Loving the subway!

So work means taking the subway—either a joy or my ungluing, depending on its reliability. Now I’ve taken the subway in New York City, where my daily commute was much, much longer (and yet more efficient,) but I’m finding the subway in Amsterdam comparable, though much less fun. Because face it, New York is full of 8 million New Yorkers who comprise the colorful jetsam and flotsam of human existence and Amsterdam just can’t compete statistically. There are fewer crazies and eccentrics here and Calvinists just aren’t that showy, anyhow.

But what’s remarkably the same about the subway here is once you enter through its doors you’re faced immediately with a sea of black coats and equally dark faces staring at electronic gadgets, making the lack of human contact all the more apparent. My daily commute includes a cross-section of sleepy university students, well-heeled business types, Moroccans and Turks in headscarves, older people and teens of all races looking tough and forever bored. The metropolitan mix is different but the drudgery of being stuck in a moving metallic box with strangers remains the same.

Still, all the sobriety of public transportation feels rather un-Dutch to me, somehow, as the Dutch are known for wearing orange to celebrate national holidays and when I first moved here, let’s just say it was no fashion faux pas to wear lime green sneakers with bright red jeans. So what has changed? Perhaps it’s as simple as this: it’s winter.

Me Talk Pretty One Day

While speaking Dutch is not obligatory in the Netherlands, I am doing my best to wrap my tongue (not to mention throat) around this guttural language. Once a week I take a fluency course at a local language school—the aim being fluency, certainly not the reality—with a host of other foreigners, most of who migrated here for love or de liefde. My classmates are primarily Eastern European (Polish, Bulgarian) now working on their third language; an Italian who’s now on her fourth; a Brit who like me, is struggling to master a second tongue and then there’s our fiery teacher who earns her bread and butter as a travel guide and speaks seven. Needless to say I’m experiencing just a bit of language jealousy here—having dabbled with French in high school, learned Spanish for several years before moving here (and having this useful world language replaced by Dutch, which the Dutch don’t even insist I speak), I am proficient in asking where the toilets are, whether something is located to the left or right of the train station and saying that I really, really like something. Yeah, really.

Every class is different and brings to light the absurdity of language and I’m convinced now that language is illogical—its rules are random, there are too many exceptions and certain concepts slide into your cerebellum with ease while others take a concerted effort to register. But what I love most is the interaction with my classmates because if we happened to find ourselves at a bus stop, we wouldn’t bother talking to each other, yet in class are prodded into communication. A few weeks ago the teacher tried to stimulate a political conversation but I was grouped with the two Polish girls, who told me they didn’t follow politics, yet immediately turned to talking about immigration—which just happens to be the most heated political issue of the moment. As we talked about immigration, I mentioned Geert Wilders, the controversial, bleached politician and agnostic who has campaigned against the "Islamitization of the Netherlands,” and is anti-immigration even though his wife is foreign. Both girls hadn’t heard of Wilders, which is hard to believe considering he’s covered by the press daily, so the conversation dead-ended.

Another lesson we actually did speak about immigration and being an American whose entire family ventured to the States from elsewhere and whose country is an evolving experiment in human integration (you might argue it’s not exactly working), I actually had little to say—immigration is business as usual. But I did mention that while Mexicans tended to migrate north of the border to better jobs, older Americans were also migrating south—for drugs.

“For drugs?” my teacher asked, looking at me curiously.

“Yeah, for drugs,” I said, “Because our healthcare system can’t cover the needs of the aging population.”

“Ohhh,” she said, now relieved. “You mean medicijn—medicine. Not drugs.”

“Well, the margaritas are really, really strong, you know, “ I said. “Really strong.”

What's in a name?

Long hiatus again—never good for a blogger—but today got me thinking that Holland still has much blogging fodder to offer me. I’ve been quiet in recent months as the novelty of “Dutchness” has worn off—the honeymoon period is long over and I’ve grown accustomed to what was once strange. But today, sitting eating lunch at a brown café in Utrecht, I was tickled by a by-line I read in the newspaper. The author was a Mr. Speksnijder or Mr. Bacon Slicer to you English speakers out there and no, this was not his stage name.

On an interesting historical note, the Dutch didn’t really use surnames until 1811, when Napoleon annexed the Netherlands, establishing a registry of births, deaths and marriages. The locals, suddenly obliged to pick a surname, didn’t take old Bonaparte that seriously (it’s been argued that many thought this was temporary), opting for irony instead. Amongst the surnames I found in the newspaper today were: Korteweg or Shortcut, Snoep or Candy and van Geen or of Nothing. Other popular ones are Naaktgeboren (born naked) and Zeldenthuis (seldom home), which puts a wide grin on this expats’s face because it gives a window into the folk who once traversed the very cobblestones I now cycle over.

