The next post will be on languages. I cleverly transition to it in the last section.
Biking:
Fact: Dutch people look
effortlessly cool while biking.
Fact: I look like I got my head
stuck in a bowling ball, and am still dazed and confused from the experience.
Conclusion: I’m not Dutch.
And because simply biking would
just be too easy, the Dutch also often travel two on a bike. I tried to do this
once. Basically, if I had been deliberately trying to make the other person as
late as possible while destroying all their possessions, I really couldn’t have
done a better job.
Helmets: That should probably be in the singular, as I seem to have the only helmet in all of Holland. It result in comments such as “Going for a marathon, eh?”, “Careful you don’t fall now”, and very, very
sarcastic whistles. If you look ridiculous, a certain portion of the Dutch
population will consider it their personal responsibility to let you know. We
will see how long I continue to value my prefrontal lobe over my dignity. Right
now, a winning tactic is pretending I don’t understand Dutch. Yeah, my dignity never even had a fighting chance.
Getting
places: Currently, my propensity for getting lost is cancelling
out my propensity to over-consume anything with sugar. For example, yesterday I
biked to visit my family. It’s about 40 miles as the crow flies, so I figured
it would take me four hours. It took me ten hours. Partly it was my
slowness (my grandma is faster than me), but mostly it was the fact that I took
the very, very scenic route. It was
truly beautiful, but after the sixth hour, my appreciation for the grazing
cows, the thatched-roof farm houses, the random castles and manors began to
diminish, and I started to wish I had considered that fact that I regularly
got lost in Richland, Washington.
Thankfully, on a sunny day in
Holland, the entire population embarks on biking odysseys of their own, though
presumably planned and not forced by lack of orientation skills. During the
wandering course of my own biking odyssey, I asked about the entire population for
directions. The people were amazingly kind and helpful, often taking a
good ten minutes to make sure their directions were correct and clear. That and
the fact that I was only mocked for my helmet once during the whole ten hours
was very faith-in-humanity restoring experience.
Learning
Dutch: About half of the Dutch people I asked for directions
yesterday in Dutch answered in English. In fact, I had several conversations
where my entire side was in Dutch and their entire side was in English. Although
I am very impressed with how accommodating the Dutch are to foreigners, I also
want to improve my Dutch, as unnecessary as Dutch is turning out to be in the Netherlands. It
would be tres lame to be the only mono- in a land of bi-, tri-, and quad- linguals. (And I'm already doing such a great job at being tres lame by saying things like tres lame.)
