Exam

The day of the exam. I had to go to Leiden to take it, one of those big halls that used to be there for cattle markets and are now used for all sorts of big events, concerts and fairs. I remember taking a linguistics exam there long ago, when I was a student, and I remember even further back seeing the Osmonds in concert there. Different event and atmosphere altogether. Great fun though. But maybe I’ll describe that one some other time.

I guess it was pretty much what I expected. A lot of people, I was number 407, and there were more. Lots of little wooden tables and chairs in neat rows, the same pieces of paper on all of them, small pencil and rubber. Quite a few attendants to help out the people who got a bit lost. Some people slightly nervous, a lot of smoking outside the hall and in the lobby.

We had forty minutes to do the exam, forty multiple choice questions, and had to stay in our seats the whole time. I think I needed about 25 minutes, so plenty of time to have a good look round. It was good to see so many different people there, many young people and a few older ones, I think about as many men as women, and from different ethnic backgrounds. I also recognised the hall from my earlier visits. I remembered that the setup was exactly the same for my linguistics exam, but I wasn’t sure about the concert. I think I know where the stage was, but it was dark outside then, and it looked different. It was well over 20 years ago, too.
Anyway, back to the exam itself. I took some test exams at home all this week, and I did okay. I knew what to expect and I got what I expected. Some of the questions weren’t very clear, and some were ambiguous. I had my doubts about eight of the questions, but I think I guessed most of those correctly. This was one of the strangest exams I’ve ever had to take though, for me at least.

You need the certificate to be able to open a bar or café serving alcoholic beverages, so I was wondering if that is what all those people want to do. Will we have so many more bars and pubs here in a couple of years’ time? I wonder how many people passed as well.

After the exam I went on to The Hague. I was pleasantly surprised to find a new book by one of my favourite authors, the Belgian Kristien Hemmerechts. She writes books that are sometimes hard to read because she writes about loss in a way that really hits home. For a while a couple of years ago they came too close and I couldn’t read them. It must be so gratifying to be able to write like that, to be able to move people that way.

When I got home I checked the answers to the exam on the net and it looks like I passed. I got two out of forty wrong, and you are allowed sixteen (?) mistakes. This isn’t the official result yet though, that should be available in about six weeks. It should be alright.

Now the next question is, what am I going to do with all this new spare time. Have fun, maybe….