Easter Surprise!

As it turns out, the Dutch take Easter seriously. Really seriously.

Almost everyone gets a four-day weekend to celebrate Good Friday, Holy Saturday, Easter Sunday, and the following Monday, which is described quite cleverly as "Second Easter Day."

It's also a major commercial holiday, in the sense that the stores have been flooded with Easter candy and Easter flowers and Easter cookies and Easter decorations and Easter toys and 29 different kinds of ham.

As an American for whom Easter is sort of a non-entity, it's a striking phenomenon. And in a basically secular country, I don't really understand what makes Easter so hot.

Maybe the Dutch just find the concept of resurrection to be a marketable one.

Or maybe Dutch consumers are less depressed in the spring and as a result, quite willing to spend their money on chicken decor.

Don't get me wrong: I'm very pro-chicken decor.

I just don't get why Holy Week unleashes a tsunami of it.

Commercialism or not, I'm grateful for the four-day weekend, especially since we're enjoying a freakish string of perfect, sunny days in which I honestly cannot remember the last time it rained.

I should be enjoying said freakishness without reservation, but I have to admit that it also fills me with a unshakable sense of dread.

As in, sure, we're getting two weeks of beautiful sunshine now, but I am convinced that it is going to end soon and then rain ALL SUMMER LONG.

Coincidentally, an American friend of mine in Nijmegen described having the exact same feeling — so while all of the Dutch people I know are giddy with delight about the unusual weather, there's something about the expat experience that makes us suspicious of Mother Nature's trickery.

But all of this is a long way to say that John and I needed a four-day weekend to recover after discovering in our mailbox last week the following advertising circular from one of the Netherlands' largest department stores.

What, you may reluctantly ask, is the Dutch tag line for this tableau featuring a terrifying Easter Bunny and an unsuspecting little girl?

EASTER SURPRISE!

Laundry Gravity

I will be the first to admit that John and I are a little bit manic when it comes to weekends.

On any given Saturday and Sunday, we're either gorging ourselves in Barcelona, trolling New York's second-hand shops, sailing on the North Sea, absconding to Beijing — OR, we're hunkered down in Nijmegen, leaving our apartment only when absolutely necessary.

Which generally means one trip on Saturday afternoon to Albert Heijn

for groceries, with grudging auxiliary trips to the Turkish market or the Asian food store as needed.

And, because there is no voice of reason in our mildly OCD household, we often spend these weekends cooking in extremis.

This weekend, for example, we're making bagels, scones, Chinese beef noodle soup, and kimchi.

...in addition to our regular meals: cheese quesadillas and homemade guacamole, rosemary-garlic lamb with tsatziki and greek salad, and caprese sandwiches.

I'm not sure why we're not like normal people, who are able to eat frozen pizza for lunch while blending at-home activities with out-of-the-home activities in the span of a single weekend.

I think it has something to do with the gravitational field from the mountain of dirty laundry in our closet.

It also has something to do with Chinese beef noodle soup being impossible to find in Nijmegen, so if we want a slice of that particular deliciousness, we have to spend all day making it ourselves.

But mostly, I think it's just a habit we've gotten into: some weekends, we head into the great blue yonder to do something adventurous and fun, and other weekends, we stay home to restock our fridge and wash our clothes and catch up on sleep and luxuriate in doing nothing.

Which is also fun, but it's a very different kind of fun.

Speaking of the great blue yonder, our latest adventure (fermenting kimchi notwithstanding) was the final weekend of our so-called "Competent Crew" sailing course.

During our first two weekends of becoming competent, we stuck to the gentle waters of the Ijsselmeer, a man-crafted lake surrounded by excruciatingly quaint Dutch villages.

For our third and final weekend, we needed to learn how to wrestle with tides, so we headed along Amsterdam's main shipping channel in the other direction, into the North Sea.

On Friday evening, it took the better part of two hours to motor all the way to Ijmuiden, the port at the mouth of the North Sea Canal.

On the way, in the darkness, we experienced a version of Holland that stands in stark contrast to the quiet, pastoral landscape that makes up 90 percent of the country.

