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  • Curling Clinic 30 March 2023
  • Blikken Festijn @ RAW 8 April 2023
  • Book Club: Small Great Things 18 April 2023

News Archive

#FBF: Cupcake Workshop

Our finished cupcake creations!

Our finished cupcake creations!

Tomorrow, we’ll have the second of our workshops for Cookie Decorating given by TIC member, Coree Forman. For #FlashBackFriday, we’re taking a look at one of our very first Cupcake Decorating workshops (that Coree attended!)

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by Mala Raman

23 February 2013. The cupcake workshop turned out to a lot of fun and a labor of love.  A workshop that was originally supposed to be 1½ hours of cupcake decorating ended up being 3 hours of creative glory.

We started with an explanation of fondant, its properties, how to properly roll it out for the first layer of the cupcake topping and how to

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#FBF Book Club review: “Educated, A Memoir”

On Monday, we will be meeting for our next book club; a gathering that sometimes has intense debates, but is always a lot of fun. For #FlashBackFriday, let’s take a look at a book club review from 2019.

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Review by Anne van Oorschot

19 Mar 2019. For our March book club gathering, after getting a warm drink, we settled around a crackling fireplace and with a tray of yummy snacks. While not everyone had finished the book, Educated, all agreed that it was a remarkable story and well written.
Tara was the youngest of 7 children and her childhood looked idylic on the surface – living on a breathtakingly beautiful mountain in rural Idaho with her own goats and horses. Her mother was a midwife and herbalist and Tara spent a lot of hours walking on the mountain, gathering rose hips and mullein flowers that her Mom could stew into tinctures.

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#FBF: GLOW International Light Art Festival

This weekend, tíc is taking a trip to the GLOW light art festival in Eindhoven. In honour of #FlashbackFriday, let’s take a look at our last trip from 2018!

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review and pictures by Mélanie Magnier

17 November 2018. tíc members met at the Tilburg station to take the train together to go to Eindhoven and discover GLOW, the International Light Art festival.

Right out of the station, the Student Hotel was animated on a facade by a projected video. (more…)

#TBT: Book Club review of Maybe Tomorrow

Next week we will be meeting (virtually) for our next book club; a gathering that sometimes has intense debates, but is always a lot of fun. For #ThrowbackThursday, let’s take a look at a book club review from 2019.

Tilburg International Club Expat Book Clubx–x–x–x–x

13 Feb 2019. by Anne van Oorschot Even though the weather outside was cold, the atmosphere at Book Club was warm and friendly. We were welcomed into the beautiful home of one of our members and offered warm drinks and tasty Valentine treats!

We had a lively discussion of Maybe Tomorrow by Boori Monty Pryor and Meme McDonald and compared its descriptions of the Australian Aboriginal’s plight to the discriminated minorities in other countries. While many shocking things were done to Australia’s indigenous population in the past, harder to understand are the many injustices and predjudices they still face. A good book, but hard to think it portrays a positive future…

In Boori Monty Pryor’s words, “The other day this little one asked me, ‘When did you start being an Aborigine, and how old were you when you started that?’ Like it was a career path or something. I just cracked up laughing.”

Pryor’s career path has taken him from the Aboriginal fringe camps of his birth to the catwalk, the basketball court, the DJ console, and now to performance and story-telling around the country. ‘You’ve got to try and play the whiteman’s game and stay black while you’re doing it,’ his brother used to tell him. (more…)

#FlashBackFriday: Pub Quiz / Annual General Meeting

Tilburg International ClubNext week we’ll have our rescheduled Annual General Meeting and Pub Quiz from last May. For #FlashBackFriday, let’s take a look back one of our past pub quiz evenings!

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by Yolonda van Riel

14.05.2015 If you missed TIC’s Annual General Meeting (AGM) on May 14th, you missed a great time! A great time at an AGM? Yes, you read correctly!

tíc Board of Directors hard at work!

We had a nice turnout and, after a welcome coffee with sweets, we began the evening as we do every year, with a short presentation over the club and how we are performing. All board members are still in term, so no need for a vote but our treasurer, Yiyi Bai, will be leaving us at the end of the club year and we are in search of a replacement. Next, Anne shared our membership numbers which are slightly up from last year but still considerably lower than when we had the first influx of university members. (more…)

Book review: Not Before Sundown (Do trolls really exist?)