Popcorn Balls

Last week, I worked at the annual Vurige Tongen poetry festival held at Ruigoord. My boyfriend owns a bus and we've sold food and chai at the festival for several years now, but this time I wanted to bring a bit of America to the table in the form of popcorn balls. Marshmellow-coated popcorn balls to be exact.

Now say the words "popcorn balls" and most Americans are apt to respond with "Yummy!" followed by, "I loved them as a child!" Food, of course, is quite a cultural thing--the Dutch don't really eat popcorn, though they have a proclivity for food that's ball-shaped, whether it's cheese, oily donuts or good ol' gehakt, which are basically meatballs.

I thought my popcorn balls would go down a treat, but the Dutch, who are also farmers at heart, suspicious of new-fangled things because they might not be water-tight, weren't sure what to do with them. Unlike Americans, who jump on what's new with pioneering spirit, the Dutch like to drag their clogs. So we ended up giving away about 40 popcorn balls to children playing nearby, who eagerly put them in their mouths and immediately said, "Yummy!" Guess they weren't old enough to know better.

I'm not sure if I'll try this experiment again. I'd rather keep popcorn balls a cheap, sugary American secret and let the Dutch eat dairy.

Lost in Translation

No one said learning a foreign language was easy, especially when you’re an adult whose head is full of decades of information, memories and trivia. Sometimes it feels like there’s not enough room in my brain to accommodate what’s new, or worse, there is room so everything gets shifted, with the result: I can’t find the words in any language.

Case in point, I was sitting around a table of Dutch speakers and the subject was RSI or repetitive strain syndrome. Already self-conscious about my language skills around more complicated subjects—i.e. anything disconnected to food—I was trying to explain how a friend had such bad RSI she couldn’t zip up her pants.

Or at least I thought that’s what I was saying. But I was only met by wide stares, so I knew something wasn’t right.

“Yes, she had trouble doing up her, uh, caterpillar,” I kept saying, motioning to my zipper. The Dutch word for zipper is “rits” and caterpillar is “rups”—not a huge difference, all things considered. “She was too weak to do her caterpillar,” I repeated, unconvinced I was using the right word. Finally, someone asked me to say it in English. “Oh zipper? That’s what you meant!” was the chorus.

It’s a good exercise, though, making mistakes because I’ll never forget either word again.

Oddly Named Cars

I am by no means a car fan--this here girl drives a bike. Still, I've been noticing car names around Amsterdam recently and some things simply don't translate (or translate well.) Over the last several days I've seen:

Panda Hobby (huh? is this car meant for a kindergardener?)

Scenic (well, certainly not the traffic...)

Charisma (this one was an old beater, so it needed some)

Galaxy (more appropriate for a chocolate bar, methinks)

Berlingo (an English language institute?)

Sharan (too close to Sharon, the name the British give to stupid women)

and finally:

Move (taking things at their most literal)

I wonder why car makers have decided to go all colorful on this side of the Atlantic. Yes, the brands are the same: Audi, Hyundai, BMW, etc. Only the car names are so frickin' weird, like someone allowed their kid to tag them as they rolled off the factory floor. I mean, in America our cars are so much more macho. We've got trailblazers, rangers, hummers and rams. Manly cars that roam on the ever expanding range.

The sights at Vondel Park

On most days, I have to really motivate myself to go jogging because this means combatting rain, wind and whatever elements Mother Nature would like to throw my way. (I'd say like most Dutch women, Mother Nature is rather assertive and holds few surprises.)

A few days ago, it was truly Spring. Spring had sprung and so, encouraged by sunlight and the lack of rain, I decided to go jogging. I live around the corner from Vondel Park, so I headed there past the David Lloyd fitness club, and discovered hundreds of joggers when I got there. I am rather slow when it comes to jogging, especially compared to the long-legged Dutch who tend to hold entire conversations while jogging, and make lots of stops.

Now Vondel Park is always fascinating as people constantly migrate here to relax. There are certain areas where groups or subgroups tend to hang out. Like teens and gays like to congregate near the rose bushes, while the northern end of the park attracts drinkers and alcoholics. So while I was jogging near the drinker's patch, I decided to take a break. Two guys were playing frisbee as their friends carried on loudly behind them. One was dressed like a throwback from the 1980s, his multi-colored, pastel jacket would have fit in perfectly at the 1984 Olympics, and the other looked like Morpheus out of the Matrix, in a long black leather jacket.

It was such a strange sight to behold, like two distinct eras being thrown into a time warp I just happened to come across. It tickled me because this is how I always envisioned Vondel Park, full of odd characters like those hippy tribes who would hang out here in the 1960s, literally coming out of the woodwork.