TTFN!

We're winding down our last few days in the Netherlands in general, and our last few days before we abscond on our trip to Madagascar in particular. 

This means two things:

1. We're really looking forward to doing nothing but taking a million photos of giant land snails.

2. At least for purposes of higher reasoning and sentence formulation, I'm feeling quite a bit like a giant land snail.


(This travel blog photo's source is TravelPod page: Andasibe National Park)


Also, I'm really sad about saying goodbye to Peanut Cheese anytime soon.

Also, I'm in the middle of baking 15 dozen afscheidskoekjes — which translates literally to goodbye cookies — which I'll bring to work on Wednesday to mark my last day of gainful employment in the lowlands.  

Like most of the activities I'm engaged in these days, baking 15 dozen cookies at 10:00 on a Monday night seemed like a good idea at the time.

As a result of all of the above, I've allowed my evil procrastinating twin to take over.   

I'll be signing off until late March, when my swan song of notes and complaining from the Netherlands will be cleverly disguised as a photo essay on millipedes and giant snails...

...and a whole host of other critters with whom you might not want to share a tent! 

Final Exam

[Editor's note: what this post lacks in timeliness, it makes up in long-windedness.  Please consider yourselves warned.]

We are officially neck deep in finishing things up at work, arranging the mechanics of our transatlantic move, divesting our hard-won European appliances, learning French for our trip to Madagascar, and saying goodbye to our friends and acquaintances in Nijmegen.

It would be a slight overstatement to describe the current state of our lives as panicked. 

It's more on the order of hamster-like frenzy. 

Some of the problem is our pathologically optimistic approach to what can be accomplished in what are traditionally considered to be the hours of the day. 

Some of the time, this manifests itself in shameless wanderlust.  Like squeezing in one last trip to Paris and one last trip to Berlin before we go.  And then choosing the most far-flung place we can think of to slip off the grid for three weeks just before our move. 

So traveling is part of it.  The rest, I'm afraid, is just plain old poor judgment. 

Six months ago, it seemed like a perfectly reasonable idea for me to spend two full days during my last two weeks of work taking the Dutch NT2 exam, a national exam for non-native speakers that's used to help determine if you can become a citizen.  It's also used as a qualification for taking in university classes in the Netherlands.

There's a fairly small chance that we will return to the Netherlands, and an even smaller chance that I will find a place for my Dutch language skills while gainfully employed in the United States. 

Yet one of the key life lessons of the last three years, one I've experienced so strongly I feel like I should get it printed on a t-shirt or a tote bag or my left clavicle is: you never know.

Three and a half years ago, as just one small example, I could not have reasonably predicted that I would learn how to play djembe.  Or even less predictably, that the associated instruction would be in Dutch. 

One simply never knows when one is going to dredge up one's obscure second language for a job or a citizenship test or an advanced degree or a new hobby.

Sure, it took two days and €90 and the special brand of patience it takes to slog through a standardized test, but in the end — if I passed — I'll have a piece of paper to validate my three years of low-level linguistic torture. 

As I may have mentioned once or twice before, the Royal Kingdom of the Netherlands is obsessed with having the proper diplomas, a condition which dramatically increased my motivation level for this particular test — from sluggish disinterest to grudging forward motion. 

Another important factor is that right now, at this very moment, my limited Dutch language skills are as good as they're ever going to get. 

I won't get the results for another 6 weeks, but I'm pretty sure I didn't totally bomb it. 

The only hairy moment was early on in the first morning, when I turned the page to a writing exercise asking me to propose a documentary film about a famous person. 

Topics to cover included whom I would choose and why, what techniques I would use to make the documentary, why anyone would find it interesting, and why it might be interesting to audiences in Europe in particular. 

Easy, right?

Kind of. 

That particular morning, my commute to the testing center in Utrecht had been a little rocky.

I had left plenty of extra travel time, but that glorious buffer melted away when I discovered that I had brought my official testing letter, my passport and my train pass, but neither my wallet nor its contents. 

In most cultures, this is known as "money". 

This was not the end of the world, except for the part about not having any money for lunch.  And if there's one thing I learned in my 13 years of public schooling, it's the importance of eating proper meals on a test day.