Tilburg Expat Book Club

by Essi Koskela

27 Aug 2020. tíc book club’s summer reading Not before Sundown by Johanna Sinisalo is a reimagined story from a classic Finnish song, The Goblin and the Ray of Light.

We started our discussion session by listening to this sweet and melodic piece, before we immersed ourselves into the darker themes portrayed in the book. is a dark satire of Mikael, or Angel, a freelance photographer working in advertising, who adopts a young, abandoned troll from the streets of Tampere city. It turns out that trolls do not make good pets. Pessi, the troll, secretes intoxicating pheromones which produce an insidious effect on Mikael and everyone around him. The symbolism behind the power-battle of Pessi‘s influence and the civilized world around Mikael made an excellent discussion point, as Mikael starts to struggle with the beast within. With the words of the author herself: ‘the book deals with themes bigger than life: the relationship between man and nature; the problems of different kinds of otherness; and how our biological ancestry as hierarchical pack animals still affects us.’

Although the book is classified into science fiction or fantasy, only the existence of the endangered and rarely seen Tilburg Expat Book Clubtrolls separates the world in the story from reality. In fact, the writer has constructed such convincing pseudo-scientific biological origin for the troll species accompanied with numerous (real) references to Finnish literature and folklore about the trolls that it was easy to believe in the existence of trolls. Arguably trolls have been very much real in the Finnish way of life before modern civilisation finally reached all the far corners of wilderness in the country, and remnants of those beliefs are still reflected in the language and children’s imagination. One of Sinisalo’s reference books, “Memories from Lapland” by Samuli Paulaharju, from 1922, which I happened to have by chance, dedicates a whole chapter to trolls. From this book, I shared the divine origin story of trolls, fabricated in the typical half-pagan way of the Finns. As it turns out, trolls are the secret children of Adam and Eve, which God condemned to live underground after Eve wrongfully hid them.

The creation aside, religion is another prominent topic in the book, already given away by the heavenly name of Angel. I dare to say, the writer creates a juxtaposition between chaste protestant tradition and the biological beastly nature of human beings. We were not sure what to make out of this, as the story does not seem to resolve in favor of the other. Although in the case of Mikael, nature takes over.

Those of us who had completed the book agreed that it was an odd but delightful reading experience. Deceptively short with only 214 pages, Sinisalo’s story seemed to contain yet another layer in chapters unwritten. What happened to Mikael in the end? Why did the trolls take him among them? Was Palomita (the human-trafficked mail-order wife of Mikael’s neighbor) rescued? And most importantly, are trolls real and where can we find them?

Join us on Facebook!

Tilburg International Club Facebook page

Did you know that #tíburginternationalclub regularly posts helpful information on our Facebook page?

We share the latest photos and videos from our events, post links to local news and resources and share stories where users can post comments.

Have questions since you just moved to town or about one of our upcoming events? Send us a private message.

You can also see all of our invitations to tíc events making it that much easier to stay up-to-date on all of our club activities.

Stay in touch with the international community in and around Tilburg.

Join us on Facebook @tilintclub!

tíc Needs your help – calling all Twitter maniacs!

Our major priority is developing a stronger online presence to showcase our club, events, goals and attractive membership benefits through Twitter. Twitter is one of the best social media platforms to find out what people think about our club and build our club “brand”. We would love the help of a dedicated “tweeter” for our club!

You can help us by doing any of the following:

  • scheduling 3 – 5 tweets/day
  • commenting on tweets
  • re-posting tweets
  • coordinating themes with our other social media platforms
  • share helpful links and tips with our followers

If you are interested in social media, specifically Twitter, this would be a great opportunity to gain some experience with this tool. And, you would be making a significant contribution towards expanding our reach to other internationals in Brabant. If you like communicating in a fun and educational way with expats in Brabant, this might just be the volunteer opportunity for you! Just fill out the form below to let us know!

#twitter #Expatlife #socialmedia #helpwanted

Explore Your World!

Expat club in TilburgLeave us a comment and let us know which city you would recommend!

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