Peanut Cheese

And Since We've No Place To Go

2012-02-06T21:26:00.001+01:00

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!

2012-01-30T21:47:00.000+01:00

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.

The Tell

2012-01-23T23:15:00.000+01:00

What's the only problem with having a fair amount of Dutch — as the weird Dutch expression goes — under my knee?

It used to be that people just smirked at everything I said.

I could go on and on for whole, stilted paragraphs and just get a single look of steady bemusement.

Now, it's much more common for me to have long conversations without getting any visual feedback at all — until I make some small but meaningful mistake.

Unless I say something just plainly and factually wrong — like telling my coworker the other day that the ketel, or boiler, on my bicycle was broken, when what I meant was the ketting, or chain — most people won't volunteer a correction.

It's way more insidious than that.

They don't say a word, and the only giveaway is just the slightest change in facial expression.

With some people, it's a tiny pursing of the lips.

With others, it's a slight widening of the eyes, or a nearly imperceptible raise of eyebrow.

For a nation whose two major claims to fame are windmills and being blunt, I don't fully understand why the reaction to my language mistakes is so darned subtle.

[Short and cranky digression alert!

This may not be the world's most shining example of classic Dutch directness, but I'm still a little stunned by an email I received last week from someone I had never met, asking me to do a same-day translation of a document written in Dutch.

Everything was all fine and good until he got to the exact spot in the mail where one (and by one, let me be clear that I mean me) expects to see something along the lines of thank you in advance for your help.

Instead, I found an Ik ben heel benieuwd of dit echt gaat lukken.

I am really curious if this is actually going to work.

And by this, he meant the process of me translating something and massaging it into passable English. Hrmph!]

I suspect that the unexpectedly gentle response has to do with the fact that it's still something of a novelty to hear English speakers trotting out Dutch with even the slightest resemblance to fluency.

I know, for example, that I'm not the only native English speaker who has had a Dutch person refer to my accent as "adorable."

It occurs to me that this is not unlike Americans who find Irish accents totally and irresistibly adorable.

(Except for the part where Irish accents actually are totally and irresistibly adorable.)

The problem is that even if I actively notice the twitch during the conversation, I'm never quick enough to figure out my mistake and correct it.

It's only later, when I'm lying awake at night, that I replay the whole thing in my mind and unravel what ridiculous and non-retractable thing I've said.

All of this is a long way to say that on Sunday, a friend in Nijmegen sent an email around suggesting that a few of us get an afternoon cup of coffee at De Blauwe Hand, a bar / restaurant in the center of the city.

On a much happier side note, should you ever find yourself in the thriving metropolis of Nijmegen, De Blauwe Hand really is worth a visit.

What it lacks in Internet presence, it more than makes up for in atmosphere.

For one thing, it's been in operation since 1542. And any bar that's been open for 470 years automatically gets a gold star for awesomeness in my book.

I had said that I would meet the group there, but it wasn't the kind of thing we planned eight weeks ahead of time and had engraved in our calendars. And I didn't know most of the other people on the email list.

So when I showed up and found a just-opened, entirely empty bar, I was feeling a little nervous.

Was anyone else going to show up?

Would they all be strangers?

And how much was I going to have to discuss my plans with the 22-year-old bartender who was lurking around?

Let's just say that when I get a little nervous in Dutch-speaking situations, I tend to go off script.

And when I go off script...

I almost always say something worthy of a twitch.

Me, greeting the 22-year-old bartender: Ben ik de enige? Am I the only one?

Bartender, scanning the empty tables and chairs: Ja...maar wij zijn net geopend. Yes, but we've only just opened.

Me: Ja, okay. Yes, okay.

Fair enough. It's kind of a weird question.

Then:

Me: Ik ben op zoek naar een vriendin.

It's like clockwork, really.

The 22-year-old bartender's eyes widen ever so slightly, but he doesn't say a word.

I plop myself down at a table in front of the window: Ik wacht gewoon hier bij de raam.

I'm pleased to report that it took a full ten minutes for anyone else to show up.

Which meant I had a full four minutes to figure out exactly what I had said, and another six to wonder if I should slide-tackle the bartender to order something stronger than coffee and make him listen to my correction.

What I was trying to say was, I'm waiting for a friend to show up. I'll just wait here by the window.

What I actually said was, I'm searching for a girlfriend.

I'll just wait here by the window.

Je Chante

2012-01-16T21:16:00.000+01:00

So here's a new variation on moving to the Netherlands and losing our minds: this week, I talked John into taking an 8-week French language course with me.

In Dutch.

in theory, the French lessons will be in French.

But the language school is Dutch and the teacher is Dutch.

Which means that in practice, we'll be building our French language skills not on our more-or-less solid foundation of English, but on our unreliable and rather eclectic knowledge of Dutch.

This is going to go in one of two directions.

Part of me thinks it will be easier to layer the language of love and quirky cinema on top of a language in which we've colonized only the simplest and most practical concepts.

I only speak a little, we're ready to pay, where is the bathroom, please excuse my American accent, could you say that for a fourth time, please?

We're not going to tread into the dangerous swamps of the subjunctive or pluperfect, since frankly, I don't know how to go there in Dutch, either.

The other part of me thinks it's going to melt our brains.

Eight weeks from now, our mélange of French and Dutch will make us sound like developmentally disabled Belgians.

There is something of a point to this fool's errand: we're planning a trip to Madagascar this spring.

We've read a number of interesting guidebooks on Madagascar, but the essential concepts seem to be that a) the country has very few passable roads, and b) to tell the doctor where your infected leech bite is located, you must be able to do it in French.

The guidebooks all say something breezy and infuriatingly nonchalant like, Don't worry — just dust off your high-school French, and you'll be fine.

Okay, but what about those of us who envisioned a future spent deep in the stacks at the Library of Congress?

Who didn't date until well after puberty and took four years of high school Latin to improve our scores on the SAT?

Something tells me that no one in the jungles of Madagascar is going to care that I can still recite the endings of all five Latin noun declensions, in both singular and plural.

John didn't take French in high school either, but he did get lessons in elementary school from a teacher with a screaming South Carolinian accent.

Me: The French teacher wants to know if you're really a beginner.

John: Uh, basically. All I can say is Je m'appelle John. Je chante.

My name is John, and I sing.

So, that's helpful.

If we get kidnapped by rebels, I feel sure they'll be enchanted by John's chante.

The Grocery Rapture

2012-01-09T21:41:00.000+01:00

No trip to the U.S. for us is complete without an hour-long orgy of grocery shopping.

Technically, it's less an orgy of shopping and more an orgy of browsing, but that doesn't quite have the same ring.

Not every American grocery store is well suited for this.

If it's too small and dumpy, we feel robbed of our God-given right to infinite brand selection and grime-free shopping carts.

If it's too big and glamorous, we feel overwhelmed. And slightly nauseous from the strident classical music piped into the olive bar.

There's a sweet spot somewhere in the middle: the store needs to be big enough to have 47 sizes of Ziploc bags, but not so big that I need a GPS to find the pickles.

Our obsession with wandering down the aisles just to glide our grubby expat fingers along miles and miles of oatmeal, hot sauce, mayonnaise, or Pop Tarts is difficult to explain.

Particularly to principled Europeans who care deeply about things like responsible food production, good nutrition, and the environment.

I too care deeply about responsible food production, good nutrition, and the environment.

In this particular instance, however, those principles coexist peacefully with my desire to be surrounded by brands that are both infinite in variety and comfortingly familiar.

It's a little bit like falling back into a soft pillow of...

...the fifteen extra pounds I gained on our 10-day trip.

I get the cognitive dissonance here.

Trust me.

Do I think the world is a better place because Jalapeño Pringles exist?

No.

Do I think the world is a better place because Pringles in general exist?

No, not really.

Do I love that the Kroger in Aiken, South Carolina carries at least 19 varieties of a potato-based snack so artificial that it can't legally call itself a "potato chip"?

Yes.

I can't explain it, but yes.

I love that everything in this photo is a Pringle.

Merry Thanksgivmas

2012-01-03T07:39:00.000+01:00

We're ringing in the new year with a series of delayed Christmas celebrations with our families in upstate New York and western South Carolina.

In the process, we're enjoying every single second we spend on the speedy, sparkling clean, and spacious commuter jets that link most smaller cities of the Eastern Seaboard.

In fact, I cannot overstate the level of delight and anticipation with which we are currently enjoying the endless amenities of the Syracuse airport before bowing our heads, literally, to enter a flying palace owned and operated by Comair or Mesa or Midwest Express.

The only downside will be tearing ourselves away from the blaring monitors that are boring a hole in my brain with closed-circuit CNN coverage of the Iowa caucuses and Michelle Duggar's latest uterine adventures.

Our intentional post-Christmas travel was something of a puzzle to my Dutch co-workers, whose general position on the matter is that once Christmas Day has happened, it's over.

As a side note, our families in the U.S. may also feel this way, but they've graciously accepted improvised Christmases in April or November for so many years that I suspect any celebration within a 7-day radius of the actual holiday must seem like a miracle on the order of Immaculate Conception.

My initial reaction to their reaction — meaning my co-workers, not our long-suffering families — was to accuse them of displaying one of my least favorite cultural tendencies: inflexibility in general, and a lack of imagination about bending the rules of a major Christian holiday to fit our travel preferences in particular.

You should be proud of me, though: before I let that particular John Philip Sousa march of mine get all the way to the trio, it occurred to me that for most Dutch people, celebrating Christmas does not involve exchanging presents.

And so officially I acknowledge that without Christmas presents, there's not a lot left to move to a totally random day in February.

It's kind of like ignoring Thanksgiving or Easter and celebrating it a week later.

Sure, you could do it. But it would be weird.

And your mother might not be so enthusiastic about waking up at the crack of dawn to baste the turkey on a day that isn't the third Thursday in November.

An additional factor in our Yuletide disconnection is that the Dutch celebrate not one but two official holidays: First Christmas Day and Second Christmas Day.

To them, it seems unthinkable that Americans would spend so much time, mental energy and money on a holiday that starts and ends in just one day.

In the week before Christmas, for example, our djembe teacher stopped rather abruptly in the middle of explaining a complicated 12/8 rhythm and accompanying cowbell to say, I have a question for you two.

We glanced nervously at the other students and leaned forward to listen carefully, thinking he was going to ask us to join his latest YouTube project or rope us into another nerve-wracking djembe recital.

But no. What he really wanted to ask was, Is it really true that you people only have one day of Christmas?!

Don't get me wrong: we're happy to have an extra day off from work.

But it's still tough to embrace the whole concept of Christmas Day followed by Second Christmas Day, especially when there aren't any gifts to occupy an hour or more of the familial proceedings.