As it turns out, I ended up with lunch money and a free warm-up for my exam when I wandered into the bank that happens to be located in the Utrecht train station, waved my passport around, and persuaded the cashier to cough up 10 of the hard-earned euros in my account. 

This is remarkably similar to the speaking portion of the test, which uses a sound recording to pose a series of vaguely plausible situations in which one has to ask for something or express an unsolicited opinion. 

Then you hear a beep and have 20 seconds to record your grammatically correct and situationally appropriate answer.

Recording: You are a moron who has left her wallet on the couch on the morning of a major exam.  While wandering through the train station, wondering what to do next, you see a bank.  You walk in and the cashier greets you.  What do you say?  BEEEEEEEEEEP. 

(As a semi-interesting cultural side note, the limit on my manual withdrawal of cash was not €10 per se; instead, the bank has a policy that you can only talk your way into enough cash for a train ticket home. 

My first reaction to this was overwhelming relief about the fact that the cashier was going to give me some money.  My second reaction was overwhelming irritation about there being a prescribed use for what was, in the end, my money.)

My detour of smooth-talking Dutch was ultimately successful, but it took a long time for the cashier to set the wheels of bureaucracy in motion and coax a ten-euro bill out of the vaults. 

When I stepped out of the station and into the maze of canals and cobblestones otherwise known as the streets of Utrecht, I was more than a little pressed for time. 

Even under the best circumstances, I am woefully navigationally challenged, and within roughly 18 seconds, I was completely and utterly lost.

Enter phase two of my exam warm-up.

Recording: You are an otherwise capable person who has entered the Great Maze of Utrecht without a proper sense of direction or a proper map.  Your test is in 20 minutes and you have no idea where you are.  You recall that the previous evening, you snorted scornfully when you read the first line of instructions on your test confirmation letter, which said, "Leave your house on time." 

You see a non-threatening middle-aged man whose bag of groceries suggests that he is not a tourist.  You approach him to ask directions.  What do you say?  BEEEEEEEEEP.

...

Recording: The man reacts to your question by asking you if you want the directions in English, which leads you to feel slightly queasy about the Dutch exam you're about to take. 

It turns out the man is also American, and like most Americans, he would like to chat with you about where you're from, exactly, and tell you about his third cousin who lived in Madison, Wisconsin and ran the Historical Society there. 

Instead, you would like him to stop talking and just tell you where you are so you can get to your goddamned test on time. 

He asks you where you're going.  You don't particularly want to admit that you are going to take a test in Dutch, in part because you think this will extend the conversation and in part because you are feeling insecure about both your language and navigation skills. 

Instead, you point to your useless Google print-out and say "To a building right here".  He replies, not unkindly, "Well, that narrows it down."

You think impatient and vaguely murderous thoughts while he slowly removes his reading glasses from their case and tells you that he's from Los Angeles. 

When he finally points you in direction in which you will now sprint toward your Dutch exam, what do you say?  BEEEEEEEEEEEEEP. 

All of that is a long and torturous way to say that when I finally did get to the testing center, just barely on time, my nerves were feeling a little jangled. 

I made my way through the preliminary writing questions without a problem, but then I got to the thing about choosing a famous person as the subject of the documentary, and my mind went blank. 

Totally blank. 

It wasn't a Dutch language issue.  I just couldn't think of any famous people. 

Other than Michael Jackson or Princess Diana or Elton John, I mean. 

Then I started thinking that maybe the famous person needed to be Dutch.  And then I was really in trouble.

After rocking back and forth in my carrel for an indeterminate period of time, trying to think of a famous person, any famous person, but preferably a Dutch famous person, I turned the page to a much more reasonable essay question about trends in Dutch vacation destinations. 

It had a pie chart.  And a histogram.  Both of which calmed me down. 

Twenty minutes later, I went back to the documentary film question and tried to think in a more rational way about selecting a famous person. 

My ensuing train of thought went something like this: Francis Ford Coppola. Francis Ford Coppola. Francis Ford Coppola. Francis Ford Coppola. Francis Ford Coppola. Francis Ford Coppola. Francis Ford Coppola. Francis Ford Coppola. Francis Ford Coppola. Francis Ford Coppola. Francis Ford Coppola.

