Speaking like a four year old.

One of the biggest adventures of moving to this country has been learning to speak Dutch. I've mentioned it on this blog mostly as a struggle, but I should say that it is also becoming a joy. Here are some examples.

While nearly all adults in the Netherlands speak a bit of English, and most are fluent, the children are another story. In our church there is sunday school during the service and there's a big rotation of who helps out with teaching the children. At the start of the service, sometimes they'll ask for someone to help with the kids (not to teach, just to help), so I have twice now joined the "Kingdom Kids" aged 4-6 with their Bible Lesson. I figured I knew a little Dutch, I would be able to help walk the kids to the bathroom or whatever else needed doing. The kids spoke no English, and though the teacher was fluent in both, the class was conducted entirely in Dutch.

I was delighted both by how much I could understand and by the excitement children can put in little activities. When telling of their weekends, the kids were bright with stories of "oma en opa," (grandparents), "ijs met hagelslag" (ice cream and sprinkles) and "pannenkoeken" (pancakes! often eaten as a meal any time of the day). I felt silly that if I had been able to cram together sentences they would have been dull and lacking interest after such a string of treats. What would I have said? "I have now a dehumidifier. Now is my apartment not wet. I find this nice." So boring! And what kid cares about the humidity?

At one point however I was astonished to discover secret English lurking in one of the children's storehouse of knowledge. After coming back from the bathroom with two of the kids, I saw another waiting. I tried in Dutch, "Wil je ook te ga naar de WC?" or "want you also to go to the bathroom?" to which she blinked, smushed her knees together and blurted out in perfect English, "I need to pee!"

When asked what they were going to do for their "krokus vakantie" or spring break, one of the boys mentioned he was going to England with his family. So they had a whole discussion about how were they going to get there? Because England is an island you can fly over the water (complete with whizzing hand motions), go under the water in a tunnel,  or go on the water in a boat! They were very disappointed that I didn't come from England. The teacher tried to make it sound amazing that I came "uit Amerika!" but they were having none of it. When having these conversations, I am continually struck with fun things to say if I had the words for it. I could have made a joke about there still being boats that go across the ocean, and that I came on a plane, but that there's no tunnel to go all the way to the US. Instead I contemplated saying that I had lived in England for a bit in college, which I could nearly say, but I'm just now getting a firmer grasp of past tense, so I held off and said nothing. Don't worry. I soon won them over with my papercrafting.

It has been a real joy to learn a language with a friend. And learning with Owen has been like having an in with the TA. Although Owen professes to know "not that much" German, he has been top of this Dutch class since we began, despite the other members of the class knowing so many more languages than we do. I do fine most of the time, and both my pronunciation and grammar are improving. Early on, it was a bit overwhelming to have a complicated grammar rule laid out for us entirely in Dutch, as I watched completely not understanding what was being said she looked around and asked in Dutch if we understood, followed by the only English sentence she'd uttered the whole class, "It's very important." So Owen has helped explain the grammar a great deal, and after I had struggled on one of the tests, Marleen (our teacher) came to our house to tutor me on the grammar. We recently had our end of first course exam, and I passed just fine. Owen scored a perfect 10.

We laugh a lot, sometimes over choosing the wrong words and sometimes because we mispronounce them. Recently at the end of a long day I said, "I am very tired," only to have Owen laugh out loud, kiss me and agree. My attempt at "Ik ben heel moe," had sounded more like, "Ik ben heel mooi." I had announced not that I was very tired but that I was very "beautiful." And so it goes.

Note: If you go to the Netherlands and think that people are calling you a "whore" all the time, don't freak out! When it first came up in Dutch class, someone asked what "hoor" meant and our teacher said, "It's just a thing you say to put someone at ease." So "gaat u gang, hoor!" means "oh, go ahead" in the grocery line or whatever. There were some snickers from the Italians at the table. But now, I use this phrase all the time. See how much I've acclimated.

Let me conclude with some Dutch words and phrases that I love.

"gezellig" - This is a wonderful word. It means something like cozy, but also means happy, intimate, and is perhaps best translated as full of "WARM FUZZIES." A class can be gezellig. An old shop. The bustle of the market. Being reunited with friends. A party. A chair with an afghan and a mug of tea nearby. Pronounce it: he-SELL-ik. But those Gs are pretty tough, and sound a little throat-clear-y if you're not careful.

"graag gedaan" - This is the best of all possible responses to "thank you." It means literally, "happily done."

"alstublieft/alsjeblieft" - It's like "please" except you can also use it as a "you're welcome" or "here you go." I think it means something like "as you wish."