Christmas Day followed immediately by Boxing Day, on the other hand, seems like a perfectly legitimate holiday arrangement.

Though we might feel differently if we knew what the hell Boxing Day was.

Second Christmas Day is so bizarre, unnatural and un-creatively named that John and I like to joke with Dutch people about having Third Christmas Day, and Fourth Christmas Day, and Fifth Christmas Day, and so on.

Like many of our jokes, this is met with blank stares, and in this case, earnest reminders that no, there are only two days of Christmas.

But I don't want to give the impression that I'm totally unassimilated on this particular point.

Three years of Dutch Christmases later, I've finally caught on to the fact that when someone wishes me the standard Christmas greeting of Fijne dagen, or Fine days, they're literally referring to the Christmas Days.

Both of them.

It still sounds a little weird to my ears, but I've even started to use that particular holiday(s) greeting myself.

Good Tidings

2011-12-26T22:25:00.000+01:00

I like to think that John and I aren't hot dog people.

Living in the Netherlands, where objects resembling hot dogs are sold in cans (!), has revealed the cold hard truth: we are, in fact, hot dog people.

To be clear: I don't mean the kind of people who understand and appreciate the differences between frankfurters, bratwurst, knackwurst, and kielbasa.

We're more the kind of hot dog people who want to have a reliable supply of Hebrew National All-beef Franks in the freezer and available for lunch emergencies. At all times.

I suspect that John has complained to his friends at work about the appalling dearth of quality hot dog options in the Netherlands.

You know, once or twice.

Even so, we were not even remotely prepared for the small package that we received from one of said friends and tucked under our 3-foot tree until Christmas morning.

(A 3-foot tree, incidentally, which may be the tackiest object ever made from green plastic, purchased at Walgreens for $8 on Black Friday, and brought to life with a $65 voltage transformer.)

It's difficult to overstate the excitement and happiness with which John unwrapped the gift and discovered its message of great joy:

An enormous, sparkly hot dog ornament.

Inburgering

2011-12-18T22:45:00.000+01:00

As temporary residents of the Netherlands, John and I have never really paid much attention to the process of obtaining Dutch citizenship.

The question of inburgering, or naturalization, comes up from time to time in our language classes, but for the most part, it's one of the many situations in which our understanding is limited to the fuzzy outlines:

Learn the language, pay a hefty fee, pass a test, take the oath, get a Dutch passport.

I guess I had always assumed that the Dutch exam is a lot like the American exam, which features a heady melange of slightly arcane but still mostly relevant questions about government and American history.

Last Thursday, however, a coworker shared a newspaper article with 10 sample questions from the Dutch citizenship exam, which is formally known as the Kennis van de Nederlandse Samenleving Examen, or the Knowledge of Dutch Society test:

1. During Zara's work day, the director comes in. She has never met him before. What should she do?

a) Wait until the director says something to her.

b) Offer her hand to the director and introduce herself.

c) Wave and keep working on what she was doing.

Answer: B

2. Mo is stopped by a policeman. He notices that Mo's drivers license is almost expired. What does the policeman say?

a) Go ahead and use your wife's drivers license.

b) Go to city hall to have your license renewed.

c) Give me your drivers license. I'll make sure it gets renewed.

Answer: B

3. If you think that religion has a place at home but not at school, which type of school should you choose for your children?

a) A Catholic school.

b) A public school.

c) A special education school.

Answer: B

4. Zara wears a headscarf at work. An older woman says to her, Headscarves are stupid. What's the best thing for Zara to do?

a) File a complaint against the woman.

b) Pretend like she didn't hear anything.

c) Explain why she wears a headscarf.

Answer: C

5. Ali, Hans and Henk are eating in a cafeteria. Hans says, Hey, what's that weird food you're eating? What should Ali do?

a) Pretend like he didn't hear anything.

b) Ask, Do you want to try it?

c) Say, Shut up!

Answer: B

6. Fatima asks Zara, Why is the Netherlands a member of the European Union? What should she say?

a) Then all of the armies in Europe can work together.

b) It's required for all of the countries in Europe.

c) It's good for the Dutch economy.

Answer: (snicker) C

7. What does the Board of the Province of Drenthe do?

a) It considers where to locate new housing.

b) It makes laws about building and renovation.

c) It says if you can renovate your house.

Answer: A

8. Zara and Fatima are looking at the news about the election. Are you going to vote? Fatima asks. What should Zara say?

a) Yes, otherwise I have to pay a fine.

b) Yes, then I can give my opinion.

c) No, my husband always votes for me.

Answer: B

9. Mo wants to start his own business. He needs money for that. What should he do?

a) Mo can borrow money from the bank.

b) Mo can get money back from the tax authorities.

c) Mo can ask for a subsidy from the local government.

Answer: A

10. Sue and Peter tell Hanna and Jan that their neighbors just got married. Hanna and Jan don't know these neighbors very well. They don't know if they should congratulate them. What do Dutch people usually do?

a) Ring the doorbell and present a big bouquet of flowers.

b) Send the neighbors a nice greeting card.

c) Bring a lovely gift to the neighbors.

Answer: B

With the exception of the dry and suitably arcane inquiries about provincial authority and compulsory voting, I find these questions both shocking and difficult to swallow.

For one thing, they suggest that a major requirement for Dutch citizenship is knowing that as a person who eats weird food and wears a headscarf, you should be direct in an inclusive and friendly way when responding to culturally insensitive comments from your co-workers.

More fundamentally, they suggest that the privileges of Dutch citizenship are dependent on one's ability to conform to a rigid code of acceptable social behavior — right down to the choice of a greeting card for your newly married neighbors.

On the other hand: if the citizenship test is based almost exclusively on Dutch social norms, then all kinds of topics are fair game.

Zara is at Albert Heijn. She wants to buy a package of chicken to cook dinner for her family. Two other Albert Heijn customers are standing in front of the chicken. What should Zara do?

a) Wait until the other customers have finished shopping.

b) Say pardon me, then reach carefully past them.

c) Silently elbow the other customers out of the way while grabbing the chicken she needs.

Out of the Cup

2011-12-12T22:56:00.000+01:00

I've been trying to think of a way to write this that doesn't turn into the next installment in Autumn Visits Starbucks in the Netherlands and Marvels at the Ensuing Transaction Theater.

On that front, I am going to fail.

In my defense, we really don't go out of our way to go to Starbucks.

It's just that there happens to be one at Utrecht Central station, and as many as three at Amsterdam's Schiphol airport —and if we happen to be traveling, as we occasionally do, it's one of those situations where resistance really is futile.

Also in my defense: if we did have daily access to a Starbucks, it would be great for about a week.

Then I would start hating the smooth jazz and iced double soy vanilla frappadingdongs and deadly snacks and shiny gift cards and overpriced juices and sticky tables and all of the other excellent reasons to visit one's local independent coffee house instead.

Where one can choke to death on a vegan brownie.

A few weeks ago, I heard a rumor that they're installing a Starbucks in the now-gutted restaurant space of the Nijmegen train station, and I have genuinely mixed feelings about it.

Though if I'm honest about it, I think the primary down side is that getting Starbucks in the Netherlands is no longer going to feel like getting away with something.

Last Friday, I spent the entire morning ~~taking a tour of the Netherlands~~ trying to get to my place of employment.

My normal daily commute involves a 10-minute bike ride, then a 48-minute train ride, then another 20-minute bike ride, though I can usually shave the longer one down to 15.

If, hypothetically speaking, I've stayed a little too late at work and I'm trying not to miss my train home, instead of riding to work, eating my breakfast and keeping a watchful eye out for chickens at the farms along the way.

On Friday, I had been on a train for the better part of three hours when the Dutch railway system (disturbingly scatological mixed metaphor alert!) spat me into the bowels of Utrecht Central Station.

I was feeling under-caffeinated and over-aggrieved — and what better haven of comfort and caffeine than a giant tankard of tea from the Coffee Purveyor Who Shall From This Point Forward Remain Unnamed?

Unlike John, who generally (overstretched pun alert!) depth charges any hope of international cooperation and understanding by trying to add an extra shot of espresso to his drink, my order is always the same: Tall. Black. Tea.

And so it took me by surprise when the girl behind the counter asked me a question I had never heard before and completely failed to understand.

Her: Wil je de hmmhmm hmmmhmmm hmm hmm of hmm mmm?

Do you want the hmm hmm hmm — okay, maybe the rest of that is universal.

Me: Sorry?

This, incidentally, is the point at which 94 percent of Dutch people and 99 percent of baristas will switch to speaking a largely charming and mostly accurate version of English.

In other words? One comprehension failure, and you're dead in the water.

In this case, however, I got a miraculous reprieve.

Her: Wil je de hmmhmm hmmmhmmm hmm HMM of hmm MMM?

Ahem!

What they don't tell you before you sell your house and move to another country is this: the activities that seem like they're going to be difficult to do in another language, like going to the dentist or calling the tax authorities?

Those are child's play in comparison to having to comprehend all of the ridiculous questions that people ask when you barely speak Dutch and you're trying to give them money in exchange for goods.

Is it a gift? Do you want it wrapped? Are you going to eat it here or take it with you? Do you have a bonus card? Do you want a bonus card? Don't you want a second bottle of ketchup for half price? Are you paying for that with air miles? Do you want to buy savings stamps? Do you want to buy another kind of savings stamps? Do you want soccer stickers? Are you saving up stickers for a discount to the spa? Do you have a bag? Do you want a bag? Do you want your receipt? Are you planning to give your soccer stickers to the Dutch children loitering just outside the grocery store like a pack of dirty little beggars?

But after almost three years of grocery shopping and language learning, I feel like I have finally (finally!) mastered the complete universe of transactional phrases that one encounters in the Netherlands.

(Although I did buy a game at our local game store on the day before Sinterklaas — by far the craziest shopping day of the year — and I was so focused on getting it out of there without a bag and without it being wrapped that I inadvertently told the guy not to bother disabling the anti-theft device stuck to it. He was like, Yeah, actually? I do need to do this. You really can't take it out of the store before I do.)

That's a long way to say that it caught me off guard when the barista repeated herself and I still had no idea — at all — what she was saying.

In an act of desperation, I played the deaf old person card: I stuck my finger behind my ear and leaned in closer for one more try.

But she bought my act and still didn't switch to English: Wil je het zakje erbij of erin?

Do you want the tea bag next to the cup or in the water?

Me (finally): Oh! Erin.

At the time, I was so relieved to break through and get to the other side that I didn't really question her question.

But here's the thing.

With all respect to Dutch drinking habits, I really don't get why this is a valid question for someone who has just ordered a cup of tea.

