Say Hello To My Little Friend

Sometime last summer, I noticed a special sticker on one of our staple Dutch foods, the Sultana Fruit Biscuit.

I say "staple" because we eat Sultanas by the crate as an all-purpose snack, or even as breakfast in a pinch.

Sultanas are neither cookies nor crackers, and so the taste is a little hard to describe. My best attempt is that if a low-sodium saltine and a grape Fruit Roll-Up had a love child, it would be a Sultana.

On the down side, they're not all that flavorful, and they're dry enough that you need a nice cup of tea or a glass of water to really choke them down.

On the plus side, they more or less of fill the hole in our lives where energy bars used to be. And they're reasonably healthy, and portable, and available in quantity.

Also, they have the most brilliant tagline in the entire History of Advertising: Met de beste rozijne, or With the best raisins.

It really does take the breath away.

In any case, it was hard not to notice when the sticker started showing up on the front of every Sultana package.

Though I cringe to admit this, saving now for Mr. Jummy did not immediately make its way on to my to-do list.

At some point, however, I peeled the sticker off and read the text on the other side:

Wist je dat het een Mr. Jummy rugzak en handpop in één is!

Did you know that the Mr. Jummy is a backpack and hand puppet in one?!

Why no! I had no idea that the Mr. Jummy is a backpack and hand puppet in one!

This discovery had two major selling points:

First, it fit nicely with my theory that the Dutch are obsessed with puppets.

For the record, I don't have any evidence to back this theory up, other than my sense that every single child in the Netherlands owns a miniature puppet theater, as well as my vague discomfort at the number of puppet theater performances on offer on any given weekend in the Netherlands.

Secondly, it spoke to my fervent belief that the only thing more useful than a backpack is a backpack that is also a hand puppet.

Four Sultana proofs of purchase, €3.99, and six weeks later, I became the proud owner of my very own Mr. Jummy.

He and I have had lots of fun adventures ever since, but the highlight of his short existence has been coming along to my sister's wedding in upstate New York.

Because nothing says bridesmaid's accessory like a red backpack / hand puppet!

And while I've never had any shortage of methods for torturing my sister, having Mr. Jummy take part in her special day really brought things to a whole new level.

As it turns out, one of the main reasons that I survived 48 hours of wedding madness is that my sister's 5-year-old niece also really loved Mr. Jummy.

And so the three of us played and played and played. And then we played some more.

Most of the time, this involved him finding potentially delicious items (think bark, rocks, flowers, or caterpillars) and then deciding whether to eat them or spit them out.

Other times (as might be expected), the play involved Mr. Jummy visiting the dentist.

But sometimes, too much eating and too much dentist made Mr. Jummy tired, and he needed to take a nap.

I'm sorry to say that between my favorite black Smartwool shirt and the flower petals in Mr. Jummy's mouth, the effect of this particular nap was downright...sepulchral.

A few days after the wedding, we went out for a cup of coffee with my sister's new mother-in-law.

I got more than a little nervous when she leaned over to me and said in a low voice, "I need to talk to you about your little friend."

My low-level panic subsided when she revealed her question, which was whether I could buy another Mr. Jummy for the niece in question and send him to the U.S. for Christmas.

As I mentioned, we eat Sultanas by the crate, and thankfully, Sultana's marketing efforts continued to soldier on, so four more proofs of purchase, €3.99, and six weeks later, we marked the arrival of Mr. Jummy the Second.

But as everyone knows, international immigration is kind of a big deal.

Combination backpack / hand puppet or not, Mr. Jummy needed papers.

Fortunately, this was nothing an inkjet printer and a glue gun couldn't handle.

And so yesterday, with his valid passport stowed gently in the backpack half of his existence, Mr. Jummy and his little suitcase full of Sultanas started the long and cramped journey to upstate New York.

La Vida Loca

This weekend, Barcelona is our home away from home.

We're here for four days to binge on art museums, eat as much Spanish food as possible, and also reacquaint ourselves with the celestial object known outside of the Netherlands as "the Sun".

Getting here was something of a close call, as a fire at the Utrecht train station on Friday night shut down almost all train traffic in the Netherlands, including the trains that run to and from the airport.

An American I know once referred to Utrecht as the bunghole of the Netherlands.

He went on to explain that if something goes wrong with car or train traffic in Utrecht, everything in the entire country grinds to a screeching halt.

At the time, I thought that was a little harsh: Utrecht is a fine city, and I prefer to reserve the term "bunghole" for truly godforsaken places. The suburbs of Houston, for example.

