, motorcycles are the most popular way for transport. Vietnamese exchange student Van Anh Le therefore had to get used to the Dutch habit of cycling everywhere. At first, she didn’t have much luck when it came to bikes. She had to cut open a few locks because of key problems, and one was stolen despite the fact that it was locked to another bike. So, when one day she found her bike completely broken and with a bent front wheel, she started to believe that she must have done something horrible to have such bad bike karma.
Despite the bike problems, Van Anh is enjoying her time in Tilburg. She finds people to be friendly and helpful. When she arrived, people carried her luggage and helped her find her house. The bike accident was a setback in an otherwise quite happy Tilburg experience.
Luckily, there was a note stuck to the bike. Campus gardener Harry had accidently hit the bike with his lawn mower, when he rolled of a hill. When Van Anh called him, she explained that she didn’t know how to fix a bike herself or where to find somebody to do it for her. In a couple of hours, Harry picked the bike up with his car and took it to a work shop. Because the front wheel was so severely damaged, instead of fixing it, Harry’s company, Van Helvoirt, bought Van Anh a second-hand bike.
According to Van Anh it would be awfully tiresome to get compensation for any damage back in Vietnam. It is hard to get in contact with managers of companies. Therefore, Van Anh is very happy with the way Harry and his boss Hendrik handled the situation. She wrote them a lovely thank you-note, in which she expresses her gratitude: ‘It was really nice to leave a note on my bike because he could simply just walk away with that. And it was really nice of you and the company for taking care of my bike. The new one is in a really good condition and also quite expensive to a student like me because my bike itself does not worth that much. It is really too much for me. So I must say it is a good luck rather than a bad luck for me like I first thought it to be.’
