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.

Wedding, Schmedding

My poor sister.

She just completed what might be the most meaningful event of her adult life, and all I felt compelled to write about last week was the outrageously large selection of energy bars at Wegman's.

On the other hand, has she lost her mind?

Does she really want her wedding at the center of my tome of cultural maladjustment and complaining?

Too late now!

In my official role as Maid-of-Honor-zilla, I present the short(ish) version of Prairie and Jeff's wedding.

My first order of business after setting foot in the sweet land of energy bars (and, as it turns out, outrageously high credit card bills) was to get my hair cut for the wedding.

Since one of my favorite Peanut Cheese topics is how much I hate getting my hair cut in the Netherlands, I will spare you — as one of my Dutch co-workers occasionally says, to my everlasting delight — the rehearsal of those ideas.

However, I will note that I find it vaguely creepy that all of my immediate family members go to the same hairdresser.

Don't get me wrong: it was lovely to get my hair cut exactly the way I wanted it, with no suffering save the time I spent gazing at the photos taped to her mirror depicting a large man with a mullet.

(Even that could be worse; my sister reports that the stylist in the next booth has a photo album dedicated to her pet weasel.)

But it's sort of a strange intimacy, this family hairdresser business. There's something about it that harkens back to the olden days, when all family members took a bath once a week in the same vat of water.

Unfortunately, my otherwise very satisfactory haircut did not spare me from the bride's demand that I wear my hair "UP!".

The bride: I want you to wear your hair UP!

The bridesmaid, scowling suspiciously: What do you mean, "UP!"?

The bride: You know. UP!

Note to any other friends or family members who may be thinking of marrying anytime in the foreseeable future: I will gladly write a large check for your dowry if it means that I don't have to do anything special to my hair.

After scultpting her own hair into place with an impressive pastiche of hair pins, Saran Wrap and white Elmer's Glue, my sister proceeded to get married at an old inn in the middle of nowhere in upstate New York.

As American weddings go, this was more reasonable than most, largely because it was limited to the bride and groom's immediate families, for a grand total of 19 people.

The ceremony itself was full of laughter, in part because it was full of warmth and humor, and in part because it was a comedy of errors.

As Maid of Honor, I was in charge of beginning the procession, which meant giving John the thumbs up to hit the Play button on the CD player, then marching out the door and down the stairs.

Without tugging at my strapless dress, tripping, crying, or smirking.

Or any combination of those things.

As I emerged from the doorway and tried to step in time to the peppy Pachelbel's Canon emanating from the porch, the groom gave me what seemed at the time to be an overly critical look.

Him: Where are the flowers?

Me: What flowers?

Rewind!

Someone rescued the flowers from the refrigerator in the kitchen, and we spent the next 10 minutes frantically pinning corsages on parents and grandparents sitting in the audience.

Meanwhile, my sister tried not to hyperventilate inside.

For the second processional, all of the bridesmaids had lovely bouquets, and most of the guests had beautiful if crookedly applied corsages.

The ceremony went swimmingly until the very end, when John stood up to do a short reading just before my sister and the groom exchanged their most serious, meaningful vow.

The reading was great, and my sister took her husband-to-be's hands and looked into his eyes, and said "John — I mean Jeff..!!!"

Fortunately for everyone, great hilarity ensued.

As she tried to regain her composure, her veil popped out of her hair, and then when I bent down to fetch it, I dropped all of the notecards she was supposed to be using to remember her vows.

The only downside of participating in such a small wedding was that the bride and groom didn't have 100 hungry guests waiting for them to hurry up and get to the reception already.

Instead, they had 17 hungry guests who were obligated by blood or marriage (or in John's case, just plain obligation) to participate in wedding photos with familial groupings that would make an eighth grade math teacher proud.

There are 524,287 different combinations of 19 wedding guests, and let me be clear: we have a photo of every single one of those.

But it was worth every single minute of photo taking.

Thank goodness, for example, that we have a photo featuring my great aunt, the bride, John, and Jeff's stepsister's husband!

All of this was orchestrated by Sue, who was a rock star when it came to the three hallmarks of successful wedding photography:

She was able through sheer force of will to keep all of the bridesmaids, flower girls, mothers and grandmothers trapped in the bridal suite for three hours of "getting ready" shots prior to the wedding.

She only referred to herself in the third person. ("Look at Sue!")

And perhaps most importantly, she was able to make a high-pitched trilling noise with her tongue, which is consistently effective in getting babies to toward her while she takes the photo.

That noise also been shown to be consistently effective in triggering murderous feelings in full-grown women who have shoveled themselves into a bridesmaids dress.

Having said all of that, one of my very favorite photos from the wedding is this one of me and John.