You know, just go ahead and leave the tea bag outside of the cup.

I'd like to let the water get niiiiice and lukewarm before I put that sucker in.

Don We Now Our Piet Apparel...

2011-12-05T22:00:00.001+01:00

Today is Sinterklaas, which means that in addition to the regular roll call of cultural weirdness, three of my co-workers came to our Monday morning all-hands meeting in blackface, to celebrate the venerable Dutch tradition of Sinterklaas' former slave and helper, Zwarte Piet.

I happen to have missed the all-hands this morning — and even though I knew today was Sinterklaas, my assimilation on this particular point is so poor that I spent most of today wondering what my father-of-three colleague was up to on Sunday night if he was still wearing eyeliner on Monday morning.

At some fundamental level, it is still really difficult for me to comprehend that someone — and by someone, what I mean is an employed, college-educated adult — would dress up in blackface at his place of employment.

And that it wasn't eyeliner at all, but the last remnants of the black face paint that he washed off in the office sink.

We've now had three encounters with the force of nature that is Sinterklaas, and I genuinely believe that this is one of the few (+/-) situations in which all I can say is:

I am from Venus and the vast majority of the Dutch population is from Mars.

I've thought about this a lot. My conclusion is that either one truly believes that a white person wearing blackface is totally appropriate in the context of a beloved holiday tradition — or one really, really feels it is not.

There's just not a lot of, pun somewhat intended, gray area on this issue.

I'm not saying they're not out there, but I have yet to meet a full-blooded Dutch person who doesn't roll their eyes and dismiss even the slightest hint that Zwarte Piet (i.e. Black Pete) — and his cultural entourage of books, movies, window displays, cupcakes, candies, hand puppets and coloring books — is a racist institution.

It's a funny thing, because somewhere in the jumble of sweet gifts and personalized poems and little spiced cookies and speculaas deliciousness that makes up Sinterklaas, there's a true affection among children and adults for Zwarte Piet.

There's a certain logic to the affection: after all, Piet is the one who comes down the chimney (or in today's modern household, effervesces through the radiator) in order to deliver presents in a hefty burlap sack.

To complicate the story further, many people say they don't perceive him as an ethnically black person (moorish ancestry notwithstanding): to them, it's more that he's black from chimney soot, or that he just happens to be black in the way that Kermit the Frog happens to be green.

Admittedly — admittedly! — I do fulfill every Dutch stereotype about Americans having tender sensibilities around issues of race and sex and gender.

Though I happen to agree — in a few cases — that it's possible to overdo sensitivity.

I'm not sure, for example, why it's not okay for Tiger Woods to describe himself as "kind of a spaz" on the golf course, because there are people out there who suffer from a spastic condition and could theoretically be offended by the remark.

(See how completely reasonable I am?!)

But as an outsider in the annual Pietapalooza, it's hard not to notice that in a predominantly white country like the Netherlands, Zwarte Piet is one of few people of color in the public eye.

And it's hard not to worry that for the armies of Dutch children who don black makeup and black curly wigs and big red lips and gold hoop earrings and purple velvet costumes, this is sending — at very, very best — a conflicted message about what it means to have black as your skin tone.

If you add in Piet's broken Dutch and buffoonish behavior...look, I don't want to be the sour American who's spoiling everyone's Sinterklaas fun. But could we just take a step back and maybe rethink this whole Piet business?

I feel a lot of sympathy for parents in the Netherlands who share my aforementioned American sensibilities — but whose children want to dress up like Zwarte Piet, just like all of the other Dutch children do.

How do you explain the whole thing to your 4-year old, exactly? I'm sorry, honey — I know you want to dress up like that for school, but our family is a "no blackface" family?

Last winter, an American friend of mine whose husband and children are Dutch gave me a pre-loved copy of The New Yorker, which was enough to keep me in my happy place for the better part of a fortnight.

I was surprised and highly amused, however, to turn the page and find her son's Zwarte Piet drawing taped over a Jaguar advertisement in the middle of the magazine, Playboy centerfold-style.

For me, the mid-New Yorker Piet ambush kind of sums it all up: you move to the Royal Kingdom of the Netherlands, thinking you'll find yourself in a perfect liberal bubble.

When in reality? There's a small child in blackface lurking around every corner.

Schipholopolis

2011-11-28T22:11:00.001+01:00

Over time, we've developed something of a love-hate relationship with Amsterdam's Schiphol Airport.

On one hand, it's one of the world's busiest international hubs. As such, serves as a fairly awesome portal to the rest of the world.

It's great for easy weekend trips like Oslo or Trieste, but it's even better for places that are difficult or impossible to reach from the U.S.

Taking a direct train from Nijmegen to Schiphol beats the hell out of hopping across the U.S. on B-grade commuter flights to get to Detroit to take an 8-hour flight to Amsterdam and only then start one's journey to Capetown or the Maldives.

Plus it's cheaper, though if you've been on the Dutch train system lately, you know what I mean when I say but only barely.

My Dutch colleagues generally act like I've lost my mind when I describe something as a "only an 8-hour flight from Amsterdam", but when we can get somewhere crazy and remote on a direct flight from Schiphol, it really does feel like we're getting away with something.

At a more fundamental level, Schiphol has also started to feel like our transition point for moving into and out of Dutch culture.

With a train station in the basement, line-free passport control, gorgeous modern design, and universally horrible, overpriced dining options —Schiphol is a pretty good proxy for the Netherlands.

In the same way that one can count on U.S. airports to deliver long and punitive passport lines, primitive cross-terminal transit, sketchy indoor-outdoor carpeting, and an endless stream of highly affordable, rather delicious, mostly trashy food.

When we're leaving the Netherlands, schlepping our luggage on the train feels like a rite of passage, as does scrounging for something edible and searching fruitlessly for a water fountain or power outlet.

Flying back into Schiphol is also a rite of passage, though I'm always surprised to feel ever-so-slightly at home.

There's a certain comfort in dredging up my Dutch vocabulary to talk with the guys in customs, and in buying a train ticket from the finicky yellow kiosk while waiting at the baggage carousels.

Even the cyborg Dutch lady's standard, hair-raisingly direct boarding announcement — "Passenger Miller. You are delaying the flight. Immediate boarding at gate C23. We will proceed to offload your luggage." — seems comfortingly familiar.

We also have something of a love-hate relationship with the Starbucks at Schiphol.

Though love-hate is grossly oversimplifying. It's more like it feels like both a guilty pleasure and an inalienable right.

On the whole, the Netherlands is not hung up on the idea of actually brewing coffee or tea.

In restaurants and in the workplace, most coffee comes out of automated, push-button coffee dispensers.

In private homes, the humble coffee pad — insert shudder here — is king.

As a result, Starbucks has come to seem like a shining beacon of light in the darkness.

The kind of shining beacon where one can put milk in one's tea without having to grovel for it in Dutch.

For better or worse, however, the Schiphol Starbucks experience is never purely transactional.

A few months ago, John did his best to order a red eye from a teenaged Dutch barista, but ended up having to defend his inalienable right to order two different kinds of coffee from the menu and then mix them in the same cup.

(The full story is here, but the short version is that the episode ended with the barista saying "Okay, okay — I can do it. But it might not be good...!)

Last Thursday, after spending 14 hours on a plane from Buenos Aires, John bellied up to the counter for a red eye to get him safely home.

John, doing his best to cough up intelligible Dutch after almost three weeks in Argentina: Ik wil graag een tall koffie met een extra shot espresso.

I'd like a tall coffee with an extra shot of espresso, please.

Dutch barista: Maar welke soort koffie? Gewone koffie of cappucino of latte of...?

But what kind of coffee? Regular coffee or cappucino or latte or...?

John: Gewone zwarte koffie met een extra shot espresso.

Normal black coffee with an extra shot of espresso.

Dutch barista: Bedoel je een 'red eye'? Do you mean a red eye?

John: Ja, precies. Yes, that's exactly what I mean.

Dutch barista: Als je dat zei, zou het wel makkelijker zijn.

Well, if you just said *that*, it would be a lot easier.

Because there's really nothing like an extra shot of good old Dutch customer service to make us feel at home.

Solo in Oslo

2011-11-21T19:47:00.001+01:00

Every once in a while, I like to spin the roulette wheel of airfare pricing and pick a more-or-less random destination purely because I can get there on the cheap.

Oslo was a pretty easy choice.

I've been to Sweden twice in the last two years, and I've really loved its quirky socialism-meets-Muppets-meets-old-Volvos-meets-cutting-edge-design aesthetic.

(Um, just in case you missed it? That was your cue to act surprised.)

I was fairly confident that Norway would feel equally quirky, plus even more remote and even more socialist.

I will admit that I was somewhat slow in comprehending the relationship between the price of plane tickets to Norway and the hours of daylight one can experience there in November.

In planning my weekend on the cheap, I also failed to account for Oslo's status as one of the most expensive cities in Europe.

As it turns out, Oslo is one of the most expensive cities in Europe!

But aside from shelling out a breathtaking 440 Kroner for a one-way streetcar ticket — the equivalent of $7.50 or €6.50 — TWICE, I managed to be a pretty cheap date...

...for myself.

I was on my own for the weekend, as John is currently participating in his semi-annual Malbecapalooza — er, I mean important physics-experiment-building trip! — on the pampas of Argentina.

I'm sure that long-term solo travel would get lonely, but I think it's fun to kick around a city by myself every once in a while.

When I'm alone, I feel like I'm of the right age and clad in sufficiently androgynous clothing to go more or less unnoticed.

I'm not young enough or old enough, or rich-looking enough or poor-looking enough, to attract attention for any of those qualities.

(Also, this may cross the line into abject vanity, but I like to think that I don't fit the profile of clueless tourist. I don't wear jewelry; I don't consult maps in public unless absolutely, desperately necessary; I am vehemently anti-rolly bag; and, I don't believe in cameras that aren't small enough to stuff in one's pocket. Don't even get me started on fanny packs.)

If you are my female friends who wish that I would at least make an effort — or my Dutch coworkers, who say things like, "Autumn, you're a whole different woman!" when I wear a skirt to work — you might find all of this to be sort of depressing.

But the reality is: I really like being able to wander freely and somewhat invisibly through the streets.

I'm happy to report that my weekend in Oslo was a glorious, free-range, schedule-free, one-pair-of-jeans, one-pair-of-hiking-boots kind of an affair.

My first love of Oslo was the main harbor, where the city opens up to the edge of the fjord.

Especially in the dusky November light, the fjord has a still, moody quality that made it hard to leave the water's edge.

Having an occasional Volvo 240 in the mix didn't hurt, either.