After Friday, however, I'm beginning to see what he means.

One taxi from Nijmegen and €230 in taxi fare later, we arrived at Schiphol with just enough time to get through security, grab a sandwich, and make a beeline to our gate.

I'm trying not to fret about a taxi fare that was almost as expensive as two round-trip plane tickets to Barcelona.

One way of looking at it is this: getting screwed by the Dutch train system now and then is still much less costly than owning a car.

Another positive take on this incident is that my willingness to gripe about the trains feels like an indicator of how well I'm integrating into Dutch society.

Most Americans can't complain in good conscience about a train system that offers a convenient and viable alternative to going just about anywhere in a car.

Most Dutch people, on the other hand, complain bitterly about the trains at the slightest provocation.

I'm still grateful for the Dutch train system, but it is definitely in the doghouse until further notice.

But that's a long way to say that we made it to lovely Barcelona, where our only point of difficulty has been adhering to the Spanish custom of eating lunch around 2 and dinner around 10.

In addition to trying not to embarrass ourselves by walking into restaurants before 8:30 p.m., we've been wandering our way through crazy food markets...

Making a long-awaited pilgrimage to the Joan Miró museum...

Hanging around on sunny park benches...

And keeping a watchful eye out for chicken-themed street art:

In other words, it's pretty much the perfect weekend.

The Rain is a Handsome Animal

Tuesday night djembe lessons notwithstanding, the Netherlands isn't really known for its music scene.

That is not to say that it's not a country full of musical people: lots of people sing or play in bands of the amateur and semi-amateur variety.

There are also a surprising number of Black Gospel choirs in Holland.

To the point where Dutch high schools offer black gospel choir as an extracurricular activity, the same way that an American high school might have jazz band.

Intellectually, I know there is absolutely nothing wrong with a bunch of Dutch people singing American Black Gospel music. At a gut level, though, it gets me every time.

I can't help but feel that it's part of a larger, more interesting relationship that the Dutch have with race in general and black people in particular.

I wish I could articulate what that relationship was, exactly, but it's more than a little confounding to interpret or discuss.

It doesn't help that my Dutch vocabulary is really oriented toward things that are slightly more concrete than, say, racial identity and cultural fetishism.

For now, I can only offer my overwhelming feeling that the relationship is...complicated.

Which brings me, of course, to everyone's favorite holiday helper (and/or former slave): Zwarte Piet.

It feels like just last month that the streets were brimming with young people wearing velvety minstrel outfits, feathered caps, and blackface.

But really, time flies when you're having fun!

That carnival of political correctness took place a full year ago, and with the 2010 Sinterklaas holiday less than a month away, the Black Pete paraphernalia is out in full force once again.

Last week, on my bicycle commute from the train station to work, I rode by the City of Zeist's lone movie theater.

I nearly drove headfirst into the gutter when I saw the following movie poster out of the corner of my eye:

This heartwarming family movie called Sinterklaas and the Packages Mystery features a cast of not one but ten different Black Petes.

To get the full effect — and to see the Petes in all of their (vaguely) diverse glory — you really have to watch the trailer. And unlike most of the other dreck I post here, it actually is worth wasting the two minutes of your life.

Or at very least, the one minute and twenty second it takes until they get through all of the Petes.

And, I would add, it's a great opportunity to hear spoken Dutch, if you haven't experienced that particular auditory delight.

Here's the basic plot, in case you want to follow along at home:

One of the Black Petes assures Santa that the hangar where they store all of the presents is full, only to find that someone (namely, an evil villainess with an evil villainess laugh that doesn't require any translation) has taken them all.

Madness, villainy, and a happy ending ensue. And there are a few catchy musical numbers for good measure.

John's reaction to this trailer, which I sprung on him without warning while sitting on the couch on Sunday morning in our pajamas?

"You know, sometimes, I think I'm used to everything here, and then something like this comes along."

This is not to say that Black Pete and Black Gospel choirs made up of Dutch people are in the same category.

As cringe-inducing as it may be to the naked eye, my sense is that the latter are a genuine celebration of African-American music and culture.

You know, in an imitation is the sincerest form of flattery sort of way.

But going back to my original thought about the Netherlands not having a huge music scene...

Even though one doesn't often hear about world-famous Dutch composers or cutting-edge musical groups (or, God help us, Dutch rock stars), we're discovering that there are a number of smaller concert halls in the Netherlands that are surprisingly broad and sophisticated in their musical offerings.

