Fijne Feestdagen
First Impressions of the Other Side of the World
A few weeks ago I moved to the Netherlands. I sold most of my stuff, packed some clothes and a few fat books to keep me busy on planes and trains, and left New Zealand. While all the impressions so far are still fresh in my mind, I want to write them down.
To travel across the world in these strange times we had to suss all sorts of documents and permissions. I packed them into a manila folder: negative covid tests, vaccination passes (domestic and international), visa letters, incoming health declarations. Nobody checked any of it. After a cursory glance at our passports, we were whisked through customs. I stepped outside Schiphol airport, hopped into a car, and got my first good look at this country. It is flat, grey, and dark. Today the sun came up at 8:46am. It started going down at 4:34pm.
For such a small, densely populated country, there is a surprising amount of empty land. You can see it as you drive between cities, because the motorways don’t go through towns, but around them. Some of that land is for grazing. As it is winter, most of the animals are indoors, so the paddocks are regenerating now. Other sections just have no purpose. A good deal of the Netherlands has been reclaimed from the sea, with the water kept at bay by an extensive series of dikes, and some of that reclaimed land is not very solid. You can’t build or grow anything there.
Because the country is so flat, it is easy to cycle around. I live in the inner city of Groningen, which is absolutely packed with all sorts of people flying around on bicycles, scooters, motorbikes, and even motorised wheelchairs. I’m never sure what is a footpath, a bike path, or a road. Cyclists tend to ignore these fine distinctions and go wherever they can.
Somehow it works. People on the road just know what everyone else is going to do; it is telepathy, not the law, which keeps order on the roads of Groningen. Accordingly, you can’t afford to be too polite. You shouldn’t bother to stop or give way if you don’t have to, as everyone else is going to move around you based on the assumption that you are going to take whatever opportunity you have. Not taking your right of way is just confusing.
As well as being fun to cycle around, the inner city of Groningen is immensely walkable. Churches and brick tenements, alleyways and asymmetries, all form a labyrinth that is a joy to get lost in. Rather than learning street names, you tend to navigate by the major market squares and buildings: the fish market, the great market, the new market, the high church, Martini church, and so on.
While I consider Groningen a beautiful city, I haven’t been able to take a photo that does it justice. What’s impressive is not that its buildings are huge and awe-inspiring, but just their general agreeableness and how they appear and disappear as you move around. The city invites you to walk and cycle through it and funnels people into big, shared spaces where there are often stalls and vendors. It has a kinetic pleasance to it, not unlike a cubist painting.
I live down an alleyway with a decorative arch from 1688. This is clearly an old city, one designed for an age before the car. Why can’t we build such cities anymore? Our bad addiction to cars forces us to lay out everything in ways which discourage us from coming together in common areas. The city stops being a shared living space and starts to exist only for utilitarian purposes: sleeping, eating, working, shitting.
There are also no powerlines. Cables run under the street, which is also where your garbage and recycling goes. It took me a while to realise this. Now I can’t unsee powerlines in towns which have them. They now look to me like someone has taken a big black marker and scribbled over a painting.
Groningen is not without its downsides. Its name is really bloody hard to pronounce. There are too many people; the only quiet spaces are smelly alleyways. Apartments are also small and sometimes hard to get to; life would be hard if you were disabled. And like many other “international” cities, there is a housing crisis. Many people need rental subsidies to afford to live in the inner city, and more students are accepted to the world-famous university each year than can actually be housed. To combat this, the local student union has started a couch-surfing initiative.
Still, it seems like we have more to learn from cities like Groningen than vice versa. Can’t we at least have nice-looking buildings in New Zealand? We seem to have two major architectural styles:
Mouldy settler cottages banged up 150 years ago
Hideous glass behemoths for the offices of big multinational employers
We probably couldn’t just copy brick tenements because of earthquakes—although Groningen has had a few in the past decade due to fracking in the country’s north-east—still, no amount of clever engineering changes just how ugly buildings look in New Zealand.
I’ve also spent some time in the countryside of Noord-Holland. Houses there are a bit more like what we have: old, with wooden interiors, uninsulated walls, and creaky floorboards. Some of them have thatched roofs! Some have backyards, which tend to bleed into each other, with no big fences dividing them. This is another nice, easy way to encourage knowing your neighbours and gives these small towns a sense of flow and continuity.