My second love was the Oslo Opera House, a stunning construction of white marble and granite that looks like an iceberg emerging from the water.

My third love was the funky neighborhood of Grünerløkka, which had lots of interesting little shops and second-hand markets.

I am now the proud owner of a 1960s-era metal pencil case from the Oslo Pencil Factory, the inside of which — rather self-servingly, I feel — advises consumers to keep pencils protected from "moisture and uneven temperatures."

(Which frankly begs the question: what kind of pansy-assed pencils were they making in Norway in the 1960s?!)

Grünerløkka is also home to The Nighthawk Diner, which is by far the most beautiful American-style diner I have ever visited.

I kept telling myself that I should try a Norwegian restaurant while I was in Oslo, and yet my boots just kept on walking, right on into the Nighthawk.

It was simply stunning, with gleaming formica tables and vinyl booths and restored Wurlitzers and and intricate tile work and shiny metalwork and a whole array of glass cabinets to display white-lettered menus on their lined black background.

It was a little bit like walking into a dream, where waitresses with 1950s-style green dresses (you know the kind: with short sleeves and scalloped while collars) also wore crazy, Norwegian-style flowered leggings.

I'm not sure which I liked more: luxuriating in so much old-school diner porn, or the fact that I could smother my scrambled eggs in ketchup that was already on the table.

It was only after I got back to the Netherlands that I realized the alarming and unintended turn that my Oslo trip had taken.

After lunch, I reluctantly said goodbye to the lunch counter and made my way back to the train station to take the extraordinarily luxurious and bracingly expensive express service to the airport.

I had a little bit of Norwegian kroner left over, and I was pleased — delighted, actually — to find that the bookstore in the train station had both a 3-for-2 sale and a large, if eclectic, selection of English-language books.

I stretched out my book shopping as long as I possibly could, but in the end, came home to the Netherlands with three novels:

- A new printing of The Catcher in the Rye, which I had not read since high school and had been thinking about recently when trying to explain to my language buddy what a coming-of-age novel is.

- Let The Great World Spin, by Colum McCann, which won the (U.S.) National Book Award in 2009 and is a gorgeous, heartbreaking story of intersecting lives in New York. (It also happens to be one of the best books I've read in the last decade!)

- Freedom by Jonathan Franzen, a story about (surprise!) a dysfunctional American family, set first in suburban Minneapolis and later New York.

Which I inhaled, in that order, during my first 48 hours upon returning from Norway.

The thing is, I never feel like I'm homesick.

When people ask me if I miss the U.S., I usually shrug and think briefly about proper, functioning plastic wrap, and then say, no, not really.

And yet: there I was in Norway, eating at a diner that had clearly been collected in parts in the U.S., then shipped across the ocean and lovingly reconstructed into something even more beautiful than the original.

Followed by a shopping spree resulting in what might be the three most American novels one can find in any given bookstore at any given point in time.

Not the three best American novels, but the three most American American novels.

I mean, come on: The Catcher in the Rye?!

(For the record:

I did not attend the "Scandinavian Eagles Tribute" concert on the Saturday night I was in Oslo, but it's only because, in the words of my favorite slacker, I hate the fuckin' Eagles, man.)

Somehow, without me even knowing it, my Oslo trip morphed into a strange, back-door, late-night pilgrimage to American culture.

I feel a little bit like I should apologize:

I'm really sorry I used you, Norway.

I didn't realize I was doing it at the time!

Ace in the Hole

2011-11-14T21:26:00.001+01:00

Every once in a while, I get a little stir crazy from hunkering down in the gray, wet Dutch weather.

Like when it rains all summer and stays cold enough to wear sweaters to work.

As one purely hypothetical example.

Fortunately, there is an Internet for poor souls like me, and so even if it's too horrible to go outside in August, I can sit under a blanket on the couch and plan ahead for when it's finally nice enough to leave the apartment.

The problem with the Internet (other than a surfeit of kitten videos), is that this method of travel planning usually entices us into what the Dutch describe as het buitenland, or the outside land — known to the rest of us as "other countries."

This isn't a huge problem, but sometimes you just want to go hiking for an afternoon and then come home and sleep in your own bed, instead of, you know, flying to Norway.

The thing is, there isn't that much wilderness in the 30th most densely populated nation in the world.

And while we do like to get out and poke around in the polder, most of the open space there feels relatively domesticated. And flat. And crowded.

So you can imagine my surprise and delight a few weekends ago: I was hunting around online for local hiking trails, when lo and behold, I stumbled across a bevertochtje, or — roughly translated — a little beaver tour.

Right here in Nijmegen!

I'm pretty sure this only exists in the Netherlands: a four-hour program in which one pays €25 to go on a hike with a park ranger to look for beavers, including coffee, tea and a light meal.

On a Saturday night.

I was pretty sure that John wasn't going to go for a 4-hour guided hike in Dutch. To my surprise and delight, he agreed — with minimal salesmanship on my part.

I didn't even have to promise to slog through some 4-hour Werner Herzog movie in exchange.

(Which, if you're John, is really kind of a missed opportunity.)

Given that the beaver tour was scheduled for 4 p.m. on a Saturday, we were both absolutely convinced (convinced!) that we would be the only ones in attendance.

As is often the case in the Netherlands: boy were we wrong.

We showed up and found ourselves a room of nearly twenty people, some of whom had driven an hour and a half from Amsterdam to go on the beaver tour.

We quickly learned that Step One of a Dutch beaver tour is sitting in a circle and drinking coffee and tea.

This seemed really weird, even though we know better.

Digression alert!

If there's one thing we've learned about life in the Netherlands, it's that no meeting of two or more people of any kind is complete without someone — nearly always a female assistant-type, I feel compelled to point out — offering a cup of coffee or tea as part of the welcome procedure.

When we went to the real estate agent to rent our apartment, we drank coffee and tea.

Same with the notary, where we signed an official document that says we live together.

Even the bank where we opened our checking account offered us a drink while we waited for our appointment.

One day at work, after making my 477th cup of coffee to offer to a visitor, I mentioned to my boss that in the U.S., people have meetings all the time without coffee or tea.

That in fact it would be weird to drink coffee with every single person with whom you meet.

His response was that of course no one really needs a beverage, but that's it's a way to make people comfortable, to set them at ease.

For me, it has exactly the opposite effect.

Either I drink the tea and find myself wondering, why am I drinking tea with my notary?

Or I say, no, I don't want anything to drink, and then spend the appointment feeling like I've rudely botched some important social transaction.

And at a more fundamental level: what ever happened to just setting someone at ease that with one's personality?

You know, by being friendly and welcoming and nice?

But — end of digression — the coffee was there in the conference room at the park ranger's office, so we drank it like everyone else.

Then we learned that Step Two of a Dutch beaver tour is a 45-minute powerpoint presentation on beavers.

Every once in a while, it feels like all of our tortured language learning has paid off.

I'm happy to report that this was one of those times.

With the help of beaver props and on-screen visual aids, we were able to follow it all with minimal effort — even if the presentation was about 40 minutes longer than we expected.

I don't like being the kind of person who adds a whiny "where I come from..." postscript to every observation.

But even so: I have to point out that in the U.S., Step One of a beaver tour would be hiking around in the woods and looking for some &%$#@#! beavers.

There are pros and cons to that brazenly American approach, but on balance, I think I'm firmly in the beavers-first, powerpoint-later camp.

This minor cultural disconnect notwithstanding, we learned all kinds of interesting things from the ranger's lecture, including the part where the beavers were completely extinct in the Netherlands by 1826 and had to be reintroduced 75 years later.

Step Three of the beaver tour was getting our ranger-issued verkijkers, the Dutch word for binoculars that translates literally to far lookers.

Step Four was finally going outside and hiking around in beaver territory.

The whole outing was kind of funny.

I'm sorry to report that we did not actually see any beavers, which may be the down side of tracking wild animals with an entourage of 20 people.

We did, however, see a lot of evidence of beavers: gnawed-on trees and barkless sticks and beaver trails and big lodges and paw prints in the mud at the edge of the lake.

Make no mistake about it: we were in beaver territory.

On the positive side, we did see a fair number of semi-wild Galloway cattle roaming around in the fields.

We also saw birds and frogs and the ranger pointed out the burrows of both rabbits and badgers.

And it was a lovely evening for tramping around in the woods at dusk.

So, remember what I said about our tortured language learning finally paying off?

Fast forward to this Wednesday, when I was reporting on my beaver tour to my language buddy, Paul.

On the plus side, it was actually quite fun and rewarding to be able to tell him — as someone who has suffered along with me on my language-acquisition process — about going on a four-hour tour in Dutch and learning all kinds of interesting things about beavers.

On the down side: as I've mentioned before, the Dutch have a lot of different words for hole.

One of those is gaatje, which means little hole.

I use it all the time at work when talking about a spot someone has in his or her calendar.

Me, feeling rather chatty about the whole beaver situation: Oh! Wij hebben ook het verschil geleerd tussen het gaatje van een konijn en een gaatje van een das.

Oh! We also learned the difference between a rabbit hole and a badger hole.

I was expecting him to smile and nod and say something like, Oh, really? What's the difference?

Instead, he got kind of a strange look on his face and said, Wat bedoel je precies?

What do you mean, exactly?

Me: Ik bedoel de plekken waar ze wonen.

I mean the places where they live.

Him (raising his eyebrows ever so slightly): Dan moet je 'hol' zeggen. Een gaatje zit onder de staart.

Then you should say 'hole." A 'gaatje' is what's under the tail.

Me: Ah! Ik snap het! Ah! I see!

At the time, I really did understand what he was telling me, but we were in the flow of conversation, so I just moved on to my next beaver factoid.

It was much later in the day when I finally thought:

Did I really just tell my 65-year-old language buddy that I went on a beaver tour with a ranger and learned the difference between a RABBIT ANUS and a BADGER ANUS?!!

Yes.

Yes I did.

Just for the record?

Our beaver tour was fun and educational, but it wasn't that fun and educational.

Enter the Owl

2011-11-07T21:34:00.001+01:00

This week is a turning point of sorts: for the first time ever, I feel more compelled to complain about my Dutch colleagues' use of English than to lament further the palsied way in which I speak Dutch.

(You, on the other hand, would be justified in complaining about both my use of English and my use of Dutch.)

It wasn't that long ago that I declared my intention not to detail the ways in which Dutch people degrade the English language until I myself am able to speak perfectly smooth, flawless, native-level Nederlands.

There are, after all, a whole litany of distinctive speech patterns employed by English-speaking Nederlanders.

Some of which are funny, some of which are cringe inducing, some of which are totally inexplicable.

