Although the Koopman family participates in the television program Droomhuis Wanted, they eventually find their dream house via a Facebook message: a guest house with seven rooms in Carinthia. Now, almost five years later, she feels completely at home. “We don’t go back. My children have fun work here, have their own home, I got to know an Austrian partner. Our lives is here, this is my home.”
She does not miss the Netherlands or Drenthe. “I miss my daughter who still lives in the Netherlands, friends and family. Everything that is sweet to me lives in Drenthe. But by video calling, I don’t really miss it either.” She also goes out of season to visit family and friends in Drenthe and in turn come to spend a holiday at Koopman in Carinthia. “In the beginning, people always had to take everything for me from the Netherlands: Dutch mayonnaise, school prayers, peanut sauce or kale. But I have less and less. If I now get back in the car after a visit to the Netherlands, I feel: I go home again.”
Rest, space and casualness, that is what her new life in Austria offers her. “In the Netherlands I was always busy, but here I never look at the clock. Of course I am now also busy in high season, but what I do gives so much satisfaction. I think I have found my peace here. I can drive around every day and every day I think again: that I can live here.”