The instructions from Look at Sue! were to turn toward each other and gaze into each other's eyes, but the actual look we're giving each other clearly translates to, "This is total bullshit."

The Double-Edged Sword of Hot Dogs and Nutter Butters

Upstate New York is the kind of place where a healthy meal is generally considered to be something along the lines of a Reuben.

At first, we were delighted to binge on all of the guilty pleasures that we can't get in the Netherlands.

Among many other things, we horked down hamburgers, hot dogs, chicken tenders, and in John's case, a disturbing number of Nutter Butters.

Then it became clear that we were going to die immediately from a combination of indigestion and artery blockage.

The same general principle held true for our time in the car.

At first, it was really fun to zip around and do all of our errands without having to use a bungee cord to attach anything to the back of a bicycle.

About two days in, however, we were totally horrified by how many hours we were spending on the road every day.

Much of our driving was related to shopping for necessary and not-even-remotely-necessary items that are either hard to find or outrageously expensive in the Netherlands. (Import taxes, schmimport taxes!)

I loved being in an American grocery store for the first time in 6 months, but even so, it was hard not to get overwhelmed by the 100 types of cereal or 17 different kinds of cranberry juice or 46 flavors of yogurt.

It's nearly impossible to find energy bars in the Netherlands, but the grocery store we visited in Liverpool, New York has an entire aisle of them. An entire aisle!

Corrections

I'm going to start the week by coming clean on two gravely misstated facts from the annals of Peanut Cheese.

One is from the not-so-distant annals and comes from my very favorite source of corrections: my mother.

She points out that Fulton, New York has not two but three Dunkin' Donuts to serve its population of (in a very best case scenario) 11,000 people.

As a side note, I tried to search the Internets for some illustrative photos of my hometown, but the disproportionate number of mug shots that appeared when I searched Google Images dampened my enthusiasm.

The other is more distant and perhaps less immediately relevant, although more personally meaningful to me: in my long and elaborate soliloquy about my new favorite Dutch abbreviation, I missed the fact that it's "in verband met", not "in verbinding met."

The letters are still the same (i.v.m.) for the gloriously all-purpose expression that means in relation to, or in connection with, or in a pinch, because of. But if you spell it out — or get ambitious and try to say it out loud — the key word is verband.

This is the story of my life when it comes to the Dutch language.

I think I've got something all figured out, to the point where I go on and on about it in public, and then it turns out that I've been saying something crazy.

Come to think of it, maybe this is just the story of my life in general.

What drives me crazy is that there's no actual difference between verband and verbinding.

If you look in the Dutch dictionary (which I did, the first time my language buddy corrected me), the definitions are exactly the same: they mean ""link" or "connection."

But there's something about "verbinding" (at least according to Paul) that connotes a more supernatural connection.

I don't actually understand this, but I think I get the basic idea: when I say "In verbinding met the broken photocopier", it suggests that a higher being has decimated the toner cartridge.

Time to Make the Donuts!

In keeping with our whirlwind summer of world cities, we're on the verge of traveling to the U.S. for my sister's wedding.

Technically speaking, I think it's fair to say that Fulton, New York is not a world city.

It does have two Dunkin' Donuts franchises, however, which might give it the highest donut shop density east of Cleveland.

If you could see me sitting on my couch right now, you would be able to see the extremely inventive faux-gang "East Side" / "West Side" hand signals I'm making to indicate that the two Dunkin' Donutses are judiciously located on either side of the Oswego River.

Leaving the donuts momentarily and returning to the wedding: my sister and her guy are having a small but fairly traditional ceremony.

I'm looking forward to celebrating the happy event with family and friends, but I'm sort of dreading the pageantry of it all.

Though in fairness to my sister, I consider pageantry to be any event in which I have to show up on time and wear an architecturally ambitious bra.

My lack of enthusiasm about rococo wedding outfits and my love/hate relationship with my Dunkin' Donuts-rich hometown aside, I'm really happy about having a chance to go home.

For one very shallow and materialistic thing, we're looking forward to trading in much of our net worth for two suitcases full of precious treasure.

In this case, precious treasure is Saran Wrap and Dramamine and brand-name panty hose.

(I wish I could say that we're planning to use those items all at the same time, but sadly, we are not Those Kind of People. )

I'm also just looking forward to being somewhere for a couple of weeks where things don't take nearly as much effort.

It's a nice luxury — and one I am just now beginning to appreciate fully — to be able to half-read or half-listen to something and still pretty much understand both the literal meaning and the nuance behind it.

It's also going to be a huge relief to open my mouth without being in grave danger of saying something stupid.

Note that I'm not claiming that the danger will be gone. It's just not quite as imminent.