"winkelwagen" - grocery cart.

"cacaopoeder" - It sounds really cute pronounced. And it means cocoa power. Win-win.

Pictures.

Most of the time we post about life in Leiden we tell in words. For Christmas we got a camera, a nice little one I can slip in my coat pocket and carry around with me, so the number of pictures I've taken has exploded. It's also shown me just how much I love it here. This post may take a while to load (I know it did here at the library with slow internet) but we hope you enjoy.

Owen with his new bike by the park right next to our new apartment

more of the park

Called the Plantsoen

What do the Dutch have with bread and butter?

Sprinkles.

I'm not kidding.

Here it is in English, in case you thought there was some mistake. 

Working on a 1000 piece puzzle is easier with overhead lighting 

But we've got that together now thanks to Praxis

Our Dutch is improving thanks to Dutch class

We got houseplants!

And a vacuum, or "stofzuiger," literally "stuff-sucker"

When we were in Amsterdam

We had a nice time

And the Rijksmuseum was beautiful 

inside and out

As they say in the Madeline books, 

"The best part of a voyage, by plane, by ship, or train

Is when the trip is over and you are home again."

Leiden feels both like home, and like a miracle.

As homes, perhaps, always are. 

Even on rainy days.

perhaps especially then. 

Misadventures of the Trailing Spouse: More Bike tales, Calculus, Dutch and Foul Smelling crockpots.

I am learning new some skills. This means that there's a lot of things that I'm doing all the time that I'm not good at yet.

Example #1. Biking.
Now, for everyone who read my first story about biking, I should say I have made a lot of progress. I am no longer frightened of biking, and enjoy the freedom of being able to zip around town, particularly now that we have suitable raingear and I don't get drenched if I bike in the rain. That said, however, I'm still not a fast or confident biker and this past week or so I've had three bike crashes. In the first one, a bus came up behind me and was honking (probably not at me) and I got scared so I started biking even closer to the curb, and when I looked back to see if Owen was still with me, I swerved into the curb and ended up catching myself beautifully on the concrete. Scraped knuckles, some small bruises, but all my stage combat work has taught me to fall well, and my instincts kicked in nicely. I was mostly just rattled (as busses are usually extremely courteous towards bikes) and once I got home and had a good, "I'm glad I'm alive" cry, everything was fine.

Bike crash number two was rattling because it was so soon after the first crash. There were a lot of slippery wet leaves in the bike path, and I must have just lost my grip or something because next thing I knew the leaves and I were becoming very well acquainted. Again. No injury worth speaking of, just had a good, "why is this happening to me?" cry and got back on my bike the next day.

The third time I crashed my bike was on the way home from church and was the scariest by far. Owen and I were biking home from church and we had just zipped through an intersection on a yellow light, and found ourselves going a good bit faster than the bike ambling along in front of us. All of the sudden he swerved and then slowed down even more, so instead of trying to pass on the left (like a sensible, sane, person) I instead caught a glimpse of the giant signpost, and knew I was done for. You know in Calvin and Hobbes, when Calvin tries to practice catching or batting a baseball? The ball grows fangs and chases him. I feel this way about posts. I see a post, (which to anyone else would just be a normal unremarkable post) and I see it grow teeth and snarl, "Ima get you." My brain has time to think, "Post, what are you talking about, I'm here in the bike lane you're over there, and oh no!" Something happens, and the post gets me. This happened to me when I was little too, and I think the best explanation is one I learned in a skiing lesson. "If you're looking at it, you'll go to it." So advice to all of you who don't bike much, or might possibly be less experienced than I am: don't look at the things you don't want to run into. If you think "I'm gonna run into that." Look at something else! Preferably something far away! This crash needless to say was messier. Owen looked back just in time to see and hear my head hit the road, I got a giant bruise on my arm, the bruises around my knees were a veritable bouquet, and one of my fingers and toes still hurts five days later. It was also very public, as the older man I nearly ran into stopped and made me sit on the sidewalk for five minutes, kissed the top of my head, and told us in Dutch if I wasn't okay we could call the ambulance, and it would be okay, we would not need to pay for it! A couple other people stopped and everyone was asking me if I was okay, and I was trying hard to stop crying so they would believe me. In the end, I sat for a bit and biked the rest of the way home, but it wasn't fun, and now I'm confronted with the whole, new task of finding a general practitioner, so that I can go to a doctor, whenever that becomes necessary. I'm also beginning to seriously doubt the wisdom of a whole country biking without helmets.

