...Toes? Or, fun with language.

I'm in Santa Cruz sitting at a coffee house trying to write, but an old white-haired local won't let me. He's here "doin' lap top" today with an iBook G4 that looks like it was buried in mud and then tied to the back of a truck and dragged down the road. One of these Berkeley graduates from the '60s who's lost a few screws and now blurs the line between the derelict and the tax-paying.

He just won't stop talking, and I don't even know what about. In the last 10 minutes he's mentioned, among other things, running for president, "mythic government," Bhutan, hitch-hiking, earthquakes, and smoking his pipe by the river. Luckily, he's now talking to another old man/veteran/vagrant named Jimbo and giving me a break.

I bring him up because he reminded me of how easy it is to mix up two languages when you spend all your time with a bilingual. When I sat down next to this old fellow, he smiled and said, "we'll be neighbors" and I very nearly said "wat gezellig!" Roughly translated, this means something like "how nice!" in Dutch. I caught myself, but here are a few mix-ups and mistakes that have slipped through over the last few months.

Going from English to Dutch to English to Dutch isn't always easy, after all, and especially hard for some. Take my mother, for example, who, on her visit to Amsterdam, raised her beer for a toast and accidentally said "Probst!" for cheers instead of the Dutch, "proost!" Probst, incidentally, is the name of her gynocologist. She also tried to say something was gezellig once and instead said, with great exuberance, "gefilte!" which is a Jewish fish cake.

At a dessert bar in Portland, Jordi politely asked the waitress for an "ice sandwich." Mmm! In Dutch, ijs (pronounced 'ice') is the word for ice cream (and for ice, and popsicles, and frozen yogurt), so naturally he forgot the 'cream' even though he knows ijs from ice.

Dutch prepositions give me a lot of trouble, and as Jordi and I were conversing in his native tongue one day, I was trying to say something like "I was talking to her" but I couldn't think of the word for "to" in that context. I started listing prepositions until I landed on the right one, "Naar? Met?...Tenen?" He laughed. Tenen, it turns out, means toes.

When my siblings visited Amsterdam, they asked Jordi and I how we met, so over Thai food Jordi explained to them how we were at a party and got to talking about the weather in California (what every Dutch person I met wanted to talk about), but we couldn't get very far because neither of us could convert Celsius and Fahrenheit. Some light chuckles around the table. "So then," Jordi went on, "we were talking about my length..." There were a few seconds of confused silence, everyone hoping he didn't mean what it sounded like. What the tall Dutchman meant, of course, was his height. In Dutch, lang (pronounced 'long') means tall. An honest mistake, really.

Luckily, after 6 weeks of essentially spending every waking (and sleeping) moment together, Jordi and I still haven't run out of things to talk about, so as I continue to practice my Dutch, and as Jordi continues to pick up more and more lazy idiomatic American English, we're sure to confuse ourselves and each other countless more times. Wat gefilte!

Double Dutch

Unusual circumstances brought us to the town of Lynden, Washington, a place that we would have otherwise cruised right by. Jordi is applying for a graduate program conducted in English that requires him to take the TOEFL exam to prove his knowledge of the language. The only testing center that roughly coincided with our itinerary was at the Christian high school in this little town situated just south of the Canadian border. So we went.

Arriving at the campground the night before the exam, we checked in with a woman wearing a baggy pastel sweatshirt and matching scrunchy in her stringy hair. As soon as Jordi told her his last name, Scholten, she freaked out and talked us about half to death in her croaky voice. It turns out—get this—that the town of Lynden is filled with Scholtens. Filled! After discussing this fact for at least 10 minutes, she pulled out the local phone book just to make sure we understood the magnitude of the coincidence.

You see, about half the population of Lynden has Dutch heritage. That’s 50 percent. As the story goes, they came here starting in the early 20th century because the climate was similar to that of the Netherlands. It’s true. A similar climate. Wild, huh? And then they just, like, made lots of babies and turned the place into miniature Holland faster than you can count een twee drie!