We navigated through Amsterdam's industrial quarter, past enormous cranes and thousands of shipping containers, around huge tunnel-digging operations with machinery that resembles something out of City of Lost Children.

The most striking image, though, was the steel foundry at Ijmuiden, captured here by our friend Jan, a German whose Dutch is so flawless, I am tempted every few hours to throw myself off the boat in a fit of envy.

I acknowledge that from an environmental perspective, the flaming chimneys and ominous smoke are not really that great.

Even so: there was something about it that I loved.

Maybe I just like moody, dystopian landscapes.

Maybe it's because I grew up (at least partly) in the rust-belt town of Fulton, New York, which was home to a Miller plant and an Alcan plant and a Birds Eye plant and a Sealright plant — and a Nestlé plant that made the whole town smell like chocolate before it was about to rain.

(As a side note, the Sealright plant was taken over some time ago by a Finnish paper company called Huhtamaki, which happens to manufacture the lids to the paper coffee cups sold at Dutch train stations. Every time I buy a cup of tea and pick up a lid that says Huhtamaki on it, I get a strange, small pang of homesickness.)

Or maybe it's just that after a while, the Netherlands' endless pattern of lovely fields and sheep and lovely fields and sheep starts to seem a little bit...endless.

Either way, it was strangely refreshing to see such a messy, imperfect, industrial side of Dutch life.

The Big Pear

Unlike my recent trip to Peru and Argentina — where I was overwhelmed with relief at being able to speak Dutch after nearly three weeks of limping along on extremely primitive Spanish — I was slightly less enthusiastic about my triumphant return to the Netherlands today after a long weekend in New York City.

This is hard to believe, I know.

To be fair, comparing New York to anywhere other than, say, Singapore, is comparing apples and oranges.

Or, as the Dutch say instead, apples and pears.

As a side note, comparing the comparison of apples to oranges with the comparison of apples to pears pretty much sums up my entire experience in the Netherlands.

As far as I'm concerned, apples and pears are just minor variations on the exact same same fruit, so the Dutch version of this expression makes no sense whatsoever.

But it's still hard not to compare and contrast — and then to feel giddy about five days in New York in all of its messy, imperfect, exquisitely quirky variety.

Which includes (but is by no means limited to) bicycle polo and letterpress stationery boutiques and Sri Lankan groceries and tranny bingo and martini bars and Naked Boys Singing and Economy Candy and Sunday morning Chinatown soccer league scrimmage and scary George Condo portraiture and brunch places where you can get a scramble made with pico de gallo and fried matzo.

This list, incidentally, makes me wonder where the Dutch get their fast-held idea that all Americans are irredeemable prudes.

I mean, come on, people: we have places where you can buy letterpress stationery!

(On second thought, I confess that I feel somewhat anxious to note here on the Internets that we did not actually attend Naked Boys Singing. But we could have if we had wanted to.)

True to form, I also spent a little bit of our time on the Lower East Side shopping for staple items like Q-tips and deodorant.

Plus two highly coveted boxes of Kraft Macaroni and Cheese.

Because nothing says "shopping in New York City" like powdered cheese mix.

At one point during this hamster spree, my friend looked in my shopping bag and asked, "So how much of that are you able to get in the Netherlands?"

I tried to keep the vein from popping out of my forehead while answering, "None of it!!!"

My bliss lasted right up until the very end of the trip, when I snagged the last Sunday New York Times on the stands and ordered a giant cup of tea from Peet's Coffee at JFK.

I curled up in a corner of the departure lounge at B20 to enjoy my delicious hot beverage and an actual, physical copy of my favorite newspaper.

The only distraction from my happy place was four Dutch ladies chatting it up a few seats away.

I'm ashamed to admit that I considered in all seriousness whether there was a nice or even remotely justifiable way to ask them to PLEASE STOP SPEAKING IN DUTCH — but in the end, I concluded that no, there really was not.

But luckily for me, they (eventually) returned to their romance novels and I was able to enjoy my last few moments on American soil in peace, quiet and total denial.