At this point in the test, time was not on my side. 

My extremely limited knowledge of Francis Ford Coppola notwithstanding, I decided he was as good as any other famous person for the purposes of my essay. 

I was reasonably sure that he was still alive. 

And my whole argument about him about being an American with a strong connection to Italy, which would make him particularly interesting to European audiences? 

Dude, even if that’s not true, how many Dutch exam proctors are going to call me on it?

So like I said: you never know. 

You never know when you’re going to deploy the language of the lowlands to write an entirely fictional essay about the man behind The Godfather.   

No Deposit, No Return

A couple of months ago, I mentioned that our tiny Dutch-style basement has been overrun by empty beer bottles.

For the better part of our time in Nijmegen, they pooled in shopping bags in darker corners of our apartment simply because we didn't know how to return them for the 10-cent deposit.  

Eventually, someone explained it to us, but then we were too terrified to operate the Dutch bottle-returning machine at the grocery store.  

John's German co-workers, who have returned beer bottles from the moment they were able to walk without parental assistance, were having none of this. 

Them: Wait a second.  You just got back from a spider-infested island of Indonesia, where you went diving with poisonous sea urchins and your taxi drove through the middle of a forest fire, and you can't return beer bottles because you're afraid of the machine?!

Us: Um...yes?

I am glowing with pride to report that last week, we finally faced our recycling demons.   

I'm glowing with slightly less pride to report that it was at 8 p.m. on a Saturday night, when we felt certain that the store would be empty and no one would be standing behind us in line and mocking us.  

As it turns out, the beer bottle machine is not difficult at all, and actually a little bit fun.

You know, relatively speaking. 

You lay the bottle on a tiny little conveyor belt, which conveys it past a scanner that cleverly identifies the type of beer, adds 10 cents to your total, and then whisks it away into the ether.  

Once your bag is empty, you push a very large and obvious green button and it spits out a receipt with a bar code that you give to the 17-year-old cashier to use as credit against your grocery bill. 

I wish I could say otherwise, but this is not an entirely unfamiliar scenario for us in the Netherlands. 

Specifically: something seems indecipherable or complicated or intimidating (and frequently, a combination of all three), and so we put it off indefinitely. 

When we finally screw up the courage to deal with it (translation: the basement becomes totally impassable and we are forced to take action), it's not nearly as difficult or painful as we had imagined.  

Conquering the Dutch bottle return system has been something of a bittersweet victory, however, as we've decided to move back to the U.S. at the end of next month. 

On one hand, we're pretty pleased about going back to the U.S.  

I'm looking forward, for example, to operating in a situation where my communication skills — such as they are — will be an asset rather than a liability.    

On the other hand: we've really enjoyed our time here, and there's a lot in the quality of our daily, bicycle-centric lives that we will be sad to leave behind.

Also: it feels like we are finally, finally getting the hang of things, and it's more than a little painful to give that up. 

We finally know how to return beer bottles.  

We've finally figured out which of the seventeen obscure settings on our oven compels it to pre-heat in this millennium.  

We've finally located a type of sliced bread that doesn't taste like cardboard.  

We've finally let go of trying to cram anything other than a modest supply of chicken stock cubes and fresh chilies into our hobbit freezer. 

We've finally figured out the weeknight witching hour at which the grocery store becomes miraculously empty. 

We've finally gotten to the point where we can make phone calls in Dutch instead of having to do every single transaction in person.    

And we finally understand the garbled announcements letting us know that the trains will not be running until further notice.  

That all sounds like thinly veiled complaining.  

(Right: a lot of it is thinly veiled complaining.)  

But I really mean it when I say that after three years and a lot of trial and error, it's hard to let go of the investment we've made.     

I'm more than a little worried that when we go back to the U.S., everything is going be so easy, it will all seem kind of...boring.  

And we're going to pine for these halcyon days of appliance hieroglyphics, extreme bicycle maintenance, and freezer jenga.  
 

And Since We've No Place To Go

In the interest of full disclosure: I grew up in the Snow Belt.  

Also known as the shining swath of progressive politics and cultural diversity that runs across upstate New York, just south of Lake Ontario. 

