(More) Bikes & Italy

I'm starting to feel like this blog is losing its function. I started it so I could record my funny cross-cultural stories, but this isn't feeling quite so cross-cultural any more. Now I just feel like, duh, of course you have to pay for your ketchup, and by the way, mayonaise is the most natural thing in the world to put on your fries. I don't even notice girls biking in miniskirts and 4 inch stilettos anymore. That said, I do still have a couple of impressions that make me smile. Today I had to do some very unpleasant errands in the rain. Every time I walk out to my bike, I carefully wipe down my bike seat (I'm not Dutch enough to have one of those creative, seat-shaped plastic covers and I'm not desperate enough to use a plastic bag) and I hop on very quickly, before the seat gets wet again. I've learned the art of quick seat hopping after sitting through several uncomfortable lectures with a wet butt. Another thing that makes me smile about Holland is the fact that they have special machines to dredge the old bikes out of canals. Holland has so many bikes, and so many canals, that they needed a solution.

I got back from Italy on Monday. I had one of the best weekends of my life. Everyone reading this has probably already heard me rave endlessly about the gelato and the blooming trees lining the streets, so I won't put you through it again. I am so happy that it worked out to go, and so grateful to Oma for making it possible. All the same, it felt great to be home again. I just took a deep breath getting off the train in Leiden, found my beautiful bike in the bike lot, and marvelled at how great it was to be in a small town without pickpockets, where the men never catcall, where the lights reflect on the canals at night.

I'm still waiting for tulips…

Groceries

I amaze myself sometimes. Today I made a mental note that I needed more yogurt (which happens a lot, actually. I go through a liter every three days on average.). My brain has created a little excel spreadsheet of 1. availabe grocery stores (Albert Heijn for specialty items, Hoogvliet for everyday things, Super de Boer for bread, C1000 is open late, the outdoor market for veg & fish), 2. comparative prices 3. brands & which stores carry them 4. opening times 5. how close they are to where I live & my classes. So when I need to buy something I have to remember where I bought it last (my favorite kind of cream cheese is only available at Hoogvliet. Parmesan cheese lives exclusively at Albert Heijn) and which brand I like (melkan yogurt is GROSS). I feel so domestic! Over the summer Lauren and I only had one grocery store (I miss you, Star Market).

There's so much variety in grocery shopping, and so little variety in cafe food: ham sandwich, cheese sandwich, ham and cheese sandwich.

On a cooking tangent: if you are American and planning on studying abroad, do not leave without your favorite chocolate chip cookie recipe. You'll find friends in unexpected places, I promise.

Pronouns

I'm not good at dealing with things that don't make sense. Like Dutch pronouns. I've been happily using Dutch pronouns most of my life, without thinking too much of it. I think I get them right about 2/3 of the time, and most of the rest of the time I can make myself understood. Last night I started thinking about them and got myself so wound up and mad about pronouns that I couldn't sleep until 4am. At around 3:30 I think I actually wished that they existed in a form I could punch. 

I have no complaints with Ik-mij-mijn. So then I got to you, and you is a terrible mess. "Jij" and "jou" both mean "you." I think it's a subject-object difference.Everyone goes around saying "je" all the time, (including me), and I will never be able to figure out what "je" actually means, although I use it all the time. Is it a lazy way of saying "jou?" "Jouw" means "your," but it sounds exactly like "jou." Now we have she/he/they." As far as I can tell, "zij" means either "she" or "they," depending on context when the person is the subject. "Hij" means "he." "Haar" and "hem" also mean "her" and "him." (not possesive) So you'd think "zijn" would mean "her" (posessive). Nope! "Zijn" means "his." "Haar" means her (posessive). (it also means "hair" unless it's spelled differently, but it sounds exactly the same). Don't even get me started on "hun." 

