Master

Gert-Jan Aardema

Temitope Atunbi

Anneloes Berghuis

Lotte Berkelaar

Elmar Boorsma

Thijs Engelen

Olaf van Ginkel

By: Maarten Jager

In 2017, the Enschede city council proposed its new slogan: ‘Enschede Stad van Nu’ (City of Now). You only have to take a walk through the city to know time has frozen here for several decades, and is at its best ‘Stad van Toen’. With this statement I am not referring to the picturesque Oude Markt with its beautiful medieval church or the refined architecture of the Rijksmuseum Twenthe, but rather to the seemingly solidified mindset of the city. During your little hike you might notice you are in fact watching your feet more than your surroundings, to avoid the ever present dog faeces on the pavement, smeared out in lightbrown footprints by inattentive other travellers. Truthfully, watching your surroundings might not be an unnecessary luxury as next to the apparent traffic anarchy created by cyclists in the city centre, the unexpecting traveller should be wary of powered-up Volkswagen Golf cars, complete with drivers wearing baseball caps, or German day trippers who seem to think the Netherlands is devoid of any traffic rules. Frankly, travelling alone through town might be even worse if you happen to be female (admittedly most Utwente students are male, but for the sake of this article let us imagine this from the female view). There does not seem to be a single street downtown not having at least one coffeeshop, which is on its own not a big issue, but does come with agglomerations of shabby-looking customers ready to bother and call out to passing female wanderers. If you were celebrating New Year’s eve in Enschede, you may have noticed the overall neglect of the national fireworks ban, resulting in an all-out war zone. For students living on the campus this was more visible than normally but for students living in the city, fireworks can be observed during the entire year. I would expect the lighting of fireworks to be adding insult to injury for a certain fireworks problem in late 2000, but this apparently does not hold sway over its denizens.

You might think, at least we have the University of Twente, that evens it out right? Well, I might argue conservatism is