We recently found, for example, that the Toonzaal in Den Bosch offers a huge array of jazz and pretty exciting (at least to us) contemporary classical music — despite a concert hall that only seats about 50 people and its location in a city of only about 130,000.

To me, the Toonzaal is an example of what Europe, in general, gets right: through the glory of generous arts funding and a fondness for art for art's sake, they manage to support an entire season of festivals, concert series and other performances full of not-very-mainstream music.

And on Friday, we went to a Tin Hat concert at a world culture center in Utrecht called RASA.

Like the Toonzaal, RASA is an unassuming building tucked away on a side street.

It's the kind of place that you might miss, if, hypothetically speaking, it was dark and raining on a Friday night in Utrecht, especially if you were in a blissful, mildly catatonic state from an unexpectedly good sushi dinner down the street.

Ecstatic mini-rant alert!

Tin Hat is just amazing. Their work is sort of like the klezmer-flavored love child of Bill Frisell and Joseph Schwanter and Victor Piazzolla.

Just one piece doesn't really cut it, but here's at least a small sample:

They're one of those crazy genre-defying groups that keep coming up with new, brave, scary things. Their latest project, for example, is a series of compositions in which they set the poems of E.E. Cummings to music.

The concert was fantastic, and we were in heaven. Part of the reason for the heaven is that the music was just so damned good.

But we realized that another reason for being in heaven is that — in stark contrast to what happens when we're trying to navigate in a Dutch cultural context — we totally got it.

And by "it", I mean that we got the references to Bill Monroe and Bill Frisell. We got the mix of klezmer and blues guitar. And we got the E.E. Cummings poems.

Not because of any special knowledge on our part, but because those poems are part of our own culture, and we have a sense — more intuitive than intellectual — of who E.E. Cummings was, and how to understand his work, and how those poems affected us when we were younger than we are now.

It might sound a little weird, but we felt sort of proud, too.

As gaudy and embarrassing as American culture can be, there can also be an unmistakable freshness and creativity to it.

As John put it, it's hard not to feel like, "E.E. Cummings is awesome. Go America!"

I'm fairly certain that no one, in the history of human language, has uttered that particular phrase before.

But it really captures the way in which we sometimes experience these weird and largely unexpected flashes of patriotism.

Maybe we should have it printed on a t-shirt.

Fire and Ice

As of last Monday, I had officially lost that lovin' feeling with respect to the Dutch language.

This was mostly because I had spent a very long day trying desperately to communicate enough to my new Dutch co-worker about her new job that I could reasonably justify abandoning her for a short trip to the U.S. this week.

For the record, I feel more than a little guilty about throwing her to the lions in just her second week of work. Then I remind myself that unlike me, she can actually understand what everyone around her is saying.

With that in mind, it seems less like lions and more like hostile housecats.

But I've rekindled the Dutch flame at least a little bit, thanks to two happy developments in my cozy and largely narcissistic world of language learning.

One is that my new co-worker has a great sense of humor and is full of interesting new expressions.

Even as I flail about in Dutch, trying to explain the finer points of receiving visitors and date-stamping mail, our conversations are dotted with delightful, quirky moments of language learning.

On Wednesday, for example, she suggested gently that we een einde aan de dag breien, or knit an end to the day.

Compared to the expressions I use when it's quitting time — I'm outta here! is one that immediately comes to mind — knitting an end to the day just seems so charming and civilized.

The second development was an unexpected comment about holes in the ice from an alert Peanut Cheese reader named Gerben.

As you may remember, I wrote a few months ago about the Dutch expression vreemde eend in de bijt, an extremely relevant (for me) way to describe a duck who doesn't fit in with the other ducks in that particular hole in the ice.

What I didn't know is that the Dutch have not one but TWO words that mean hole in the ice:

We actually have two words for a hole in the ice. A bijt is made on purpose, for example because you want to go fishing or make sure the ducks have something to drink.

A wak is one that is created by the wind or current, and is the kind that pops up unexpectedly and that you fall into when skating.

I can't even really explain why this thrills me so much.

Maybe it's just that I was already highly amused by the first Dutch word for hole in the ice.

A second Dutch word for hole in the ice is the kind of thing that pops up unexpectedly and makes me smile to myself for days.

Orientation

I had every intention of devoting this week's Peanut Cheese to picayune but delightful things about the Dutch language.

For example: uitvaartdienst, the Dutch word for funeral home, which translates literally (at least in my mind) to something like journey out service.

Or the Dutch verb for pacing back and forth, which is ijsberen. Literally? To polar bear.