While cycling around Noord-Holland, I have noticed the huge volume and variety of birds. They cruise around the sky in massive gangs, or hang out in waterways or on the saggy branches of trees in parks. Given the amount of people in the country and the lack of forest and wilderness, I’m surprised at just how many there are. I’d say there are more than in New Zealand.
One bird I see a lot gliding around the waterways reminds me a bit of the Takahē. It is called the Meerkoet. It has a round, black body with a crest of white on its forehead and scaly feet that look like snakeskin. They can be aggressive, and will smash other birds’ nests. Sometimes they make an odd noise, a bit like a groaning metal pipe. Apparently we have these too, but I’ve never noticed one.
As I cycle around, I also notice that Dutch people often don’t close their curtains. I have read explanations that this comes from the country’s old Calvinist habits: people wanted to be visible to their neighbours so they wouldn’t be suspected of doing anything improper in private. Whatever its origin, it’s a bit awkward to be going down a street at night and accidentally see right into Opa Henk’s living room as he’s watching TV.
Your gaze is just as likely to be drawn to all the clutter he’s put on his windowsills: candles, lights, blue China, Christmas decorations, electronic Santas. Dutch people love their small, pretty, useless objects. Many shops exist for no other purpose than to sell small, pretty, useless objects, which are given with great enthusiasm on birthdays and holidays—especially at Christmas, when everyone gets a box of chocolates, snacks, and baubles from their employer.
The walkable towns and love of small things carries over into shopping habits. Supermarkets are smaller than you’d expect, and you often can’t buy things in bulk. Shops which have nothing to do with food often sell slightly posh food or beer: IKEA, a furniture shop, sells meatballs; HEMA, which is like K-Mart or Farmers, sells sausages. Rather than do a single big shop for the week, Dutch people do several smaller shops throughout the week, stopping in at specialist shops or market stalls for specific things like bread, cheese, tea, fish, biscuits, or sweets.
Dutch bread is really good. So is the cheese. In New Zealand, the “normal” cheeses are just various types: edam, cheddar, colby etc. The “normal” Dutch cheeses are mostly different varieties of what we would probably just call Gouda, labelled by how long they have been aged.
Dutch coffee, on the other hand, is not so great. Flat whites only exist in hipster cafes. The closest thing to it is “koffie verkeerd” (“wrong coffee”), which is what I would describe as a normal black coffee with hot milk added. The beans just don’t seem to have the same flavour though, and the default strength is single shot vs. a double shot in New Zealand. Tea is also popular. The normal kind is the same sort of black tea we drink, but it’s usually taken without milk. However, Dutch people share and re-use their teabags! Every kichen has a plate filled with sad, soggy, second-hand teabags.
Dutch people typically have light breakfasts and lunches. They make a strangely firm distinction between hot and cold meals. Breakfast and lunch are typically cold i.e. you don’t really cook anything. Typical foods include crackers, sandwiches, cheese, ham, biscuits (they call them “cookies”), light cakes, or toasted sandwiches—a.k.a “Tosti’s”, which Dutch people are absolutely bonkers about. Some people are purists and only allow themselves one topping on their sandwich, lest they enjoy it too much.
They have this thing called spice which is a non-specific mix of warm herbs and spices—things like cinnamon, paprika, clove, ginger, nutmeg etc. I’m not entirely sure what the boundaries of this word are. “Spice” can be both savoury (chips and nuts) and sweet (biscuits and cakes). It is not what we would call spicy—chillis and curries and so on. That is pittig, and even by Kiwi standards, the tolerance for pittig is pitifully low—though somehow, Dutch people can handle strong mustard.
Lots of biscuits are flavoured with spice which, to my Kiwi tastebuds, just means they all taste like gingernut biscuits. Among the popular Christmas biscuits are kerstkransjes, little sugary annuli that might have chunks of almond or chocolate sprinkles on it. Pepernoten (“pepper-nuts”) are little spiced dog-biscuit looking things that taste like gingernut biscuits. Gevulde koeken (“filled biscuit”) are big, circular biscuits, decorated with almonds in the middle. They are filled with a thick white paste flavoured with almond and aniseed. They taste a bit medicinal, but are pretty good dipped in tea.
