Dutch is Life

It’s been a good week, especially at work; I’ve been assigned to an investigation (to research what crimes we can charge), so that’s been fun. Yesterday, I watched a parade go by my apartment in honor of Sinterklaas. Though they celebrate Christmas in Holland, the bigger holiday is Sinterklaas, held on December 5^th. I didn’t take the attached picture, but that’s him in his bishop’s hat, along with his assistant Black Pete (Zwarte Piet). In fact, the entire parade was made up of men in blackface. I do believe it was the first time I’ve seen blackface when it wasn’t meant to be ironic; some of them were playing instruments and dancing around with jazz hands, as if straight out of a minstrel show. For a country that’s so progressive in so many ways, it was rather jaw-dropping to see how the Dutch think nothing of this practice.

Besides that parade, there wasn’t anything too out of the ordinary. Rather than recap the week, I thought I might note a few idiosyncrasies about life here in The Hague:

- I was on a roll for a while of getting in trouble every time I went to the supermarket. One time, I didn’t know you had to weigh your own fruit, so I held up the entire check-out line while someone ran back to do it for me. Another time, security surrounded me because I took a grocery bag without paying for it (as apparently you have to do here). I think I’m getting the hang of things now, though.

- The biggest difference about the Dutch grocery stores is that the food has no preservatives. Everything is probably healthier, but everything also goes bad very quickly. It’s already happened a number of times that I try to pour milk on my cereal and it comes out in chunks. Lovely. One time, I was eating a tuna sandwich, and a mealworm crawled out. I was so hungry that I almost finished the sandwich anyway, until someone convinced me not to.

- We don’t have a fire alarm in my office building. Instead, a woman’s voice politely asks over the loudspeaker for everyone to head outside. I’m pretty sure if that were our fire alarm in California, we all would have died a long time ago.

- “Cool Ranch” Doritos are instead called “Cool American.” (Do they not have ranch here?) The movie “Live Free or Die Hard” is called “Die Hard 4.0.” (I guess they didn’t appreciate the New Hampshire reference.) A few other things are tweaked like this, but not many.

- I am a big fan of the cheese here, and my favorite snack is a stroopwaffle. It’s basically a sandwich made out of waffles filled with caramel. So delicious...

- Every one of the interns must go through two rights of passage: first, everyone at some point falls down the stairs, since Dutch stairs are absurdly steep. (As of yesterday, I’ve fallen down the stairs three times, which my landlady tells me is a new record here.) Second, everyone at some point gets their bike tires stuck in the tram tracks, since for some reason they are the perfect width to fit in the track. (Everyone also gets their bikes stolen – a booming industry in the Netherlands – though thankfully my bike is too much of a piece of junk to steal.)