Adventures of Mr.Behi

The Enduring Dutch

One of the inspiring things about people in the Netherlands is observing their spirit. This is indeed the nation of hard workers with many individuals so desperate to do things on time that sometimes they go as far as being unnecessarily nervous about time. In Dutch, you ask "Hoe laat is het?"(How late is it?) when you want to ask for time!! and that speaks for itself.

I was amazed that morning of January 1st by the beach, watching hundreds of people doing the traditional "swim in freezing water"  or perhaps the politically correct version "Start the year fresh". Back in the office after the holidays, I heard a Dutch friend quoting his expat wife: "You Dutch people always like to do things the hard way as you are so committed to endure pain".

That might be true. Everyday when the freezing breeze convinces me to change my way from the bike storage to the bus stop, I see people cycling with red noses, frozen ears and tearing eyes, enduring the cold and cycling fast and even the rain won't deter some of them.

That was my share of positive thinking under the gray sky of the Netherlands. I have my share of frustrations though: Why do you have to say "Het is vijf voor half een" (meaning it is five minutes before half of one o'clock) instead of simply saying 12:25??!!

Drift

I went out this afternoon for a quick grocery shopping and headed for the supermarket a few blocks away. Winter is already here with a thin ice sheet on cars and a crisp frost on grass. It was snowing but it could well be just a windblown snow, already plundered, shattered and drifted away.

Walking past the small gardens in the neighborhood and in the ordinary of all things covered in frost, I was gazing at needle shaped complex of ice crystals branching out of objects or swinging along spider webs. I was looking with a broad smile on my face. Some minutes later, that smile met with the smile of the man playing new year themes on his accordion. His brown hat in front of him as he was pressing the keys with fingers of same shade, resting the accordion on his conspicuously large belly. A few meters away by the door of the supermarket, was the regular girl who sells magazines, very pale and skinny by contrast.

On the way back, As the sound of accordion faded, I reviewed 2008 that ends tonight. It was yet another year with lots of changes and new adventures and here I am again, drifting off for yet another year.

Daring for Herring

Around a month or so before Christmas, I received an e-mail from one of my Dutch colleagues calling for a "Herring Party" on a day after work. With no clue of what he was talking about, I replied with question that what the party was supposed to be about. He replied that it would be about eating herring with friends and that certainly did not make anything more clear for me. Just realising that it was something about fish and Dutch traditions was enough for me to sign up.

The day arrived and I found myself in a room where trays full of small fish were being passed around. It was the first time for me seeing what herring looked like. The fish were beheaded and cleaned with a longitudinal slice passing through them ending to the tail. I anxiously looked at my colleagues picked one each and run it against a covering of raw onion in their plates. Each then picked the fish from the tail, bent their neck backwards and snapped a bite like children taking on cherries.

I should admit that going for the raw fish could easily make as an initial psychological barrier for me but as it seems, it is true that one gets more brave in the crowed.

It did not taste like a totally raw fish. Not that I have any reference to compare but it smelled like as if it was left for a while with a special mixture of herbs (?). By the time I swallowed the second bite on the second fish, I was already popular in the Dutch crowed for bravely endorsing their tradition :) I even took one home for Mrs.Behi and she enjoyed it as I did. I can say one thing is crossed off from the list of Dutch things to do for us :) 

The Regulars

I got this cool program on my iphone called "iwakeup" that tries its best to wake us up in the morning with a selection of sounds from nature from which I normally use a calming noise of a forest as a main theme. Getting up is difficult considering the latitude of Holland and the time of year. The sound of the woodpecker from my iphone says it is time but the eyes can not believe the dark of the outside as a true morning.
I know a few people here who are deeply into photography and they were telling me how much they love the scattered light caused by the ever cloudy sky here. Going out is like walking into a big hall with a dimmed florescent lamp. Not bright nor dark, no shadows but something tells you that there must be a sun somewhere.
If I manage to leave on time, I normally meet a bunch of regular people in the station and or along the way when I watch them boarding the bus. There is almost everyday a man cycling very fast just before the bus comes. On a speed bike and with a blue windproof coat and amber cycling glasses, he passes  like wind yet you hear him breathing fast and feel him sweating heavily under the jacket. Maybe he is one of those CEOs who have a shower in their offices!