Let's be clear: I'm not to the point where I've stopped noticing when someone rattles off an I suggest you to do that or an I'm going to learn you some handy Dutch expressions.

But in the spirit of international cooperation and understanding, I generally don't make faces, offer unsolicited corrections, or think snarky thoughts.

(No, really!)

I've even appropriated a few Dutch verbal tics.

It's surprisingly useful, for example, to be able to describe something as "pretty okay."

As of this week, however, my maximum-tolerance policy has officially been cancelled.

I'm blaming it on The Owl.

As an organization with a strong commitment to sustainability, my workplace has all manner of environmental bells and whistles: lichens on the roof, a gray-water system for the toilets, organic food in the cafeteria, company Priuses (Prii?), and some sort of weird plastering that everyone refers to, puzzlingly, as "walls that breathe".

On a more superficial note, our conference rooms are all named after trees: the Birch, the Beech, the Oak, the Larch, and the Chestnut.

Which, for the record, I am also in favor of.

I like trees just as much as the next person, and I like to think of the room names as a subtle nod to our tree-hugging proclivities.

About six months ago, we started construction on a new board room on the top floor of our building.

Since the rest of the conference rooms are on the ground floor, this one needed a sylvan name that towers above the rest.

Tree huggers or not, you can't build a manly board room on the top floor of a bank and call it "ginko" or "fig" or "juniper".

As one of a few token native English speakers in the building, I was accosted in the hall and canvassed for ideas.

Them: What do you think of when you hear the word "canopy"?

Me: You mean like hors d'oeuvres?

Them: No, like in the jungle.

Me: Oh, CANOPY.

Them: Can you think of any other ideas?

Me: How about Sequoia?

Them: Suh....?

Me: Se-quoi-a. You know, the biggest tree in the world?

Them: Mmm....yeah. That name might be too difficult.

At the time, I thought, okay, fair enough.

And in any case, sequoias are more of a majestic-canyons-of-America kind of thing, not so much a brackish-swamps-of-Europe kind of thing.

A few weeks later, I caught a glimpse of the sign for the new board room: The Owl.

At the time, this seemed like a great solution.

It's simple, relatively universal, and it suggests a sort of humble wisdom.

(It also suggests beaky, grumpy, solitary creatures who come out at night to terrorize small rodents.)

Plus I'm a huge fan of owls — their current, obnoxious level of Etsy-hipsterishness notwithstanding.

(And...? So what if I can identify with beaky, grumpy, solitary creatures who come out at night to terrorize small rodents!)

In practice, however, this simple, unassuming syllable has singlehandedly ruptured my sanity.

Everyone I work with — everyone — calls it the Oll.

Think Ol' Yeller.

Or Ole Miss.

Or Back in the Ol-den Days, when we used to shoot owls and roast them on spits for dinner.

Me: Are you guys meeting today in the Owl?

My coworkers: You mean the Oll?

Me: No, I mean the Owl.

Them: Yeah, the Oll.

It doesn't really matter who says it first.

Without fail, I'm the one who ends up getting corrected.

Them: So, tell me again what I have to do to reserve the Oll for a meeting?

Me: Ah, you mean the Owl?

Them: No, you mean the Oll.

Snips and Snails and Puppy Dog Tails

2011-10-31T23:12:00.000+01:00

As much as I appreciate the existence of majestic churches, ornate temples, imposing parliament buildings, and other worthy bastions of modern civilization, my dream vacation is less Sistine Chapel and more tramping around in the weeds looking for lizards.

By those standards, our recent visit to the island of Gozo, the smaller of Malta's two main islands, was pretty much the perfect week.

Even the weather suited our plans: on our first day, it rained enough to coax at least half of the island's three million snails out of hiding.

Later on, the sun came out in full force, which was more suitable for lizards and their brethren — and as an added bonus, kept the brisk waters of the Mediterranean from turning John and me into popsicles.

I am fully aware, incidentally, that this whole vacation tableau makes us sound like 7-year-old boys.

Inasmuch as two 7-year-old boys would tolerate a lovely, romantic, snail-filled Mediterranean holiday together.

Despite the noise I've been making about my would-be guides to the Lesser Cities of Europe and Lesser Soft Drinks of the World, I don't often feel inspired to write actual travel advice.

(Travel is such a personal thing, and I'm not sure I'm the best person to advise people who prefer spotless rooms over quirky 1970s decor.)

But should you ever find yourself on Gozo — and can tear yourself away from its 22 churches, assorted neolithic temples, and single terrifying highway discotheque — I humbly submit the following list of tiny pleasures to be derived from this tiny pleasure of an island.

(Most of which are only for loving, not for eating.)

1. Carpenter Bees

These hairy black bees hover on the "alarmingly large" end of the tiny spectrum — and the only reliable way to find them is to sit in a sunny garden with a cup of tea and wait for the sound of one shoehorning her way into an unsuspecting iris.

I'm proud to say that we were prepared to go that extra mile.

2. Maltese Wall Snails

The only problem with being on an island covered in snails is that it's not possible to take photos of all of them.

Please believe me when I say that we tried.

3. Maltese Wall Lizards

One of the painful things about loving snails so much is that when it rains and the snails come out in force, one's hiking boots can becomes weapons of mass destruction.

Even if one has a very high level of snaildar.

With lizards, we had the opposite problem.

Even in the height of the afternoon, when all lizards should be fulfilling their destiny by being sluggish and photographically cooperative while lazing around in the sun.

We saw a lot of lizard-shaped blurs during our week on Gozo.

Before we found this relatively relaxed little cutie, the lizard hunt was a little frustrating for those of us who like to get nose-to-nose with the subject at hand.

For those of us who only like looking for critters and have no patience whatsoever for the precision of macro photography, it wasn't a big deal at all.

4. Maltese sausage

We're not really sure what's in this, and really, it's probably better not to think about it.

But it was unlike any other sausage we've ever eaten, and like ~~most~~ all preserved pork products, it was absolutely delicious.

5. Black beetles

To my mind, black beetles are pretty much everything one could ask for in an insect.

They're shiny and beautiful, plus they're outrageously round and crawly.

We're not sure what kind of beetle-y mission this little guy was on, but it was pretty clear that he didn't have a lot of extra time for John's beetle photography.

6. Qaghaq ta’ l-Ghasel

Gesundheit!

Known in English as "honey rings", these might be the largest tiny pleasure on my list.

It was getting to be snack time in the capital city of Victoria (population: 6,000), and so we bought a pair at a little grocery store without knowing exactly what they were.

Further fieldwork revealed that honey rings are a) a magical and topologically interesting construction of pastry and spiced treacle paste, and b) a screamingly sweet dessert for which coffee accompaniment is a physiological requirement.

We, as innocent tourists, sat on a park bench and ate about half of each honey roll — minus any such beverage — before lapsing into sugar comas.
It's kind of miracle that I'm even alive to write this today.

7. Bats

Gozo may be a tiny island, but its 25 square miles are dense with caves and old stone buildings and crumbling forts and belfries.

In short: bat heaven!

One night, after we had tried all four restaurants in the village where we were staying, we walked down to Gozo's main harbor for dinner.

In the process, we discovered a shortcut — aka, a rotting staircase that took us into labyrinthine, overgrown, unfinished municipal garden between the main road and the marina.

At dusk, the whole thing was — what's the word I'm looking for here...? — oh right: terrifying.

Absolutely terrifying.

But, after confirming that there weren't any dead bodies in the undergrowth, we discovered that the park was nothing short of a bat spectacle, with tiny, bat-shaped cuties circling and swooping and swarming just over our heads.

As a side note, everyone's favorite Peanut Cheese photographer was mildly put out — perhaps rightly so — when I suggested that catching this bat in flight (and in focus) was luck and not necessarily photographic mastery.

8. Olive

We knew that chameleons held a prominent place on the Maltese reptile list, but the end of our vacation was nearing, and we were starting to feel less than optimistic about finding one in the wild.

Gozitan herpetologists were even more elusive, so we screwed up our courage to ask the charming, mildly eccentric Swedish woman who runs the bed and breakfast where we stayed if she had any tips for our chameleon quest.

Much to our surprise, her eyes lit up and she reported that they had seen one in the garden just the other day.

We confirmed that she didn't mind us skulking around all in of the nooks and crannies of their property, and she warned us that they were really hard to find.

Really hard to find.

Then we got to work.

While John alternated between snail photos and lizard blurs, I spent about an hour examining the garden walls, the palm tress, the cacti, the rubble, the lawn chairs.

I had nearly given up when I spotted a medium-sized olive tree next to the gazebo.

I had my head stuck in the tree, and had been trying to think like a chameleon for a good five minutes when, out of nowhere, all of a sudden, one of the branches moved!

And lo and behold: there was our chameleon, about 8 inches from my nose.

I'm sorry to report that said chameleon — whom we named Olive after finding her each day in a different part of a different olive tree — was far less interested in us than we were in her.

But in some cases, unrequited love is better than no love at all.

Perks

2011-10-24T23:00:00.000+02:00

When people ask us if we enjoy living in the Netherlands, our usual answer is "mostly."

After almost three years, this feels like the right response.

It's honest, which is a plus.

Another plus is that it can sound chipper or it can sound anguished, depending on how many times one has had to air kiss one's co-workers that day.

"Mostly" is usually followed by a few "for examples".

For example: dark, snowy mornings and the transport of furniture notwithstanding, the deep-rooted culture of bicycling is one of our absolute favorite parts of daily life here.

We own four bicycles and zero cars — and amazingly, the bicycle-plus-public-transit infrastructure is good enough that living without a car hasn't constrained our lifestyle in any way.

(It's true that we sometimes hunker down and stay inside all weekend making Ethiopian food, but that's an entirely different issue, one completely unrelated to transit limitations.)

At the risk of stating the obvious: in general, carlessness in the U.S. is not for the faint of heart.

As a side note, I would be willing to bet my last smuggled-in box of Kraft Macaroni and Cheese that the Dutch language does not include the concept of "carlessness."

Another concept also absent from the Dutch language? Sick days.

I recently mentioned to a Dutch person that accruing 10 or 15 sick days a year is fairly standard for a job in the U.S. She looked at me like I had lost my mind.

As it turns out, if you're sick in the Netherlands, you stop coming to work until you're well again. The days in which this happens are not called sick days. You don't have to keep track of them on your timesheet.

When this acquaintance could speak again, she reported that with some Dutch employers, if you take vacation time and then happen to get sick while you're already out of the office, you don't have to count the days you were sick.

I love having ridiculously generous European vacation allotments more than I love life itself, but I'm sorry: that sick-during-vacation-time business is crazy talk.

This brings me to another major perk of living in the Netherlands: its "work-life balance", which is just a touchy-feely way to describe the outrageous awesomeness of John getting nine weeks of vacation time each year.