Example #2. Speaking/Reading/Understanding Dutch.
It will be a great joy to be able to speak Dutch, but it is pretty tough when you're starting out. The use of the English language is one of the things I have spent a huge amount of my life studying and practicing, and my ability to communicate is an ability I treasure, so floundering in Dutch class, not knowing what to say when asked a question, or just exasperation at not being able to express myself is a hard thing. It's sad to pass bookstores and feel like a diabetic kid in a candy shop. I'm learning, I'm working on it pretty much every day, but it's hard. I also have a lot of tasks to do like, calling about the customs paperwork for our shipment, and let's just say calling government offices is never fun, even in your mothertongue. It's wretched when you have to write down the "Speekt u Engels? Mijn Nederlands is neit goed..." so that you don't freak out and forget when you have a person speaking rapid Dutch on the other end of the phone.

Example #3. Calculus.
Owen's teaching calculus twice a week, and I get to sit in on his classes which is really exciting and interesting. Also humiliating. Somewhere I had got the idea that if I worked hard and paid attention, I would not just get the math, I would excel! I had not thought I would be decidedly below average in my speed in picking up concepts, or struggling over the notation. For the second class, I had not had time to review the notes from the previous class (something I thought of as being helpful perhaps, but not necessary,) and I was the only one in the class to fail the first quiz. Lesson learned, I studied hard for the next class, and got a perfect score on my first homework (without even getting help from the teacher!) but it was still humiliating. Since then I've learned that most of these students have already taken calculus (why they're taking Intro to Calculus, I'm not sure) and that has made me feel a lot better about everything. But still. Not something I have any of the skills to breeze by in. Just have to put in a lot of hard work.

Example #4. Slowcooker shenanigans
Owen brought home a slowcooker (very rare in the Netherlands) from an Asian grocery store. The lady running the cash register had to make sure he knew "this is not a rice cooker" "Oh, yes, I know. It's for cooking things at a low heat for a long period of time." "Good." I thought, "Hurray! Something I know how to use and do!" However I spent my whole morning looking for a new apartment (we have to be out of this one in about a month) and didn't get the food into the crock pot til after lunch. But I thought, "that's okay. 8 hours on low won't work at this point, but 4 hours on high will still have this food done in time." So I carefully washed the slowcooker, and put together the meal and turned it on high. And the house slowly began to fill with the scent of.... burning plastic. I was horrified and worried, "Is this normal? Do we have a defective machine?" but found reassurance on the internet that this is indeed normal, and should only happen the first time or two as the encasing around the wiring breaks down. The house smelled so bad that I opened the windows and still had a terrible headache, so I thought. "It's a crockpot. Full of liquid. The chicken in there is frozen. It will be fine if I give it a stir and then go to the library." So that is what I did. It made me feel a lot better to not be breathing in any more burning plastic fumes, and I got some work done, ready to come home and find that the crock pot had burned everything around the base, and that only two hours later, the chicken was totally shreddable. Ladies and gentlemen, beware the vigorous Asian crockpot. I was able to salvage the meal (which did not taste at all like plastic or even burnt stuff, and was actually pretty great) but I think it will take some work to identify the cooking patterns of this particular crockpot, and it may be awhile before I have the confidence to put it on the "auto" setting.

This has all sounded pretty sad. So let me end with this. My last year at Mary Baldwin I started weight training. Just a couple times a week, at first, and not for long at all. I had a class at the gym from 8-9:30, so it just made sense to stay for another half hour before heading back to the dorm and showering. When I started it was terrible. I hated it. I was in pain, and as one of my friends grimly told me "your muscles are actually ripping so they can grow back stronger." I had never felt so weak or pathetic, and the worst part was that when I started it didn't start going uphill. It went downhill first, for a good while before going uphill. But as I did it, I started to like it. Between Thursday and Tuesday I would miss the crazy happy exhileration, and I would find myself trying to figure out if I could go another day. By the time the spring semester rolled around I didn't have a class at the gym but I went anyways, every Monday, Wednesday and Friday the whole semester. Can I just say how fantastic it felt to lift or press or pull twice or three times as much as when I had started? By late spring I would see girls come in and I would have to try not to smile at their surprise when they used machines after me and found they needed to take off a lot of the weight before they could make a rep. So here's hoping that in six months, or eight months or by the time we leave this country, I will be happy with my past self for all the hard work when the work was hard.

