Mission impossible

A meeting with other Finnish girls living in the Netherlands. Within the first half an hour, so many familiar items come up.

X: ".. And have you guys seen, that even in the middle of the winter the small children are not wearing mittens outside?"

Everyone: "Yes, in Finland you would get to hear it immediately if your child is not wearing proper winter gear."

Y: ".. And then - the small kids without helmets biking all over the place, while mom is having also one 1-year old without a helmet on her bike".

I think, regarding the above, a full assimilation to the dutch society might be simply unachievable for foreigners.

Library

An excerpt of a discussion one evening

Me: "I think I should finally get a library card"
Dutch: "Why do you need that?"
Me: "Well, they probably also have some English books there and it would be nice to check the selection and save some money when borrowing books instead of buying them".
Dutch: "Well you should see, which will be actually cheaper"
Me: "What??? Library is not FREE??"
Dutch: "What?? You have a FREE library in Finland?!"

So it turns out, that there is a yearly membership fee for the libraries. While it is around 50 euro's, it's the thought of having to pay that has yet prevented me to get the library card in the Netherlands.

Long time no update

It's been a while since the last post. Sometimes life takes over even the laziest of the bloggers. Instead of long stories, I am going now for a different approach - capturing small bits and pieces of the everyday life. Let's see what happens :)

New year in the Netherlands

My friend is pondering over coming to Amsterdam for New Year’s Eve. I just received a question of how the Dutch people celebrate New Year’s Eve. While my experiences of the Dutch New Year are limited to one, I came up with two main ingredients and the Dutch guy added the third

1. Oliebollen. Lots of oliebollen, with or without raisins.
2. Fireworks. With a healthy disregard of any safety instructions. It’s completely OK to set fireworks on your small street and then take few steps back.
3. Going to a bar before/just around New Year and kiss everyone there. And pay a lot of money for the ticket.

The theory is now there, I will spend my next New Year’s Eve gathering empirical evidence for these hypotheses.

Road racing

I got a chance to borrow a bicycle for few weeks. And not just any bicycle, but a real road racing bike (sounds even cooler than what it really is :-). Besides hockey, biking really fast through the streets of the Netherlands with very tight outfits is one of the national sports here. I have so far only experienced the slow rolling with my hippie bike. Putting on full biking gear including click-to pedals was somewhat scary. The first time we practiced in our front yard multiple times clicking off-clicking on-clicking off and me getting more scared by the minute. 

The one racing bike that lives with us

It took quite some persuasion to make the next step and get out to our street. And I definitely did not want to go there while the neighbors' kids were playing out. Probably all the dutch kids here spend 50% of their waking up time on bike, so I was  planning not to go there to humiliate myself, or even worse, get instructions from 7-year-olds :) In the late hours of the day I did some circles on the street and actually the faster I went, the easier it got!

After that, we did few biking trips around ~40 kms in the surroundings of Utrecht. It was nice to see the country from a different perspective, while going through country side, forests and hills (yes, we found even those in these flat lands..!). I was convinced that I need to get me a bike also and add it as not only exercising routine but also a way to see enjoy the outdoors and maybe improve my navigation skills.

My goal is to train enough so that I could participate on a bike riding event for girls, one being mid-September in Den Bosch the distance being either 35 or 69 km. First step is then to shop a bike for me. Next week we are going to visit the Bianchi store to see what kind of bike would be good one. My selection is at the moment based solely on color & looks, but somehow my selection of the nicest bike also seems to be the most expensive one..

Gardening

Today while the Dutch guy went to enjoy a biking race called "Hell of Heuvelrug" (which would be enough to keep me away at least), I decided to continue with some gardening work since the weather was also perfect.

Our garden is somewhere between Babylon's hanging gardens and a wild meadow, to which we every now and then try to do something to keep it completely taking over the house. Since every Dutch home seems to have a perfectly maintained garden, we are a happy exception of that. The amazing thing with the other gardens is, that you rarely see anyone actually doing garden work. I've yet to find out the secrets of Dutch gardening. Netherlands is also the only place where I've seen those geometrical shapes in trees, that I thought were mainly only in Donal Duck.

The stones ARE actually there! (notice the big pile of green stuff in the lower left corner)

After some time I was able to get our patio visible again and create my own blogging corner there. As a result of this heavy gardening during past days we've got few regulars hanging out here as well. One brown and one black bird, who are enjoying the nice and fresh worms that we have exposed while turning everything upside down and a cat that looks exactly like Garfield. He definitely enjoys chilling out in our relatively relaxed and wild garden. Maybe it is the only place where he can dream of being a lion in the savannah, following the prey while being half hidden in the lawn/meadow.

Is there any way to save these..?

Garfield

Tomatoes!! 

This looked really nice in the garden store. We try to keep it looking nice.

Apparently it is really bad apple year throughout the country, not just in our tree. However there's at least three apples!

Watching TV

One of the great helps in learning a language is TV. There are lot of channels which enable subtitles for dutch programs. It's like killing two birds with one stone, you can both hear the language and  actually understand something when seeing the text as well. Sometimes in real-time things (such as the news) the timing is slightly off which makes it more confusing than actually helping.

(http://www.flickr.com/photos/sarahreido/3245498261/)

It seems in the Netherlands there are really no social boundaries in what you can say / show on TV. Many times I've sat on the couch and thought that if that would've been in Finland, it would be such an faux pas. But here it seems to be completely OK to bring people on TV (even against their will) and ask very personal questions and find ways of making people look just simply bad/sad/strange or weird.

Few interesting shows either for language learning or spotting akward social situations are

• Lingo - a great program for learning language, as it is about guessing dutch words with different amount of letters. Everything is also spelled out very c-l-e-a-r-l-y.
• Spuiten en slikken (Shoot and swallow) - the few episodes I've seen were either about people using drugs in the most sadest places or then something to do with prostituion.
• any program with Mart Smeets - He is the icon of dutch sports (who looks like it's been few years since he has been actively sporting), and most probably you will spot him during Tour de France sitting in a beautiful French chateau drinking some nice red wine and talking to the lucky ones, who have gotten the honor to appear by his side on TV.
• De wereld draait door - discussion program that seems to be on EVERY DAY. And EVERY DAY there is the same guy with his strange hair. I heard that once the program was cancelled as he got sick during, but otherwise he must be the most seen face on TV.
• Interviews of famous people - these are always good, especially for spotting akward social situations. Latest example was an interview of a family of a famous dutch woman cyclist. Her brother had some issues with mental health, and the interviewer, tactful as always, asked: "So how did it make you feel that while your sister was winning the world championship, you were sitting inside a room and staring at the wall and having a nervous breakdown?" Like, did I miss that this was a contest of how low can you go with your questions..
• Talkshows - One talkshow decided it was a good idea to have a surgeon cut out a piece of flesh from both hosts, and then they would eat a piece of each other while the one who was "being eaten" watched. How gezellig! Another one arranged a debate between a association for pedophiles and on the other side the parents of the victims of pedophiles. You can imagine the atmosphere in that room..
• Reality shows - shows such as "will you go out with me" where 20+ girls say either yes/no to a guy who walks on stage, can be also quite brutal. Or how about a show, where a teenage boy comes out of the closed in front of his classmates - would not work in Finland :-) Also one nice one is Marry my son, where moms are trying to find wives for their sons.
• Boer zoekt vrouw - my favorite! People from dutch countryside are looking for husbands/wives. Only worry there is (or the Dutch guy has), is that I get this countryside "boer" accent :-)
• Grenzeloos verliefd - stories of people who move abroad to be with their loved ones. This one I can relate to!