And here, standing before this woman, like Hans Brinker reincarnate, was a real Scholten. Straight out of Amsterdam. I’ll tell ya, that knocked her silver skates right off. “You wouldn’t believe it!” she said, “You’ll go into town and see signs in English and Dutch!”

We’re thinking, no freaking way. Well, actually, I was thinking that. Jordi was probably thinking, echt waar?

“There are old people here who still speak real Dutch!” she went on. “And it’s not just Scholtens…” She started listing other “Dutch” names, which were either heavily Americanized or just not Dutch at all. The one I remember best, partly because she kept repeating it and partly because it’s obscene, sounded like “Coochie”. Jordi and I couldn’t for the life of us imagine what actual Dutch name she was trying to say, but I was reminded of popular mid-90s slang, and, well, female genitalia.

We couldn’t wait to get into town and see the madness for ourselves. And boy, she wasn’t lyin’. They had a public bulletin board with flyers for piano lessons and lost cats with a sign that said “Dorpsnieuws” (village news). There was the Dutch Mothers restaurant, the Dutch Bakery, the Dutch Village Inn, the Dutch Computer Repair Emporium. (OK, I made that last one up, but you get the idea.) They had a giant windmill and a mural depicting wheels of gouda, tulip fields and people in clogs. The post office said “Postkantoor” over the door with a Dutch flag and, again, tulips and clogs. It was kitschy and artificial, but damn were they proud. The only thing missing was a tribute to van Gogh and stoned tourists crowding the streets.

Jordi felt right at home. But, alas, we had to leave dear Dutch Lynden and head north to British Columbia. It's funny, though, that we were there so Jordi could prove his knowledge of English, but what we found was a little American town trying, with all its might, to prove its knowledge of all things Dutch.

They also, just to freak you out a little bit, apparently had some sort of scarecrow contest under way.

 

Ah! Happy October everyone.

Gimme S'more

I hope you all had a great long Labor Day weekend! I missed 4th of July this year, and I've been out of the country for the last two Thanksgivings, but dammit! I was here for Labor Day. And with the heat we're having this week, it doesn't feel like the end of summer to me. Though, I guess that's also probably because I don't have a job and don't go to school and am, all things considered, a feckless vagabond contributing nothing to society.
Happy Labor Day!

Anyway, on the topic of the good ol' U.S. of A., there are things I'm not too thrilled to be back for, but I won't get into that now. What I am thrilled to be back for is the food. The food you just can't get in Europe and that I've unsuccessfully tried explaining to my European friends far too often than they cared for, I'm sure. I'm talking about Mexican food, burgers (real burgers), big giant salads with names like 'Wiqui Waqui BBQ Chicken' or 'Quesadilla Explosion.'

I can't tell you how difficult it was for me to explain s'mores to the four Dutch people and one Danish person I went camping with in the Netherlands in the spring. They don't have graham crackers in Holland, of course, and nothing really resembling them (aside from maybe speculaas, a kind of cinnamon cookie), so from the get go it was a challenge. They're like, "you eat burnt marshmallows with crackers?"

What they came up with were the cheapest cookies they could find (being Dutch) and multicolored marshmallows that were at least the right size. The cookies were plain, round, with one side coated in chocolate. So not the idea. And instead of roasting the marshmallows on the long sticks that I meticulously selected from the firewood and then placing the hot gooey puff in between two cookies, they used little wooden grill skewers, basically like big toothpicks, and stuck them through both cookies and the marshmallow and held the whole sloppy thing over the fire. This, of course, failed. At one point they were using empty Heineken cans to prop the ridiculous cookie sandwiches up near the fire, because the tiny skewers they tried using were of course too small and didn't allow enough distance between hand and flame for proper roasting. Essentially, it was a disaster.

One of these amateur Dutchmen will be arriving in California in a matter of days, and I can't wait to show him how it's really done. As for me, I'll go on enjoying my favorite American fare until the next time I go abroad. Like yesterday, when my mom made ribs, corn on the cob, and this delicious apple pie:

It's good to be home. And now, hungry readers, I'm going out with my brother to get a legit steak burrito the size of my arm from a cockroach-infested hole, and I wouldn't have it any other way. Lekker!