I get five weeks, and can shell out some cash for two more, which is nothing to shake a stick at.

But seriously.

NINE WEEKS!

That's almost five years' worth of vacation time for some jobs in the U.S.

I could say that this was not a major consideration in us moving to Europe in the first place.

And that would be a bald-faced lie.

The last feature of our holy "why it's great to live in the Netherlands" trinity is how easy it is to leave the Netherlands and travel to other parts of Europe, especially when one has so much vacation time to burn.

I fully expected that we would do a lot of traveling once we moved.

What I didn't realize is how our close proximity would release us from any obligation to focus on tried-and-true destinations like Paris, London, and Rome.

Instead, it's incredibly easy to follow a whim (or a conference or a cheap flight) to a spot that definitely would not make the cut for a once-in-a-lifetime European vacation.

If this whole day job thing doesn't work out, I'm fully prepared to write a travel guide to the Lesser Cities of Europe: Nürnberg. Nantes. Trieste. Utrecht. Oslo. Ghent. Krakow. Valletta. Cologne.

But as we all know, it's important to have a back-up plan, even for a back-up plan.

So if the whole travel guide thing doesn't work out, I've found an even better purpose in life, which is to travel the world on a pilgrimage to local soft drinks.

Given the many proven health benefits of soda, my love of local soft drinks is something of a guilty pleasure. But I really do love them, and how can love be wrong?

Our trip last week to Malta is what sealed the deal, in the form of an amber delight called Kinnie.

Which is a funny, charming name for one very freaky beverage.

The best I can do using only words is that drinking Kinnie is sort of like drinking a liquified pomander.

(Quick interlude for anyone who needs a Christmas craft refresher: a pomander is what happens when you stuff an orange with cloves and then leave it in a closet for 6 weeks to dry. The creation of which is a handy and effective task for hyperactive children during the months of November and December.)

Kinnie may be extremely bitter and totally weird, but it is seriously one of the most delicious things on earth.

It's not just the drink itself but the name, the logo, the packaging, the national pride. One really gets the sense that only the tiny island nation of Malta could have invented Kinnie.

I have the same affection for Kinnie as I do for Thums Up, an Indian beverage which someone on the Internets described as Coke with a betelnut twang; Cheerwine, which is a hard-to-find delicacy with roots in the American south; Almdudler, the national drink of Austria; and IRN-BRU, a Scottish beverage that may actually be as radioactive as it looks.

Long-time Peanut Cheese readers may also remember Kofola, the fine Slovakian root beer with a hint of Lemon Pledge.

I find it more than a little depressing that no matter where you go in the world, Coke is as plentiful as water — and sometimes even more so.

But there's nothing quite as refreshing as a drink you can only get in the place where you are right now.

Groeten Uit Malta

2011-10-17T18:45:00.000+02:00

Greetings from the tiny island country of Malta!

Goals for our week-long vacation include:

- Photographing the island's considerable snail population
- Looking for elusive chameleons
- Diving in the not-really-that-balmy sea

Tune in next week, when we'll be back to our regularly scheduled program of complaining about the Netherlands!

Comparative Studies

2011-10-10T21:09:00.000+02:00

I don't know about you all, but for me, one of life's great pleasures is finding small details and blowing them way out of proportion to make a vaguely grumpy point about life in the Netherlands.

Exhibit A? Hours of Operation.

Two weeks ago, I traveled to Washington, DC and then to Vancouver for a series of meetings for work.

Which, I want to say for the record, is not nearly as glamorous as it sounds.

During a short break in our cricket match-length meeting agenda, I scampered over to Dupont Circle for another one of life's great pleasures: a small but well-stocked neighborhood bookstore.

Given how difficult and expensive it is to find new English-language books in the Netherlands, I would have been thrilled even with the fluorescent lights, dingy carpet and Sweet Valley High stockpiles of an old-school, mall-style Waldenbooks.

But this (this!) bookstore specimen, called Kramerbooks and Afterwords Cafe, was an amazing and somewhat unexpected embarrassment of bookstore riches.

I spent every second of my thirty-minute break gazing longingly at the shelves, running my fingers over the brand new covers, luxuriating in the smell of paper and ink, and floating two inches above the ground in nerdy bliss.

As the clock ticked down through my last few minutes of litvana, I brought my handful of books to the checkout counter and surrendered them to a girl with just the right amount of bookstore-employee attitude.

You got the sense that she would grudgingly answer your question about last year's Booker short list, but she wasn't, you know, going to ask you about your favorite Jane Austen character.

I was feeling more than a little bereft about having to leave, and it occurred to me that if they were open until, say, 9 or 9:30, I might be able to sneak back over to the neighborhood after dinner.

Me, bracing myself for disappointment: So, uh, how much later are you open tonight?

Her, looking a little bit startled by the question: We're open until tomorrow.

Her, seeing that there's something wrong with me and I can't quite comprehend that answer to the question: We're open all night. It's kind of crazy here on weekends.

Me: Sweet Jesus In A Go-Kart! SERIOUSLY?!!

Meanwhile, back in the Netherlands: fast-forward to last Wednesday, when needed to mail my sister's already late birthday gift

Around 5:20 p.m., after forgetting to run the errand during my lunch break, I decided to see if I could find a post office that was a) still open, and b) on my way from work to the train station.

I wasn't optimistic.

My only point of reference was our neighborhood post office, which is housed inside of the Dutch equivalent of Waldenbooks.

On one hand, I'm grateful that there's a postal counter just down the street from us.

On the other hand, I'm whatever the opposite of grateful is that said counter is open from 10:15 to 11:45 on Saturdays. During the week, it's open based on whim, which translates to, on average, from 1:30 to 2:45 every afternoon.

John and I may be partly at fault for having the sleeping habits of teenagers, but I simply don't think it's reasonable for a post office to close before noon on a Saturday.

Especially if you're the kind of person who, hypothetically speaking, orders a lot of English-language books from Amazon.

(On a mildly amusing side note: the tag line for TNT, the Dutch postal system is "sure we can", which sounds confident and enthusiastic in when said a certain tone of voice.

In another tone of voice, it sounds a lot like how I feel about an extremely pricey postal system that once delivered a package back to me because someone in the mailroom couldn't figure out who was the sender and who was the addressee.)

In any case, I searched the Internets that evening for the closest post office.

To my surprise and delight, I found a tobacconist with a postal counter that was just a few minutes away by bicycle.

I checked the website of said tobacconist and learned that — at least in theory — they were open until 6 p.m.

I was intrigued, but still not optimistic.

But, since the only actual benefit of my two-plus years of language study is that I can now make phone calls in Dutch without having a panic attack, I called.

Just in case a miracle was about to happen.

Me: Hi, I was calling to see if your postal counter is still open.

Her: Oh, yes, definitely.

Me: Oh, wow, really? That's great.

Me: But just to check, you're open until 6, right?

Her: No. If you come at 6, I can't help you.

[UM, WHAT!?]

Me: Okay... ... okay... ... ...but what if I come in the next 15 minutes?

Her: Yes, that would be fine.

I hung up and hightailed it to the shop, screeching in just before 5:45.

The woman recognized my painfully American accent, and either she felt guilty or she heard the irritation in my voice on the phone — or both — because she went on to explain, unprompted, why "open until 6" doesn't actually mean "open until 6".

Her: I mean, we don't know what it's going to be, you know? And then someone shows up at 5 minutes before 6 and we can't do anything.

Me: No, you're right. I totally understand. I mean, I'm sure it happens all the time that freaky immigrants show up at 5 minutes to 6 with a wheelbarrow full of live gerbils and say, um, yeah, can you package these up for me and ship them to St. Petersburg, please?

Kiss & Tell

2011-10-03T21:14:00.004+02:00

One of the most terrifying things about the Dutch workplace is the specter of social kissing.

Technically, it's what Americans call "air kissing", in which you put your cheek on someone else's cheek and then kiss into the air next to them.

This sometimes comes with sound effects, depending on how enthusiastic you're feeling.

I always thought that air kissing was just an adorable, affected practice limited strictly to The French.

To our surprise and thinly disguised horror, it's an earnest and entirely heartfelt Dutch practice as well.

There's another important distinction: the French kiss twice and the Dutch kiss three times, so you end up with the cheek on which you started.

In other words, once you've been accosted by a Dutch co-worker, your face is going to be in the orbit of their face for a very, very long time.

The lack of an international standard for kissing also means that if, hypothetically speaking, you were to find yourself in a gathering of coworkers from a bunch of different countries, your fight-or-flight response would be amplified by the awkward pigeon-like dance around whether to go for a second or third kiss.

It's not that smooth to lean in for a third when the other person — usually a Spaniard who initiated the kissing in the first place — only has two on his mind.

To complicate things further, Peruvians only kiss once, but they swap said smooch for a handshake when you first meet someone, which ups the ante considerably.

The good news about the Dutch version of kissing is that — for the most part — it's limited to special occasions in the Dutch life cycle: announcing pregnancies, leaving for vacation, returning from vacation, and having a birthday.

I suffered through about a year's worth of said occasions before I stopped feeling hideously uncomfortable about it.

As it turns out, my work-related trip to Peru had a lot to do with my assimilation: the steady stream of nice-to-meet-you kisses made the occasional welcome-back-from-vacation kiss seem not so extreme, after all.

To be fair, I think most Dutch people find hugging to be just as uncomfortable as I find kissing — if not more.

Every once in a while, someone will reminisce unfondly along the lines of, "yeah, I had an American roommate once...and boy was she a hugger."

There are times when I can see their point: especially now that I've gotten used to this other form of simian recognition, wrapping one's arms around an acquaintance seems like it's waaaaay, way, way over the line.

All of this is a long way to say that celebrating my birthday at work last month felt like something of a milestone.

To be clear: it felt like a milestone once it was over.

Before that, it felt a lot like an inflamed, insomnia-inducing ulcer.

In addition to having to kiss everyone as they congratulate you, the Dutch birthday tradition involves bring baked goods to the office for your coworkers.

The most standard offering is vlaai, which is more or less the same thing as pie.

Many Dutch people we know, however, insist on calling it cake.

As a side note, this mislabeling drives poor John Up The Damned Wall.

I like to think that for two perfectionistic language lovers / grammar freaks, we are fairly tolerant of the minor daily abuses heaped on the English language by non-native speakers.

It's only fair. The day I can speak perfect Dutch is the day I can write an open letter to the Kingdom of the Netherlands about the proper use of noun adjuncts.

(A brief sneak preview of that moment of exalted triumph: it's cooking class, people, not cookingclass.)

But every once in a while, something pushes us over the edge.

