Your real Dutch age

by Marianne on 18/01/2012

We’ve been watching a drama series about the Dutch royal family, Beatrix, Oranje onder vuur, and it’s clear that there are significant gaps in my Dutch history.

I know the basics like Juliana and Bernhard being Beatrix’s parents and Wilhelmina being Juliana’s mother (although I did just check that one to make sure) but what I am missing is the experience of events that happened before I was living here; events I would have experienced if I had grown up here.

What I’m missing therefore is less of a textbook history, although that’s missing too, and more of a experiential history.

It reminds me of those programmes where they talk about your real age as opposed to your chronological age, programmes that generally involve tracksuits, gyms, teeth-whitening and cosmetic fillers.

In terms of experiential Dutch history, my real age is 14. Obviously, this mismatch between chronological age and real Dutch age doesn’t hamper me in daily life. It’s not like I’m always being laughed at or shot because I don’t know who the prime minister was in 1986.  However, it does render one slightly childlike when one hasn’t experienced the same history as ones contemporaries.

Returning to Beatrix, Oranje onder vuur, the actors haven’t been chosen due to an astonishing likeness to the person they are playing, so it’s a guessing game working out who they are supposed to be anyway. I can work out the contemporary figures such as Balkenende, Wilders and Willem Alexander (and gain extra trivia points for knowing that he’s played by Bastian Ragas who used to be in a boy band and is now married to Tooske thingy) but once we go back in time I’m lost.

Husband and my mother-in-law sat through the first episode going ‘is that supposed to be bla bla bla? Oh no it’s bla bla bla’ and a name would occasionally ring a small, distant bell. So we had Lubbers, who I know as a former politician who worked for the UNHCR. It turns out he was prime minister of the Netherlands until 1994, just three years before I was ‘born’ in the Netherlands.

Lubbers being prime minister makes sense in terms of a tradition of prime ministers with comedy names: he was after all followed by Wim Kok. Whether it was a long-standing tradition, which was broken with the advent of the non-comedy-name Balkenende era, is something I’d have to look up.

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Integration check-up

by Marianne on 11/01/2012

However integrated I feel, there is always yet another level that I could take my integration to.

Take hanging your duvet out of the window every day. I have done it but only about twice since I’ve been living here.

‘Torrid nights’ is my mum’s pronunciation on it, which confirms my suspicion that ‘we’ don’t do it ‘at home’. Maybe they just have more torrid nights here. Perhaps it’s a sign that you have just had a torrid night… Although it does seem to be the superkeurig people who do it.

Then there’s slavinken. Having had them recently at Oma’s and seeing the kids enjoying them, I suddenly thought, for the first time ever and thus very adventurously, ‘right I’ll buy and cook slavinken; I shall be a slavinken cook’ when out shopping the other day.

Then I discovered a whole slavinken world at the supermarket that I have never noticed before – I think all these supermarket sections, like with kapucijners, only become visible to us when we are just about ready to accept their existence – and it was suddenly too daunting. I decided I would have to do some slavink research first rather than blithely blundering into slavinken world.

I’ve denied the existence of slavinken for so long because the name conjures up such unappetising images: sla is lettuce and vink is a finch. Lettuce Finch sounds like a good name for a character in a book but not like something I would particularly want to eat, and that’s even though we do eat them regularly at Oma’s.

Alternatively, I could take sla to be a form of the verb slaan and it could thus mean ‘bashed finches’, which is coincidentally what we almost witnessed earlier in the week as a sparrowhawk (sperwer) sat on the garden fence tearing at a great tit (koolmees) it had caught, a scheurmees I guess.

My trusty Kookboek van de Amsterdamsche Huishoudschool isn’t any help with slavinken, which is probably because it predates them. The etymology dictionary says slavinken are a culinary invention of the 1950s and are named as such because they taste lekker with salad and resemble a roasted songbird. Hmm.

Which brings me onto another integration level that I still haven’t reached: sla versus salade. In theory, I know that sla is lettuce and salade is the finished product, such as the, after the centuries I have been living here, still very scary huzarensalade – and I’m sure there’s a whole huzarensalade section waiting to reveal itself at the supermarket, but I’m certainly not ready for it yet – but I am still crap at applying this concept in practice when speaking.

So what do I need to work on? More torrid nights, more bashed songbirds and more sla/salade practice.

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Hamsterpolitie and a wildbegravenis

December 31, 2011

The year has a certain symmetry to it. It starts with a death, a funeral, the whole family crying round Opa’s grave and Daughter saying ‘Oma, you’ll have to find a new man to live with now.’ It ends with a death, a smaller one this time. Sniffy the hamster is, as Husband says, a [...]

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Sour plums and red herrings

December 20, 2011

The other day I was taking Son to a friend’s house. Friend lives on the section of the Fart that is currently a big sandpit due to roadworks that seem to have lasted an eternity. So I was cycling along the pavement because there is no road. Ahead of us a woman was walking in [...]

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Dutch design classics or rechtse hobbymuziek

December 14, 2011

***Warning: this post contains references to earwormy music*** Having heard the song Paloma Blanca (warning: this link opens the song in YouTube) twice in as many days (not of my own volition) I decided it must be trying to tell me something. The first hearing was at the local Kerstmarkt/Winter Braderie. They’re always having seasonally-adjusted braderieën [...]

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Language magic

December 2, 2011

When I turned the radio on the day before yesterday the DJ was talking about the song Heaven is a Place on Earth by Belinda Carlisle and I got rather excited about the prospect of hearing this song that would take me back to being a miserable teenager. Then it transpired that he’d just played [...]

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Snuggles

December 1, 2011

All the wonderful posts I had planned were washed away by a sea of vomit that chundered through our house halfway through last week hitting first son, then daughter and then husband and I at the same time at the beginning of this week (guess who got up and took the kids to school, did [...]

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A time and a place for everything

November 25, 2011

Daughter and her friend were having a conversation the other day about which words you can and cannot say. They turned to me as the adult authority. They started with the word stom. Can we say stom? they asked. Stom is the equivalent of stupid, so my take was you can say stom but you mustn’t call [...]

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Mand-maand anti-ageing facial exercises

November 21, 2011

One of the things I have trouble with in Dutch is long and short vowels, for instance, mand for basket and maand for month or man for man and maan for moon. I realised this when I was voyeuristically – or maybe luisteristically (but not in the sense of getting off on it, I hasten to add) [...]

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Traditions and the river bed

November 18, 2011

With traditions it’s tempting to see ourselves as a river bed over which the river of tradition washes from one generation to the next. This can lead us to see a tradition as coming directly from all the generations before us and therefore as having merit simply because it has passed over so many generations [...]

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