On balance, it's not a bad place to grow up.  

At least during those tender years before anyone sticks a shovel in your hands and says "go clear the driveway."  

And what it lacks in, say, decent Vietnamese food, it makes up for in diners that don't give off the putrid smell of faux vintage interior decorating.     

Said diners may have an actual putrid smell, but that's just part of their authenticity.  

Another main feature, which is great when you're a kid and not so great when you're a driveway-owning adult, is that it snows a lot there.  

Really a lot.  

Just last month, they got a full meter of snow in 24 hours.  

(Uh, can we pause for a moment while I shudder at the fact that I just described something — without meaning to — in metric?)

Photo credit and shoveling credit, by the way, go to my mother.

But, that particular brand of precipitation insanity happens more or less every year.  

And so despite the sluggish local economy and limited public resources, there's an infrastructure to support clearing the roads and parking lots and putting down sand and salt.  

In other words, life goes on more or less as usual.

Given that upbringing, I might not, you know, be the most sympathetic person when it comes to weather-related meltdowns. 

But let's just say, hypothetically speaking, that John and I had made plans to go to Berlin for the weekend, on a late Friday night flight from Amsterdam.  

And let's say that it started snowing around 12:30 on Friday afternoon, a light, fluffy snow that makes everything sparkly and white.  

If this had happened, I might have gazed out over the winter wonderland, eyeballed the two inches of snow that had accumulated on the cars and trees and thought absolutely nothing of it.  

Then, if it had gotten to be around 4 p.m., John might have called and shaken me out of my Burl Ives reverie with a report that the entire train system in the Netherlands was shut down, that the highways were clogged, and that there was no possibility whatsoever of getting to the airport for a 9 p.m. flight.  

Just to keep going with this purely academic discussion: it might now be Monday and I might be writing this after a weekend not spent in the outrageously awesome city of Berlin.  

It might not have snowed again for 3 full days, and yet I might be sitting with my laptop on a train that is both 25 minutes late and packed to the gills, and I might be listening to announcements indicating that the national train service will be operating at half capacity at least until the end of of the week.  

Oh, also?  We might have woken up on Saturday morning (after not staying in my favorite hotel of all time) to a giant ice cube formerly known as our hot water heater.   

Here's the thing: despite my petty complaints, the Royal Kingdom of the Netherlands really does have a lot going for it.  

A social safety net! Virtually no crime! Wind farms! Gouda! Affordable health care! Bicycles! Neighborhood composting! Drum circles! A thriving middle class!  

Plus everyone drinks milk all the time!  

But the country seems to suffer from a major case of denial when it comes to winter.  

We've only been here for a few years, but it seems absolutely clear to me that winter in the Netherlands is a real thing.  It gets cold for long stretches at a time and it snows.  

Not a lot, but it snows. Every year. You know, like winter.  

Yet all takes is a measly 5 centimeters of snow and the entire train system shuts down.  Including trains that would transport one to the airport.  

Just hypothetically speaking.  

I know that this all sounds suspiciously like plain old complaining.  

In a sense, it is.   

But I also can't help but think that there's something deeper to it than me being grumpy about missing our trip to Berlin. 

I find it hard, for example, to have conversations with my co-workers about it.  

My co-workers, watching with bemusement as I drag into work with bright red cheeks, six layers of outdoor clothing, hat head and a runny nose:  How were the trains today?

Me: They were terrible! 

My co-workers: Yeah, that's too bad for you.  But it's awfully beautiful outside, isn't it?

Me, on the inside: I DON'T CARE HOW BEAUTIFUL IT IS OUTSIDE. WHY DOESN'T ANYONE HERE RECOGNIZE THE BEAUTY OF A FUNCTIONING TRAIN SYSTEM?!

Going back to my point about milk drinking and wind farms: 

If we lived in a country that didn't pride itself on its efficient and well-maintained infrastructure, particularly I might not feel so strongly about all of this.  

But it just doesn't add up.

Every documentary ever made about the Netherlands hails its miracles of hydraulic engineering and its hard-fought triumph over water. 

If only that water had been cleverly disguised as snow. 

Au Travail!