One breakfast food I like is ontbijtkoek (“breakfast cake”). This is a loaf of spiced bread—think banana bread, but much less sweet, and it tastes like a gingernut. You eat it with butter—which, for some reason, is what margarine is called. Actual butter is called “roomboter” or “echte boter” (real butter). It is very creamy and much nicer than butter in New Zealand, though I think our milk has more flavour.
In addition to sampling infinitely many kinds of biscuits, Christmas is a time for Dutch people to drape their rooms, houses, and streets with lights and decorations. They are chasing what is called gezellig, a feeling of cosiness and domestic warmth. I suspect this is needed to combat the weather, which gives everyone seasonal depression for nine months of the year. Different families have their own Christmas traditions, but a big one is gourmetten—this is a big dinner in which you cook your own meats and vegetables on a hot plate on the table.
While I’m here I’ve been trying to learn Dutch. It has been a humbling experience; there is no way to pretend you can speak a language any better than you can, especially when you open your mouth and they frown as they struggle to understand what you just said. Sometimes, in an unfamiliar context with a stranger, my mind will just completely blank. More than once I’ve left a conversation by pretending I can’t speak Dutch or English (which all Dutch people know, to some extent).
There are many different kinds of accents and variations of the Dutch language. A lot of them are regional: people from Groningen have a distinct accent, people from Drenthe, from West-Friesland, from Belgium, etc. In the north-northwest of the country some people speak Frisian, which is not mutually intelligible with Dutch, although it is very similar. There are even Frisian schools and road signs up there.
The differences between these variations can be about how words are stressed or how certain sounds are pronounced. For example, “g” is often pronounced as a hard, uvular sound made in the back of the throat, in the same part where you gargle your listerine. Belgians don’t make this sound. They say “hezellih” instead of “gezellig”. Their accent is much smoother and softer, with fewer guttural noises. Some regions use different words. In the northern half of the country, the word for chips (as in fries) is patat, while in the south it’s friet.
Some other Dutch accents are ethnic. There many Turkish and Surinamese people in the Netherlands, and they have quite distinct ways of talking. I don’t know enough Dutch to be able to distinguish most regional accents, but the Turkish and Surinamese accents sound very different to my ears, and I can always tell them apart.
It’s amazing how much variation there is. I find it sad that it is dying out. Many people lose their regional accent when they move to a big city for univesrity or work. Dutch people are also a bit snobbish about talking “with an accent”—which I don’t really understand, since everyone obviously has an accent, which is to say nothing more than that they have a particular way of talking.
Language differences can also be generational. Certain forms of speech are only seen among older people or in books, or have fallen out of use. For example, Dutch used to have a genitive case like German. This is a way of modifying words to indicate possession. Dutch no longer really does this, though the genitive has been preserved in a few phrases like ‘s ochtends (in the mornings), originally short for des ochtends, which is basically how you would say it in German.
A lot of old-fashioned Dutch words are more like the words you would use in German. For example, the word for sad is verdrietig, but there is an older word treurig which is almost the same as the German traurig. The word for “whole” or “entire” as in “the entire sandwich” is heel. “The entire sandwich” is het hele broodje. But you could also say the slightly archaic het ganse broodje—again, gans is basically identical to the German ganz.
It’s somewhat uncommon for expats to learn Dutch and many Dutch people are happy to hear you try and speak it. What’s helpful is that they will often correct your mistakes; Dutch people like certainty and correctness. They are very deliberate people, sometimes bordering on pedantic. I find them direct, but not rude or strict.
Sometimes I miss the relaxed nature of Kiwis. We tend to take ourselves a bit less seriously and are much more spontaneous. Kiwis might make say “come round after lunch” or “come over at 12”, and it doesn’t really matter what exact time you come.
Dutch people won’t put up with that kind of nonsense. They will organise the smallest things weeks in advance. They get everyone to fill in the dates and times they can make using a website called Datumprikker, and a final date and time is chosen based on this information—and this isn’t just for big events, either. This level of planning just feels too bureaucratic for me. But on the other hand, if a Dutch person says they are coming to a party, they are definitely coming to the party, and neither early nor late, but at the specified time.
Where Dutch people are direct and confrontational, Kiwis are evasive and conflict-averse. That’s been the hardest thing for me to navigate. Kiwis are more suggestive, dry, under-stated; we rely more on subtext to convey how we feel. But sometimes we are too conflict-averse, and by avoiding confrontation, we just create more problems. Between the two extremes, I’m sure there’s a happy mean.