learning Dutch

Tiny horse

Brooke, , , , , , 1 Comment

Is there anything scarier than the idea of an accomplice?

I first learned about the concept when I moved to France after college. In Marseille people love to warn you about pickpockets, always plural.

See that guy, asking if you dropped a Euro? What trouble could he possibly be? But he has an accomplice, who takes your wallet while you’re distracted. If anyone bumps into you on your left, their accomplice on your right is probably cutting your purse.

Accomplices don’t have to wear uniforms, or matching t-shirts, or anything like that. So conceivably anyone could be working together, and in my mind everyone was. That’s the thing about accomplices.

See that elderly woman crossing your path slowly to feed an injured pigeon a leftover baguette? Well she might be accomplices with that construction worker climbing down the ladder of the building next door, and the two of them could be in cahoots with one of those teenagers listening to music. Which teenager? I don’t know, maybe the one closest to us? And hey that injured pigeon could be in on it too. Don’t rule anyone out, that’s the thing about accomplices.

I don’t think Marseille really has too many pickpockets because my wallet never once got stolen. But it’s a hard thought to shake. And now in Amsterdam, a city with I think even less crime, my fears have moved up Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs.  Now I no longer worry about losing my money, I worry about losing my dignity. And unlikely accomplices are still the problem. I’m fine with making a fool of myself at the cash register, but what about the possible exchange the cashier has with the next customer after I’ve left?

“I can’t believe she brought the oranges she wanted to buy to the register, instead of weighing them with a small derelict machine at the back of the store and printing the weight of the oranges on a sticker and bringing the sticker to the register.” The next customer will say, and the cashier will be right there with her.

“I know – what does she think this is, every other grocery store in the world?”

Yesterday when someone asked if I needed a receipt I said no, which in Dutch is spelled nee and pronounced neigh.

“Neigh.” I said, somehow making eye contact with all thirty people in my vicinity at once. And then a little louder, in case it hadn’t been loud enough: “NEIGH.”

I threw in a bunch of thank-you’s too, but those are harder to spell.

I think there are two solutions to being worried about having dignity stolen by groups of unlikely strangers: either have no dignity to steal, or a never-ending supply.

But I haven’t decided which to do, so I’m always somewhere in the middle, walking around with the exact amount of dignity I need to get by.

Processed with VSCO with f2 preset

I took this photo yesterday so I would have a photo to post with this.

You’re one in fourteen.

Brooke, , , , , , , 2 Comments

Everyone says that all the Dutch people in Amsterdam speak English. You won’t find anyone who will only speak Dutch to you, they say. It’s a port city, it’s a city of merchants, it’s an international city, it’s the Mensa headquarters, whatever reason: it’s just not going to happen.

And everyone says that we won’t find any ice cream here in the winter. Not until summer, or at least late April, they say. The diets here are reasonable, we think about the season, now is the time for hot chocolate, soup, and whatever else: it’s just not going to happen.

No Dutch-speakers, no ice cream, it’s not possible, they all said.

Well you were all wrong. It’s pouring and miserable and I’m in the most international city on earth and today I found an ice cream vendor that speaks no English. It’s the little things that make me happy at this point. The little things, and proving other people wrong.

This man wasn’t even old! It was a non-English-speaking young man!

I haven’t had an at-gunpoint opportunity to practice any Dutch until today, at the magic ice cream shop. Not that it was a gunpoint scenario. It’s just that usually when people get to the hard questions, or any questions, they switch to English.

In my moment of panic I couldn’t remember how to say that I don’t speak Dutch, and could only recall how to tell him that “my Dutch is not so hot.”

“My Dutch is not so hot.” I told him in very slow Dutch, saying what really did not need to be said.

Standing in the ice cream shop, looking back and forth between the rain outside and the ice cream selling man, I thought about whoever’s job it is to store new Dutch words I learn on notecards, file them in my brain, and then retrieve them at the moment they become useful. “Not so hot!” I imagined her scribbling on a piece of posterboard. “Let’s keep this one handy. Right at the front, with the lyrics to every Magnetic Fields song and the words to the LDS sacrament prayers in German!!!” As I silently begged her to remind me how to say something else, anything else, she left to take a smoke break and tossed the burning match on whatever other Dutch vocabulary I had.

“I am American. I am an American woman.” I told the very patient man. “Now. HERE. Now, …Netherlands?”

Being in this ice cream place made me feel like a kid again: not because they had stroopwafel flavored ice cream and peanut-M&M milkshakes, but because the non-English-speaking man asked me how long I’ve lived here. I wanted to tell him that I’ve been in Amsterdam 3 weeks, but I only know how to say the word for “days,” and the biggest number I know is 14, so I had to improvise a bit and say I’ve been here 14 days.

It’s been a long time since the biggest number I knew was that small. If I had to tell you how long it’s been, and I had to tell you in Dutch, I would tell you it’s been 14 years.

Snow

Brooke, 1 Comment

Learning to speak Dutch isn’t karate, but if it were, it seems like the white belt would be learning to maneuver a conversation at a supermarket. And I would probably have a lot of bruises.

I thought supermarket transactions were a good starting point because, unless something strange is happening, people only say a few different things at a grocery store. They want you to give them money. Or they want you to use cash. Or they want to know if you need a bag. It’s easy enough.

There’s only one part that so complicated that no matter how many times I visit the grocery store and no matter how many wortels I buy, I still haven’t learned it. Every single time I’ve almost made it through a perfectly-executed (ok, almost adequately-executed) Dutch conversation, they say something so confusing and unfamiliar that I have to ask them to say it in English, and they do:

“Would you like a receipt?”

Memorizing the Dutch word for receipt seemed like the simplest solution to the problem that is the complicated string of words you hear after you hand someone money. But I swear the word receipt changes every time.

They say that eskimos have 100 words for snow, but what they don’t mention that is that the Dutch have 100 words for receipt.

A slip of white paper printed with proof of a monetary transaction is an object so beautiful and multifaceted that it requires an entire section of a vocabulary to describe it. To you it’s just proof that you bought a juice and two blocks of cheese, but to a mathematician it’s poetry, and in a Dutch grocery store it’s the key to the whole universe. How could one word ever do that justice?