For John, this is a big one.

At least once a month, I hear a little strangled voice from behind his laptop: "It's not cake! It's pie!!"

Last year, my birthday was on a Sunday, and so I took a pass on treating my coworkers to pie.

But this year, it fell squarely on a Monday, and one can only eat so much of other people's pie before one starts to feel guilty about being such a slacker.

The easiest and most straightforward approach would have been to go to the pie shop first thing on Monday morning and be done with it.

But I had issues.

I'm not saying that my coworkers are all a bunch of intolerant tree huggers — or as the Dutch expression goes, goat-wool sock wearers — but issue one was that I didn't feel like I could just go to my trashy neighborhood pie shop and load up on non-organic, non-sustainably produced pies.

Issue two was that unlike all able-bodied Dutch people, I have not yet mastered the art of balancing children, adults, animals or fragile objects on the back of my bicycle.

So even if I did go to the trashy pie shop, I didn't have a good way to get it back to the office.

Two years ago, I bicycled some pie to my going-away party at the University's Gender Studies Institute, and by the time I arrived, it looked a like it used to have a stripper hiding in it.

Issue three was (and is) that I am not particularly coordinated when it comes to serving food.

Just as one strictly hypothetical and not at all recent example, I'm the kind of person who might accidentally dump half a ladle's worth of Soto Ayam into my wine glass at a dinner party.

So having to cut and serve pie while speaking in Dutch and fending off congratulatory birthday kisses would have been enough to cause an aneurysm at the tender age of 35.

Issue four was that as much as I wanted to embrace the Dutch birthday tradition, there's something so grotesquely un-American about not using a birthday to assert one's individuality and/or baking prowess.

So: my deus ex machina for these birthday festivities?

The humble American cupcake.

The good news: the cupcakes were a hit.

Even with the co-worker who admitted that she had to look up what cupcakes were on the Internet.

(They're better known here as muffins, which kind of makes sense but also leads me to mutter grumpily under my breath, "They're not muffins! They're cupcakes!!!")

The bad news: serving cupcakes to a room full of coworkers was still painfully awkward, especially with me being sleep deprived from the creation of said cupcakes and ad-libbing in Dutch all the while.

I failed to anticipate that a) no one would be so bold as to eat more than one cupcake, and b) my cleverly designed self-service finger food eliminated the built-in entertainment of birthday time: waiting your turn, picking out your slice, watching the birthday girl drop cake on the floor.

Instead, everyone was done eating in about 30 seconds, and I was reduced to exhorting people to take more.

At one point, I pointed to the still-full platters and said what — in retrospect — might have translated to "Look! You people didn't even do anything with these cupcakes!"

The already somewhat tense silence revved up a notch until a kind coworker rescued me: "Oh...you mean it looks like we haven't eaten any!"

Me: "YES! YES! THAT IS EXACTLY WHAT I MEAN."

In the end, with more than a little American salesmanship, I managed to pawn all 48 cupcakes off on my sugar-shocked coworkers.

As an added bonus?

I kissed them all.

(The coworkers, not the cupcakes.)

Every. Single. One.

Quintessentialism

2011-09-26T22:30:00.000+02:00

I've been traveling for work over the last six days, the last 48 hours of which have been spent under the scrim of a medicated-but-still-throbbing head cold.

I really don't understand why I'm sick.

I mean, it's not like I went sailing in a weekend-long rainstorm, stayed up until 12:30 on Sunday night baking cupcakes, kissed half of my coworkers on the cheek on Monday while serving said cupcakes, celebrated into the wee hours of that night with a fortifying mix of Kahlua, Stolichnaya and milk, and then flew to Washington DC for a lot of jetlag and three long days of meetings.

What could possibly be unhealthy about that?!

When I say we went sailing in a weekend-long rainstorm, I'm only exaggerating a little bit.

It's hard to tell from the photos that we are completely soaked, but trust me: after eight hours in the driving rain, our waterproof clothing was anything but.

It was at this point that our sailing teacher took pity on us and fed us tea and stroopwafels, a classic Dutch dessert made up of two thin, buttery waffle-like wafers held together with a sticky, caramel-like filling.

Stroopwafels are certainly the country's culinary highlight.

Some people might even argue that they're the Netherlands' greatest contribution to humanity.

Either way, it felt like a quintessential Dutch experience to shiver from dampness while horking down a pair of stroopwafels with Armageddon looming on the horizon.

The Dude Abides

2011-09-19T11:59:00.000+02:00

Today is my birthday, so technically, I'm taking the week off from Peanut Cheese.

But I think it's worth mentioning that we had some friends over tonight for a White Russian-fueled homage to one of my favorite movies of all time: The Big Lebowski.

(Fans of the Coen Brothers may be amused to hear that the last time I mentioned this movie to my sister, she rolled her eyes and said, "Ugh! A bowling movie!" — which is a lot like complaining about Fargo being a police procedural.)

The highlight of the evening — and possibly of the year — was when we ran out of milk for the aforementioned drinks.

John had his shoes and jacket on and was searching for his bicycle lights when I looked around the room and saw eight people dressed in bathrobes (I wasn't joking when I said it was an homage) and asked "Why don't we all go?"

Everyone looked around and shrugged and picked up their drinks and said, "Okay."

I could be wrong, but I'm pretty sure that the Albert Heijn on Dalseweg in Nijmegen has never before been subjected to a posse of 8 bathrobe-clad physicist-types at 9:30 on a Monday night.

I'm not sure they really understood how awesome it was.

The Half-Year Report

2011-09-12T23:14:00.000+02:00

I try to maintain a healthy distance between my job and Peanut Cheese, as the former is what funds our weekend junkets and the latter is rife with possibilities for getting fired.

But I do have a job at a bank in the Netherlands.

As I've mentioned, it's at a sustainable bank, which means we try to use money as a force for doing good in the world.

We even have a company motto to that effect, which someone recites (out loud) at the end of our Monday morning all-hands meeting.

Motto notwithstanding, it is very much a bank, which means that I've learned more in the last 18 months about the banking industry than I ever thought possible.

But in addition to learning terms like "basis points" and "liquidity curves", I've come to appreciate one of the finer arts of the banking industry: the half-year report.

A lively compilation of results from the first two quarters of the year, in which one seeks to assure shareholders that we haven't absconded with their money to Suriname.

Though on most days, that is sorely tempting.

Inspired by this riveting exercise from my work, I present the first and probably only half-year report for Peanut Cheese.

In the interest of transparency, I will admit that the flat tire count and the beer bottle value are both wildly exaggerated.

Though it feels like we've had 11 flat tires in the last 6 months and I wish that the giant pile of beer bottles in the basement would net us €34 in deposit money.

Everything else in this report has been determined by auditors to be the honest-to-god truth.

Key Figures (January 1, 2011 to June 30, 2011)
*Primary travel indicators*
Number of countries visited:	14
Nautical miles sailed:	217
Miles logged by bicycle:	1,395
Hours logged by train:	223

*Adverse conditions*
Total days with precipitation:	113
Number of flat tires:	11
Average number of incorrectly conjugated verbs per sentence:	0.8

*Assets*
Current household bicycle-to-person ratio:	2:1
Value of unclaimed deposits from beer bottles in basement:	€34

*Extracurricular activities*
Djembe performances given:	4
Danish crime thriller series binged upon:	1
Limpets wiggled while on vacation:	3

What Bwings Us Together Today

2011-09-04T22:06:00.000+02:00

This weekend, we ventured far into our consumerist, vertigo-inducing neighbor to the east: the Federal Republic of Germany.

Our destination?

A city hall in the tiny Franconian village of Effeltrich, to witness and celebrate as two of our friends entered into the legally binding institution of marriage.

A tiny Franconian village, I feel compelled to point out, with proud traditions of marital unions, community service, and taxidermy.

I will admit that my general feelings about marriage lean rather heavily toward the snarky.

In this particular instance, however, I'm not using "legally binding" in a snarky kind of way.

I mean it in a more of a tender, bemused kind of way.

The reason?

We learned that a German civil marriage ceremony is a little bit like dressing up in fancy clothes and bringing 40 of one's closest family and friends on a visit to the Internal Revenue Service.

To be fair: there were moments for rings and champagne and kissing during the ceremony, and the whole procedure was followed by a lovely garden party on the grounds of an old hunting lodge.

And as an added bonus, the magistrate took special care to moderate his invocations of German legal code with lots of meaningful, semi-romantic advice.

Such as advising the groom to devour his wife on their honeymoon.

But there's no getting around the fact that there were a lot of forms to sign.

A lot of forms.

To the point where the bride and groom spent most of the ceremony sitting down, pens in hand, at a table at the front of the room.

Heading into our first European wedding, we claimed not to have any particular expectations for what it would be like.

But as usual, we found that we did have expectations.

In this case, I'm pretty sure I thought that a German wedding would more or less resemble an American wedding, only that it would be simpler and significantly more modest.

In retrospect, we should have seen this cultural disconnect coming.

Just a few days before this wedding, a German friend of ours described a wedding that he recently attended at an American church in Bonn.

Him: This wedding at the American church was TOTALLY crazy!

Us: Oh really?

Him: Yeah! First the mother of the bride came down the aisle...

Us: Uh-huh?

Him: And then there were three bridesmaids and three groomsmen who came down the aisle in pairs...

Us: Uh-huh?

Him: And then the father of the bride walked the bride down the aisle...

Us: Uh-huh?

Him: And then he kissed her on the cheek and handed her over to the groom...

Us: (starting to get impatient) Uh-huh...?

Him: And then the bridesmaids and the groomsmen STOOD UP THERE WITH THEM THE ENTIRE TIME!!

Us: And...?

Him: Well, then the priest gave a sermon and there was some singing and then they got married.

Getting to know the finer points of German marital law wasn't the only wedding surprise.

At one point during the garden party, some of the bride's relatives presented the couple with what looked like a wedding cake.

Then they offered a hammer and chisel to extract a handful of treasures from what turned out to be a cake made of solid plaster.

By their own admission, this couple has many talents, but handiness with tools is not one of them. But the groom happens to be a physicist, so they quickly abandoned the hammer and chisel in favor of gravity.

(Photo credit, as is often the case, goes to John, Peanut Cheese photographer extraordinaire.)

Us, watching the groom smash the plaster cake on the concrete steps: This is completely insane.

Our aforementioned German friend: What, you guys don't do this?

He went on to explain that it's a popular German birthday gag to encase gifts in impenetrable substances like ice and concrete.

All I have to say to that is: who says Germans don't know how to have a good time?!

But one of our favorite moments came during the reception, when our Danish friend inquired about the order of the evening's festivities.