Also! In all my free time when I'm not learning Dutch, calculus or battling asian slowcookers, I now write a weekly column for the Shakespeare Standard, you can see my articles here: http://www.theshakespearestandard.com/author/clara/

Things making us happy in Leiden

1. We now own rain gear.

It rains a lot in Leiden, and biking is our means of transportation. Owen is a strong enough biker to hold an umbrella while he bikes, but I'm still getting to that point. And although I have a couple of jacket-like articles of clothing I didn't have anything resembling real rain gear til this week. After last Sunday's trip to church and getting soaked to the skin both ways, I went and bought us both some cheap raingear. 

grocery bags don't really cut it.

rain gear is much better!

2. Visitor!

Mark, one of Owen's closest friends, and a friend of mine since Deerwander days came to visit us here in the Netherlands. It has been a blast having him around during the days, going to museums with him and having him in and out over the last nearly two weeks. He's come and gone a bit, going on adventures to Scotland and Ireland, making the most of this visit to Europe. It's been great. 

3. Museums.

I mentioned that I've been heading to museums with Mark during the weekdays, but Owen and I have also been going. He's writing up a blogpost about the Naturalis Museum now. I should say that for a city this size, Leiden has a ton of excellent museums, all with a very Dutch flair. They are usually bilingual throughout the museum (which is so nice for us) but the museums are always eager to point out local achievements. These artifacts were brought by the first Dutch archeologist working in Egypt, these tools belonged to an innovative Dutch surgeon, these tile pattern was originally based off of Chinese influences but became emblematic of Dutch domestic culture and export. I think in the US, we are much happier to dip our fingers into other people's achievements, or to not care as much how the things we use came to us. I like this Dutch national pride. And it makes sense. They have a lot to be proud of. 

4. Baked goods.

It's been chilly in our house, and although we now have learned how to turn on the heat, a cold house has made me very eager to bake. I will post another post very soon with the recipe I use for Roman Apple cake adapted for the gluten intolerant, but for now, here's the original recipe I found online. 

5. Dutch class.

Owen and I are taking a Dutch class at his department. It's an immersion class so you really have to do the work or you'll look like an idiot, but I already feel like a bit of one given the other students. We have a lot of students from Italy in the class, and many of the students know four or five languages. This past week we all went around the room saying where we come from and which languages we speak. The first student said, "Ik kom uit Italië, ik spreek Italiaans, Engles, Frans, Spaans, en een beetie Nederlands." There were almost as many distinct languages as students, with languages as diverse as Latin, Romanian, Mandarin, Hindi, Japanese, Russian, Serbian, and it made my shaky accomplishments in highschool French look poor indeed. Everyone in the class is fluent in English as well as their native tongue, (Owen and I are the only native English speakers) and most students knew at least three if not more. It's so easy to think of my language as the only one worth knowing, (particularly with all the time and effort I've put into studying it) but how simple to not realize other people think the same. 

6. Knitting. 

Another way we've been keeping warm is knitting. I am very nearly finished with my first ever sweatervest, and I'm thinking fondly of my mother-in-law and new family and our happy trip to Rhinebeck Sheep and Wool festival a year ago this weekend. Here's what I wrote about it last year.

7. The Prague fiasco

Here is some of the furniture at our gate. 

Now this story may not sound like a happy story at first but stick with me. Mark, Owen and I had planned to be in Prague this weekend. We thought it was high time to explore a little more of Europe, and Mark was eager to see Prague, so what better occasion? After much careful planning (it can be tough to travel with significant allergies in yet another unknown language) we got up very early yesterday morning to head to the Rotterdam Airport, a place full of cushy couches, delightful little coffee-drinking nooks, security with our shoes on, and decor with a whimsical flair putting us in mind of the Oegestgeest Bank office. Our flight was cancelled, and then merely delayed, then cancelled for real, no reasonable flights to take us there a little later, so our plan was a wash. Mark was still eager to go and see another country, so he caught a train to Belgium, and we planned on heading back home, figuring out how to cancel the rest of our flights, and get our money back and our new plan was to meet him in Brussels today. But here's what happened. We got home and my stomach with which I had been on nebulous terms all day, decided to outright revolt, and I found myself sicker than I've been in about seven years, probably longer. Which brings me to the happy parts of the story. I am so thankful that I was sick at home with a immeasurably sweet husband taking care of me. Not in a youth hostel. Not at some great historic landmark. Not on a train. Not in a plane. Not anywhere but home. New weekend plan? Sleep. Stay in bed. Watch old Disney movies. Eat applesauce and bananas, maybe rice. Work on finishing the sweatervest--or possibly just watch Owen finish it. Maybe go to church and a baby welcoming party if I'm feeling stronger tomorrow. Mostly? I'm planning on loving and being loved.