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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.

(more…)

#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…)

Meet the Board! Mala Raman

Tilburg International Club Communications

Mala Raman, Communications & Outreach

Tilburg International Club has come a long way from its start in 2008.  Since we started the club, I’ve contributed invarious capacities on the Board and have enjoyed seeing the club from all different perspectives. I’m currently in the role of strengthening our online presence, supporting the growth of our membership base and developing sustainable business partnerships.

Our Online Presence

Our communications priority has always been to create a strong online awareness of our club, events, goals and attractive membership benefits through Facebook (feel free to visit now!), Twitter @tilintclub, Instagram @tilburg_international_club and, of course, our own Tilburg International Club website. We rely on our members, guests, sponsors and community leaders to help spread the word about what our club can offer internationals in Brabant. (more…)

We congratulate Anne van Oorschot for receiving a Royal Decoration!

Knight of the Order of Oranje-Nassau
Ridder van de Orde van Oranje Nassau

Tilburg International Club Ridder van de Orde van Oranje Nassauby Hein van Oorschot

April 2020. 

Anne van Oorschot is one the founding members of the  tilburg international club.

She established the club in 2008 and served as its first president for 6 years.

She recently received a decoration from the Royal House of the Netherlands (Ridder van de Orde van Oranje Nassau) in April 2020!


What is the Ridder van de Orde van Oranje Nassau?

The Order of Orange-Nassau is a civil and military Dutch order of chivalry founded on 4 April 1892 by the Queen regent Emma, acting on behalf of her under-age daughter Queen Wilhelmina.

The order is a chivalric order open to “everyone who has earned special merits for society”. These are people who deserve appreciation and recognition from society for the special way in which they have carried out their activities. (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!

Thank you to our sponsors!

Tilburg International Club sponsor

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

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