Him: When are we going to cut off the socks?

Everyone else at the table, when we were all able to speak again: Excuse me?

Him: You know, the sock thing.

The rest of the table: WHAT sock thing?

Him: You know, first they have the waltz — La, la la la, La la la la — and then everyone surrounds the bride and the groom and then they lift the groom up and take off his shoes and then cut off the ends of his socks.

The rest of the table: Um, we don't do that.

Him: What do you mean "you don't do that"?!

The rest of the table: Dude, that is some weird Danish thing that the rest of us have never even heard of.

Him, after a few minutes spent contemplating the possibility that marital sock-cutting could be a purely Danish invention: You guys are just messing with me, right?

Eventually, after a fair amount of groveling from our table, the groom gave in and allowed us to re-enact the sock-cutting tradition.

I think it made our Danish friend feel a little better, even if no socks were harmed in the making of this photo.

Rainy Day Muppets

2011-08-29T21:16:00.005+02:00

I've been saving this particular piece of internet detritus for a slow week on Peanut Cheese.

By "slow", I mean a week without any glaring language humiliations, bizarro international trips, or delicious new Belgian beers to report.

It's not that I haven't humiliated myself in the last 168 hours while speaking the Dutch language.

It's just that the humiliation hasn't crossed the threshold of what might be interesting to strangers.

Somebody on the Internet has to have standards!

So instead, I present to you a Bert and Ernie classic: Bread and Peanut Butter, in which Bert and Ernie learn the critical life skill of cooperating.

Only it's overdubbed in Dutch, so instead of Bread and Peanut Butter, it's Brood and Pindakaas.

You can see why this has a special place in my heart.

But before you click the button, I need to deploy a viewer advisory.

If you've never learned Dutch and don't plan to, go ahead and dive in.

In addition to brood and pindakaas, you'll hear Bert talk about samenwerking, which means working together, and lekker, which means all kinds of things in addition to delicious.

You may also be interested to observe the clipped Dutch way that Ernie pronounces "Bert" and the downright freaky way that Bert says around the 10-second mark: O, ik ben dol op Pindakaas. Dank je Ernie! / O! I am fond of peanut butter! Thank you, Ernie!

(Even if you hate it when people resort to YouTube crapola instead of writing a proper blog entry, it's worth making it to the O Ernie! I am fond of pindakaas part.)

But it you're like me, and you've learned Dutch after growing up on the original 1970s version of Sesame Street, I don't really recommend watching this.

It's going to ruin your childhood.

For one thing, the men doing the voiceovers for Bert and Ernie are — without question — Dutch beet farmers who were plucked out of some rainy polder for a 1970s version of Holland's Got Talent.

Here's the original, fellow Muppet fans, just in case you need to get that beet farmer taste out of your mouth:

Pee Ess

2011-08-21T23:21:00.008+02:00

At the risk of, you know, overdoing it, I have just a few short postscripts to last week's beerpiphany about Trappist brews.

1) As virtuous as it is to head straight for the abbey when one has a hankering for beer, I thought I would investigate the offerings of our local liquor store, Gall & Gall.

As I feared, the beer selection was rather poor, although they do have brightly decorated gift assortments made up of beer from Eastern bloc countries that are no longer solvent.

To add insult to injury, however, there's a hot pink banner plastered across the front of the store advertising its Thuisblijvers Voordeel.

This translates literally to Home-stayers' Advantage, but it basically means a sale for people who have stayed home.

And by home-stayers, they mean anyone who didn't go on vacation during the months of July and August, the designated period when three quarters of the country goes to France.

Early on in my Dutch-learning journey, I thought it was charming to have a verb that means to stay at home.

Them: Hey, what are you guys doing tonight?

Us: O, wij gaan thuisblijven. / Oh, we're going to stay home.

When they're using thuisblijvers to mean people who stay home and drink instead of going on vacation, it's not so charming anymore.

I'm sure it's not because my entire self-image is wrapped up in how much and how widely we travel.

I feel like marching into Gall & Gall to insist that I'm not a home-stayer; I just happen to be staying home this month!

When really? I should just be quiet and enjoy my liquor discounts.

2) Whenever I start to feel that I might be out of the woods when it comes to speaking Dutch, I find myself on the receiving end of a big, fat dose of reality.

Me, speaking to any number of Dutch acquaintances who might be interested in my beer-tasting weekend: So, I have these friends in Weert...

Them: Where?

Me: Weert. You probably don't know it, it's a small city south of Eindhoven...

Them, pausing to think for a minute: OH! You mean WEERT!

Me: Yeah, Weert. Ahem! Like I said.

The thing that kills me is that Weert is only five letters long.

It's not Scheveningen.

Or Schiermonnikoog.

Or Hugo de Grootstraat, which looks easy on paper but requires a killer pair of gutteral Dutch g's.

Try coughing out Hhhhuccchhhhoooo duh Chhhhhroooootstraaaaat to a bus driver every time you're trying to get home.

(Just to be clear, it's the name of the street where our bus stop is, not some kind of safe word we use when riding the bus.)

But believe me: when I say Weert to Dutch people, no one has any idea what I'm talking about.

3) Last week, I mentioned three Dutch beers whose most notable qualities are being cheap and plentiful: Heineken, Grolsch and Amstel.

Alert Peanut Cheese reader Sarah points out that there's a fourth brand of Dutch beer in this category called Bavaria.

I'm going to go out on a limb here and guess that Bavarians, as a people, are really unhappy about this.

Sarah also mentioned one of my favorite parts of Dutch beer advertisements: the note under the scantily clad women where they tell you to drink responsibly: Geniet ervan, maar met mate.

Which translates more or less to Enjoy it, but in moderation.

But as an English speaker, it's hard not to read it as, Enjoy, but with maté, a South American drink that's in the same general family as herbal tea.

Mmm...rum & maté.

It's kind of like my favorite anti-speeding posters, which show up in the neighborhood every once in a while.

The posters say Heb jezelf in de hand, which is an expression along the lines of keep an eye on your speed.

To my great amusement, it translates more literally to Have yourself in the hand.

Which, at least in my experience, is not really a strategy that's going to prevent accidents.

4) Last but not least: lest you think I was being too harsh about mass-produced Dutch pilsners, my language buddy confirmed that even the Dutch don't like Dutch beer.

Heineken? Grolsch? Amstel? Bavaria?

The Dutch name for all of those beers, he gleefully reported, is owl pee.

Proost!

2011-08-15T20:58:00.013+02:00

The only down side to writing Peanut Cheese is that certain patterns start to emerge in my weekly chronicle of our lives in the Netherlands.

If you didn't know better, you might think I was a hair-obsessed, jingoistic, shopaholic Ziploc bag aficionado who likes to drink beer.

Sorry, what's that?

Oh, right: I do like to drink beer!

And as it turns out, beer has been an unexpected alimentary delight during our time here.

Before I go further, though, I want to loudly disclaim any ideas that I'm a beer snob.

As someone who is about to write 800-word ode to Trappist beer, I'm not really in a position of strong credibility here.

But trust me when I say that I am just as happy drinking Pabst Blue Ribbon or Coors Lite as Guinness or Pilsner Urquell or Leffe.

Sometimes, I'm happier drinking Coors.

It kind of depends on the weather and how many family members are in the room.

Also? I am largely and somewhat purposefully ignorant about the beer-brewing process, and the fine differences, say, between a Pale Ale and a Winter Wheat.

As far as I'm concerned, what happens in the vat is a chemical miracle, not to be questioned or even really understood.

So I'm not at risk of saying anything obnoxious like "This is too hoppy! What do you have that's been top fermented?"

I do have one disclaimer to my disclaimer, which is that I have a low irritation threshold when it comes to microbrews.

In almost all other cases, I'm in favor of local products distributed on a small scale.

But at a microbrewery, I find myself thinking "Did you really have to add ginger and call this one Summer Barley Twinkle Toes? Give me a Bud Lite!"

(End of disclaimer and disclaimer disclaimer.)

The Netherlands itself is not such a mighty beer-producing nation, but its neighbors to the east and south most certainly are.

(You may or may not be interested to know that the Dutch brand Heineken, which is marketed as a relatively high-end beer in the U.S., is considered by most Dutch to be only half a step above canal water.

However, this being the Netherlands, there are only two other choices: Amstel and Grolsch, which in my opinion, are even worse.)

Given our glorious proximity to Belgium, I've developed an appreciation for Belgian beer in general and Trappist beer in particular.

As you may know, and as I recently learned on The Wikipedia, authentic Trappist beer is brewed by Trappist monks in 7 monasteries in Belgium and one in the Netherlands. They brew it as a source of income for their cloisters and social programs.

So in a way, every time I drink Trappist beer, I'm saving the world through Catholicism. See what a good person I am?

We have the very good fortune of living a (relatively) short train trip away from some Dutch friends, Marieke and Peter, whom we know because Marieke and I went to high school together in upstate New York.

This was back (gulp) in 1992, when she was a foreign exchange student and when I am absolutely certain that I had never heard of the Netherlands and thought that Luxembourg was a type of car.

This past weekend, while John was eating his way through the lesser-known poultry of China, they were kind enough to host me for a weekend and a biertochtje, which I would loosely translate as little beer tour.

In Nijmegen, we can get a handful of Trappist beers at our neighborhood grocery store —Chimay, Westmalle, and La Trappe, for any Peanut Cheese readers who are beer snobs — but Peter outdid himself with even more hard-to-find selections: Orval and Rochefort and my runaway favorite, Achel.

And no, it's not just because I love (love!) the monkish label.

Luckily for me, Achel happens to be the one brewed by the monks just down the road from where Peter and Marieke live.

So on Sunday morning, when I could stand up again, we hopped in their cute orange car and went to Belgium.

As it turns out, not only does the Achel abbey sell beer, it has an amazingly large souvenir shop, where one can get candles, First Communion swag, Christmas ornaments, devotional books, candles, prayer beads, nativity scenes, candles, angel paraphernalia, and candles.

But as is often the case, my downfall was lurking in the postcard racks.

How could I resist this old-school "magic picture" beauty, where the slightest movement of the wrist broadcasts the light of Jesus into an unsuspecting nun?

But the icing on my monastic beer cake came when it was time to get on the train and head home.

My little yellow overnight bag was already quite full when we got to the abbey.

But I haven't yet mastered the fine Dutch art of riding a bicycle home from the train station with a six-pack in one hand.

I either needed to repack my bag, or drink a lot of beer on the train.

Clearly there was some divine intervention involved in squeezing a .75 liter beer bottle and a six pack in with my books and laptop and notebook and cell phone and rain gear and regular clothes.

Even my favorite combination hand puppet / backpack was impressed.