2 Lists

things I'm into right now: playing cards with the Spanish girls, actually doing pretty much anything with the Spanish girls, goat cheese-tomato pesto sandwiches, understanding the difference between "verstaan" and "begrijp," flickr, spring, going to Rome in a week, the month of may!, the movie "ik omhels je met duizend armen," cooking lessons from Italians, new shoes, appelstroop, NPS kunststof, repeating poop jokes I heard from 8 year olds, biking to the beach, fresh stroopwafels.

things I'm not into right now: George Eliot, the guy at some party who asked me to sleep with him, worksheets, my broken bike light, my empty fridge shelf, our dorm showers (the lights are motion sensitive, and the builders obviously weren't girls who had to shave their legs because the lights turn off after ten minutes. Besides, the water fluctuates temperature so often that I spend most of my ten minutes freezing in a corner while I try to get the temperature normal again. I usually end up looking mildy ridiculous, standing totally soapy in a towel waving my arms around in the direction of the door. Our bathrooms are also co-ed, so I can get really good and embarassed when the weird Turkish guy gives me a funny look.)

Time to shower.

Only in Holland.

other person: Hey, where are you going?

me: Oh, i need some mushrooms. I was just going to swing by the market.

other person: You can get those there?

me: Yeah, of course, the vegetable stall.

other person: Oh, you mean THOSE mushrooms. I thought you meant, you know…

Pidgin

This post is going to be irritating to read unless you speak the same languages as I do. Today on the train I overheard two really funny conversations. First a KLM stewardness sat down across from me. Her cell phone rang and she answered “Fala.” My ears perked up. Instead of going on in Portuguese, she combined it with Dutch in a very interesting way. Most people I know who speak two languages generally pick one and throw in words of the other (eu vou para meu “locker,” for instance), but she was splitting it pretty much 50/50. She was throwing together sentences like “se eu não liga sexta-feira, é porque ik zit nog steeds op werk, sabe?” and exlamations like “não não, nee, dat bedoelde ik niet.” I was fascinated.

After she stood up to leave at Schiphol, two American women came to sit next to me. They had thick American accents, but once I started listening I heard something funny: they were doing it too! I caught phrases like “alles, the floor, the walls, helemaal tot het ceiling,” “that’s probably the train die net achter ons komt,” and my favorite, “ja, en de warmte will come boven, too.” I find it remarkable that people adopt Dutch in conversations with people who obviously have the same native language as themselves. Then again, maybe those two conversations weren’t typical. I love the Dutch language and I think it has a lot to offer that other languages lack. Well, every language does. I think it would be interesting to study what words and phrases people choose to say in which languages. I would expect people to switch languages when they run into a phrase that cannot be expressed in the other language, or when it’s just easier, faster, shorter to say it the other way. In those examples, people showed which one was their native language by the grammar structure, which can’t change in the middle of a sentence. Even if most of the words were in Dutch in the last example, that is an English sentence, grammatically. It’s intuitive to me that the structure of speech would be more deeply rooted than the words themselves. What I’m not sure of is whether certain topics beg to be expressed in a certain language, or whether a story about laundry and a story about a murder would come across equally well in any language. It’s something I hardly ever do because I don’t know many native English speakers who also speak Portuguese or Dutch. Sometimes I’d like to, with my parents or a friend from Brazil, but I’m afraid of sounding like I’m showing off if I mix and match. Besides, I can’t yet claim to truly be bilingual.

To-do

This is what’s on my plate at the moment. Not exciting or inspiring, but neither is Leiden in a grey, unseasonably cold March. I feel right now like I am living out lists and waiting for spring.
-buy birthday presents, wrapping paper?
-swana’s b-day party
-ottens lunch fri.
-koopavond w. valerie
-READ MIDDLEMARCH
-apply for AMNH, etc. (transcript request form to fax)
-maiken’s birthday dinner
-housing lottery: find proxy &/or roommates
-book trip to italy, hostel?
-buy shoes for formal
-pay rent; move to basement?
-DENTIST
-read 2 books for anth. of ind.