Apart from some irregulars like the boy de ear piercing and the the guy van red hat, there are others that I may call the regulars like the guy with two newspapers or the girl with the heavy hardback book. After one station, a family of three board the bus. A mother with two boys, one hand pulling one boy and another pushing the stroller in which the other looks at his surroundings ever surprised no matter how similar the bus looks from the day before. The mom has to stamp the ticket so the older boy find his hand free from the mom and runs inside the bus. She pushes the stroller in, puts the foot break on, calls for the older boy and rests her back on the side of the bus. She looks exhausted already.

Sometimes if I am early, there I see another family of three boarding the bus. Again a mom, a boy and a little girl. They speak English and the kids speak loudly all along the trip and I can hear their plans for the day and after school. The girl is spectacled and wears an eye patch on one of her eyes that each day, has a different colour and patter. A blue flower or a pink one. The three of them cramp on the single seat in front of the bus and the talks go on. I get to the office and normally head to a coffee stand in the ground floor. I am becoming a regular and they start preparing the medium latte that will take me through the morning...just another regular day.

And The Dutch Class

The Dutch beginner course that I signed up for, finally started last week. It is held in this small but cozy building near work and I am with six other expats in the class. To be honest, I am taken by surprise by the Dutch language. There is something especially heavy about it that gives a very pushy first impression. It is supposedly the closest language to English but you discover this only when you start looking at written words and find about the meaning. Just like what happens to your sense of taste after eating a very spicy sauce - you know the fact that it overwhelms you and you can not taste anything else much- The "kheee" sound is so repetitive and abundant in Dutch that when they speak, you feel like hearing people clearing their throats by short coughs and the ear just gives up capturing what else that is in between :)

I just learned how to say "eighty-eight beautiful canals" in Dutch: "achtentachtig prachtige grachten" (you got to say pronouce "khee" for each "g" and "ch" you can see). You got to repeat this a couple of times if your mobile rings in the class, our teacher joked the other day.

Unpacked and Assembled

Holland Handbook is a good publication to hold on to as an expat here in Holland that comes straight to the point explaining the hinges that can open doors or get you stuck in life in here. In its introduction, it explains a general path of an expat, entering a new country through a sort of phasing in psychological evolution: The tourist phase, the `'I love this country" phase, the "I hate this country phase" and finally the phase where your anxieties disappear and you become part of the system. Speaking of ourselves, we have not fully enjoyed the starter in the tourist phase, yet we are managing ourselves within "the I love this country phase" while sometimes lingering towards the one after.

We were kind of quick in getting new stuff for our apartment. Thanks to the huge IKEA concept center that is in the outskirt of the city of Delft, a train and a bus ride from The Hague. As a child, I used to hate assembling and disassembling things. I could read fictions and biographies over and over and over but opening the toys was not my thing...this was delegated to my little brother who had a real passion with the screw driver who in which had it after my father that as far as I remember, could fix broken thing (or it was very hard for him to give up and surrender if he couldn't). Now I thing after all these years, I kind of enjoyed a little assembling and you had better to anyway if you shop from IKEA. It is funny to consider this a big thing to do because there is a simple rule with IKEA furniture: "If you are trying too hard, you are doing something wrong" and to be honest, this was not a free lesson to learn hence you can see some screw holes in our bed where they don't belong, proving that I am in fact the same kid as I always was.

Now things are finally unpacked and assembled. My new job is showing the benefits of its nature very quickly. I used to work for a huge organization with thousands of employees, lots of initiatives and "stuff" hovering around my head. I am now enjoying the fact that I have only three things to do per working day, dive deep and stay focused. You wouldn't believe how much I enjoy the fact that I receive and reply to only 10 e-mails per day tops, five to ten times less than what I used to do.

There is a real luck that everyone speaks English very well in Holland but I still feel like an illiterate outsider being among the Dutch and the worst case is when we receive something by mail. I once asked one of the collegues for help but well, you can't do that forever...so I came with this temporary solution(yeah right!) of I re-typing the letter into google translator! If Google translator and GoogleEarth were not around, this could become a lousy start for us to get to the know how of the place. Now I am thinking of buying an OCR enabled scanner to convert the pages into text and then use Google to Translate. But anyway this Dutch illitracy is bothering me so much that I have signed up for a Dutch class and hopefully start in a while. This is a difficult language, those who make fun of Dutch language say like : "it is like eating a mouthfull of chips and speaking a mixture of English and German" :) 

More coming up...