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.”