As I've mentioned, we're taking French lessons from a Dutch instructor in the six weeks between now and we leave for Madagascar.

This seemed like a good idea at the time.

As someone whose French was limited to a few key phrases, like je ne se quoi and pardon and moi?! — the last of those very much à la Miss Piggy — this has been a humbling and eye-opening experience. 

There's no question that Dutch is a guttural, convoluted, often infuriating labyrinth, with verbs that are irregular, reflexive and/or separable.  

And which, to add insult to injury, are usually exiled to the end of the sentence.

But French?

French is downright diabolical.

Pourquoi? you ask coquettishly.

Mostly it's the lack of any relationship whatsoever between the letters and the words they are supposed to be forming.  

Me: Why is there a p in the middle of that word if you're not supposed to say it?

John, looking worried: I don't think you want to go down that road with this language.  

Just from being an English-speaking adult who has eaten in a restaurant once or twice, it feels reasonable and natural to drop just one letter at the end of a French word.

If we're talking Filet Mignon, I am totally with you.

But as I've discovered at the tender age of 35, there are a lot of other French words out there. 

I read them, I see a whole series of actual, recognizable letters, and I am instantly rendered unable to pronounce them correctly.

Somehow, I'm supposed to look at Montmartre and say Mo-mar. Set when I see Sept.  Trav-aye when I see travaillent.  

With phrases, it gets even more whacked.  

I can ask voo-zet? no problem, as long as the actual question, vous êtes? is nowhere close to my field of vision. 

And while staring at Qu'est-ce que...? and trying to squeak out a kes-kuh, I nearly closed my French workbook forever.   

I mean, come on.  

As far as I'm concerned, two or more letters in a row need to man up and become a syllable.  

As I've also mentioned, the French-on-top-of-Dutch part of these lessons is making a veritable parfait of the limited brain cells we have to support language learning. 

I suspect that John and I are a somewhat disturbing wonder to our teacher, who is used to teaching people who don't have gaping holes in their Dutch vocabulary.  

I think we seemed like fully formed, reasonably educated adults.  

Until she translated the French word for gesture into Dutch, and we stared at her blankly for an uncomfortably long time and she realized that we are, in fact, not.

Our teacher is also used to explaining things that make Dutch people crazy, but that make perfect sense to us.  

It took months and months in the Netherlands, for example, before we understood that the Dutch have a single verb, afwassen, that means doing the dishes.

The French, on the other hand, are totally on our team when it comes to expressing the act of washing dishes.  

Our teacher was prepared to dive deep into her well-rehearsed explanation about the lack of a dedicated dishwashing verb, but we were both like, No, no — we totally get it.  Of course you do the dishes.  

The same goes for cousins.  

I still don't really accept this, but there's no dedicated word in the Dutch language for cousin.   

Male cousins and/or nephews are neefjes, and female cousins and/or nieces are nichtjes.  

If I really try to understand it (which I'm not saying I'm willing to do), I can see there's sort of a general concept of children of siblings at work, without getting too uptight about whose siblings they are.  

Our teacher had a whole series of diagrams for maintaining a Dutch person's sanity while notifying them that in French, cousins are a separate and distinct class of relatives.  

But again, we were all, no really: we have cousins.  You don't need to draw a picture for this. 

In general, though, aside from the hangover-class headaches it gives us, using Dutch as our base hasn't slowed us down too much.  

The vocabulary we're working on is still very simple, and, in some cases, it helps to just swap one unintuitive phrase in for another.  

Like à tout à l'heure, which translates literally to To all to the hour!  

We were well on our way to getting bogged down in that nonsense when our teacher explained that it's just like tot ziens!, a Dutch salutation we use all the time.  

Until seeing! makes no more sense than To all the hour!, but we know exactly when and how to use it, so it's easy enough to make a wholesale switch. 

It's also helpful that I still remember exactly what I needed to know in order to squeak by in Dutch.  

We had a major breakthrough in our second lesson this week, when we learned how to say Je suis américaine, mais j'habite aux Pays-Bas.  

I'm an American, but I live in the Netherlands.

It's funny, but that phrase makes me feel like there's still some hope. 

Even if I can't make all of the sounds fit all the letters, I still know enough to explain myself.