Yesterday I asked someone if I could take his picture. I don’t think I’ve ever done that before and I was really nervous. I had a moment of thinking I would never get a phd if I wasn’t even brave enough to do this, so I made myself work up the courage to ask him. He was a Dutch construction worker with a neck tattoo wearing wooden shoes and carting bricks in a wheelbarrow. He said “no, they’ll be in a picture but I won’t,” pointing to his co-workers. I was actually not at all surprised by his reaction. There is something stand-offish to the point of rudeness about the kind of people I’ve met who are still wearing wooden shoes. As Californian, mowhawked, surfer Will said, “Dude, what an asshole.” I’m not sure I agree. It’s not neccessarily a bad thing: I can understand their dislike of being made to feel exoticized in their own country. But then, isn’t that what anthropology inevitably ends up doing?

Water

I saw Swana row for the Head of the River today on the Amstel. Dad and I biked alongside the race and yelled cheerfully as Swana’s team passed two other boats that started before. The boats were kept on a field when they weren’t being raced, and the teams had to carry their boats up a ramp to put them in the river. Does that sound odd to you? It probably does if you’re American, and it probably doesn’t if you’re Dutch. Dutch people are so used to their system of dikes and dams that it seems perfectly natural to them to walk uphill to get to water. It still catches me off guard every time to see a canal above the level of the ground. Nothing is quite as strange as the time I went under an overpass in a car, to see a sailboat sailing by above me. It wasn’t an overpass at all, but a canal-bridge built over the road. Holland is cheerfully but determindly and stubbornly waging war on the natural law that water should flow downhill.

Things people do on bikes, part 2

I saw a guy riding a bike without hands, while he checked his text messages on his phone and then wrote and sent one of his own.  Are Dutch people just good bikers because they can do that without crashing into anything, or are they irresponsible for running the risk?

Musicas Brasileiras

The girl who lives next door to me is Brazilian. I told her how much I enjoyed hearing Milton and Chico through the wall, so she went and burned me an mp3 CD of 12 hours of Brazilian music. It’s so odd and fun to hear the Paralamas again in Holland. I know I really harp on how international this experience is for me, but honestly, in all my time abroad I’ve never met so many people from different countries in one place. The Italians taught me to make pasta sauce from scratch (they’re really hardcore. They grow their own basil and rosemary). Whenever you get the Spanish girls and the Basque girls together at a party you get to witness the entire Basque separatist movement explode in a very educationally first-hand way. I’ve known this girl all semester and assumed she was Irish based on her accent, only to find out that she’s actually from a tiny Caribbean island and strictly follows an offshoot of Islam. She just grew up in Ireland. Our washing machines are in some weird Scandenavian language (it informed me yesterday that it wasn’t done because it was still “centrifuging�). I’ve just been picking random settings and crossing my fingers. Yesterday I finally realized, duh, Karina, you know a Dane and a Norwegian in your dorm.

Reasons I love the Dutch language: The word “puberty� can also refer to a person going through puberty or the act of going through puberty. When the Dutch stage actor said that “his sister was pubering terribly at the time� (mijn zus was heel erg aan het puberen) I couldn’t stop laughing. I think toilet humor is pretty funny too. I’m going to be really insufferable in Maine after a semester of potty jokes. I mean, American kids grew playing hopscotch, jump rope, and tag. Dutch kids also grow up playing spijkerpoopen (nail pooping). I grew up playing both. Also, I love the ways you say goodbye in Dutch. There’s something much friendlier about “Dooi� or “Hoi oi� in a really high, sing-song voice than “bye,� particularly when an enormous, Amazonian, Dutch businesswoman says it.

I think American religious fundamentalists should come visit Holland. This country legalizes pot, mushrooms, prostitution, and gay marriage while still upholding family values. The argument that gay marriage will erode the family unit just doesn’t hold here (if anywhere). Families here are much more tightly-knit from what I can tell. The Dutch high school seniors I’ve talked to all want to go to a college close to home. The American high school seniors I talk to generally joke about moving to the opposite coast, and often do (no reference to brother intended).