Tangent alert!

In my paranoia about at least trying to get the English words right, I quickly looked up picayune to make sure that it means what I think it means.

In the process, I learned that online dictionary listings now include "things that rhyme with word x" as a standard feature.

I present to you what might possibly be the most delightful list of words ever listed:

Afternoon, apolune, barracoon, Brigadoon, call the tune, Cameroon, greasy spoon, harvest moon, honeymoon, importune, macaroon, octoroon, opportune, pantaloon, perilune, picaroon, Saskatoon, silver spoon, tablespoon.

Clearly, this is how the Internet redeems itself.

In my book, picayune / call the tune / Cameroon / greasy spoon more or less makes up for the existence of Linked In.

Learning about ijsberen seriously made my month. But even so, today is not the day for a wandering soliloquy about the tiny thrills of learning a second language.

After months of eager anticipation, today was my first day with a Dutch co-worker we've hired to take on the telephone calls and other Dutch-language work that I've been butchering since mid-March.

The only problem is that first I need to provide a hefty amount of training and orientation. In Dutch.

For the record: my new coworker is delightful. And patient. And she doesn't grimace too much when I go off the rails in what many people call not a language but a throat disease.

But by about mid-afternoon today, my honeymoon with the Dutch language was officially over as I tried to explain in detail how the phones are supposed to work.

It's too bad someone didn't record the whole thing. A few decades from now, I might find it very funny to hear.

In the meantime, let's hope that she understands what I mean when I say, first these buttons is push then talk and if he present is can you button one more time push.

Hamsterweek Redux

There's a glorious event that descends upon grocery stores throughout the Netherlands: Hamsterweek.

At first, it seemed mysterious and unpredictable. Now we've figured out that it rolls around every six months or so.

That's emblematic, by the way, of our general experience of life in the Netherlands: at first, things seem mysterious, unpredictable and/or incomprehensible.

Eventually — and in most cases, this means six months to a year later — we figure out how the thing actually works, and it starts to seem more manageable.

This was definitely true for Hamsterweek, but also for less interesting things like using the secured bike parking at the train station, or our ChipKnip debit cards, or deciphering European clothing sizes in order to buy pantyhose.

(If only I could write this in a squeaky, my-pants-are-too-tight voice: note that the pantyhose sizing is still something of a mystery!)

Hamsterweek is based on the Dutch verb hamsteren, which means "to hoard."

You know, like a hamster.

(Funnily enough, John and I also use the verb "to hamster", but it refers instead to lying awake at night thinking obsessively about work or other stressful things.

The only known antidote to hamstering in our household is thinking like a sea cucumber. Sadly, this activity does not have its own verb.)

For the Dutch, hamstering takes the form of stocking up on items when Albert Heijn offers two for the price of one.

Since we have no desire to own one can of beets, let alone two, we generally abstain from the hamster festivities.

However — and here I should freely acknowledge that I am most definitely a simple-pleasures-for-simple-minds kind of girl — I love the hamster paraphernalia. It's just too scary and weird to resist.

Unfortunately, I can't really think of a compelling American equivalent to the Albert Heijn hamsters.

But I guess this is sort of the same as if someone from the Netherlands came to the U.S. and became obsessed with the Keebler Elves in the middle of a giant cookie promotion at their local Price Chopper.

Sort of.

In any case, the Hamster gear last January was limited to grocery bags with giant hamster faces on them, and also an extremely lame take-home maze for the kids.

But this time around? We've hit Hamster paydirt.

In the form of a superspannende Hamsterspel available next to the checkout counters.

A super-exciting Hamster game indeed.

Let's just say that a little bit of hamstering happened with respect to these hilarious, brilliant pieces of grocery store marketing.

By which I mean that I snagged about 20 more Hamsterspels than the number of children I had waiting at home like little birds for the only known version of Hamster Concentration.

(Which, perhaps it goes without saying, is zero.)

My feeling is: screaming children with grubby fingers be damned.

These hamstered hamster games had a much more noble destiny: being cut and folded into slightly disturbed greeting cards for me to send to family and friends.

One paper cutter and 45 minutes (by which I mean 2 hours) later?

Voilà! A fine selection of small, medium and large hamster notecards and gift tags:

These feature a number of Albert Heijn products, including but not limited to:

Sweet and sour Dutch Yakitori mix;

Rodent-infested Chiquita bananas;

and our personal favorite: Rozijn Vriendjes, which translates (somehow) to Little Raisin Friends.