Which means that my upcoming absence from work is not technically a summer holiday.
At least in the Dutch sense of summer holiday, which involves choosing the entire month of July or August and using it in its entirety to abscond to France.
(Where I hear that one can rent a nice campsite with a full hook-up and spend a gezellig month with a whole campground's worth of Dutch people.)
I know it sounds like I'm generalizing about the Dutch, but in this case, I'm going to stand my ground.
The question from my colleagues is not "Are you going on holiday this summer?" but "When are you going on holiday this summer?"
In late June, it shifts ever so slightly to "Are you going on holiday soon?" and in August it drifts more in the direction of "When did you get back from holiday?"
But to be fair, this hasn't exactly been a holiday for my sister or her husband, either.
Through a grievous error in judgement, they decided to spend a chunk of their honeymoon with us.
Through a second grievous error in judgment, they let me choose the daily activity roster.
In my quest to share only the most quintessential Dutch experiences, we spent the first day — in its entirety — on bicycles.
To deepen their understanding of the Dutch experience, we spent the second day — in its entirety — hiking around in the rain.
On the plus side, we were geocaching.
On the down side, an overenthusiastic tour director who shall remain unnamed picked a 20-stage search that led us into the forest and through the fields, looking for numbers on information boards, counting the number of window panes in farm cottages, and learning the difference between a plank, which is a plank, and a balk, which is a square plank.
Our quest took an entire afternoon, in which the only variation in weather was whether it was raining hard or raining really hard.
Even I felt a little guilty for dragging my poor sister and her poor husband so far outside of Nijmegen on bike and foot that they were overcome with joy and exhaustion upon returning to city limits each day.
Don't get me wrong: I didn't feel that guilty.
But definitely a tiny little smidgen of guilty.
So today I took them to Nijmegen's Sanadome, which is one of the most unfortunately named spas I've had the pleasure of visiting.
I even let them take the bus!
Which brings me (loosely) to my new favorite Dutch-language discovery: fris en fruitig.
According to my Dutch sources, it's just another way to describe someone who is feeling fresh and alert in the morning.
As in, I should write these meeting minutes this morning, while I'm feeling fresh.
But the expression fris and fruitig translates literally to fresh and fruity.
As in, I should write these meeting minutes this morning, while I'm feeling fresh and fruity.
Just for the record?
Having spent the better part of the day in an eucalyptus steam room, we're basically recovered from my two-day Dutch hazing ritual.
But we might need another day on the couch before we feel fresh and fruity again.
