Ianika Tzankova was 15 when she fell in love with a Dutch boy who was on holiday in her native Bulgaria. Now a lawyer and professor at Tilburg University, she says she is still struck by how neat and tidy the Netherlands is, would have liked to meet murdered filmmaker Theo van Gogh, and would spend her last day here on a bike ride and wandering in Den Bosch.

How did you end up in the Netherlands?
I was a teenager living in communist Bulgaria in the summer of 1989 when the government imposed new rules on the Turkish minority and many of them left. The result was a shortage of workers. That meant students, school pupils like me, had to work. Normally you were not allowed to, but we had to ‘help our country’ for one month during the summer holiday.

I was working with a friend in a seaside hotel resort because we thought that would be much more fun than picking vegetables. And there was this 17-year-old Dutch boy on holiday with his parents and we fell in love.

That autumn the Berlin Wall fell, and his parents invited me and my family to visit them for New Year. We stayed for three weeks and it was the beginning of a romance. Two years later, when I finished high school, I came to the Netherlands and I stayed. I lived first with his parents while I went to Tilburg University to study law, and they became like parents to me.

We broke up just before Covid, after 30 years together.

How do you describe yourself – an expat, lovepat, immigrant, international?
Certainly not an expat or immigrant. I identify myself as Bulgarian Dutch. I’m both. I’m a European as well. But I think I find it easy to feel at home anywhere. I lived for three months in California and I could see how I could fit in there as well. My new partner is British and London feels like a second home to me nowadays.

How long do you plan to stay?
I’ve no plans to leave: my children are here and we are happy. But it is good to have options. I think that is healthy and everyone should!

Do you speak Dutch and how did you learn?
When I came and was living with my boyfriend’s family, I had to learn Dutch very quickly, and there were very few courses in those days.

My parents-in-law were very instrumental in it all. I was signed up for a course in Breda three days a week, and they were very strict with me from the beginning. If I said a sentence wrong or pronounced a word the wrong way, they would correct me.

But it is fair to say that I do learn languages easily, which allowed me to start my law studies (in Dutch) only one year after I had arrived in the Netherlands. I am trained as a Dutch lawyer.

What’s your favourite Dutch thing?
What always struck me is how neat and tidy the Netherlands is. Amsterdam is not a good example, but I remember flying over the fields and seeing how everything is so well planned and used. A lot of thought has gone into it.

You could say we are now a bit overregulated, but what I find incredible is that such a small country has the impact it has with relatively few resources. We don’t have mountains to bring in tourists. But the most has been made of what is there, and I think that is a talent.

How Dutch have you become?
My late mother would say I have become very Dutch, and because I am so well integrated, many Dutch colleagues and friends thought I was born and raised here. But I wasn’t, and so all the nostalgia about Dutch children’s TV shows from the 70s that everyone of my generation remembers passes me by.  I can’t talk about them.

But apart from that, I think I had a pretty similar youth to most children here from average families. And I think children are the same the world over. They play with the same things, they like sweets. That is something constant, no matter where you are.

Which three Dutch people (dead or alive) would you most like to meet?
Theo van Gogh: I would like to ask him if making the film he made (Submission) and paid for with his life was worth it, and whether he would do it again.

Audrey Hepburn: I want to know what her life was like in Arnhem in those days, where she used to go and what she did at the weekend. My first real job was in Arnhem and I am fascinated by the city in the pre–World War II years.

And Vincent van Gogh: I would ask him, if he were alive and able to reap all the fruits of his talent, what he would do with all that money.

What’s your top tourist tip?
Den Bosch and Heusden. Heusden is a very charming place, very small and very Dutch. It’s a fortified village on the Maas river, a bit like being in Madurodam. It was a very poor village so it has remained in its original state and has slowly been restored.

There are a few restaurants and cafés, and one of them is quite upmarket and, of course, all the clichés — a windmill, a pancake house. You can walk around the dyke and there is a small harbour. It’s close to Den Bosch so you can do both together.

Tell us something surprising you’ve found out about the Netherlands
What surprised me is the way everyone was on their bikes, and in the south where I grew up, everyone is friendly to each other. You say hello to complete strangers, people you have never met. And the way you congratulate everyone else on a birthday… in fact, the whole birthday celebration thing.

In Bulgaria when someone has a birthday you really want to give them a nice present, so you all club together with as much cash as you can afford and buy a nice big gift. In the Netherlands it struck me in the early days that you actually pool your money with others to buy a present so everyone can contribute less.

If you had just 24 hours left in the Netherlands, what would you do?
Forever? I would go for a walk in Bokhoven on the Maas. I hope it is summer, and in that case I would cycle from Bokhoven to Heusden and have lunch there, probably at the pancake house – you have good restaurants all over the world but not pancakes. That would be in the morning.

In the afternoon, I would go to the City Park IJzeren Vrouw in Den Bosch and walk from there to the centre of town. Visit the cathedral (the biggest one in the Netherlands, and I even prefer it to the Notre-Dame in Paris) and wander through my favourite streets and little shops, go to the Noordbrabants Museum. I would take my time, so I am zen when I have to leave.

Ianika Tzankova is a lawyer with Rubicon Impact and Litigation and was talking to Robin Pascoe.