The Dutch Method, Part II; or, When God Closes a Door, He Disables the Back Window Lock

If I still haven't fuly grasped the degree to which the Dutch philosophy is to just chill out when faced with disaster or red tape, it's not for any lack of examples. A couple of weeks ago, when I finally got access to my school email address, I found a backlog of messages warning me, with increasing seriousness, that if I did not register at the University by October 1, terrible things would happen.

I got these emails on October 3, so my first reaction was to hyperventilate a little. My second was to connect the warnings with the "Confirmation of Registration" I had received on September 29, which strangely (and, I thought at the time, erroneously) listed my tenure at the VU from 9/1/07 to 9/30/07. It looked like I had been registered, then unregistered for my failure to answer any of the emails I couldn't access because I ... hadn't yet been registered.

My go-to solution in previous instances of Dutch Circular Logic gave me the same answer as it has every time before: "Just ignore those emails," said the [extremely kind and infinitely patient] international office coordinator. "Just delete them; don't even read them. The registrar has probably just not received your proof of visa from the city, so they issued you a temporary
registration without telling the Student Office."

"But I met with the city visa people almost three weeks ago," I told her. "And they said it takes five days to send the papers over to the school." In my mind, I saw my papers stamped with 'INCOMPLETE,' languishing in a cabinet at the city hall.

"Well." Said the [EKIF]IOC.

"Well?" I said.

"Sometimes things do not happen so quickly here."

This had become readily and increasingly apparent to me over the past two months, so I decided to trust her. Sure enough, my student ID card and proof of registration through the school year arrived a week or two later. I still haven't gotten any visa paperwork or confirmation that I'm here legally, but I've decided to give it a couple more months before I start to worry.

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If I do get any official correspondence from the government, I have a pretty good shot at understanding it, because my Dutch is getting noticeably better. This doesn't mean that I don't still fall into a German accent, and it certainly doesn't mean that my vocabulary is big enough to avoid the kind of "the metal dealie, that you use... to dig food with" sidestepping around basic words. But it has gained me a lot of ground with—and free things from—the Dutch: attempting to speak Dutch has gotten me an invitation to a knitting convention (by the lady in the yarn shop); a free bike repair (from the guy in the bike shop whom I asked to buy screws from, although what I really needed were bolts); and four extra cookies (from a waiter in a bruincafe after I impressed him by asking for no whipped cream on my hot chocolate).

To realize that this last coup is much more impressive than it sounds, you need to know the way the Dutch approach hot drinks. While the British revere their tea, the Dutch give equal status to tea, coffee, and hot chocolate. All bars, restaurants, and cafes here (bruincafes are a sort of typical Dutch neighborhood bar) serve this triumvirate at all times of day, and the act of 'having a coffee' is such a basic aspect of daily life here that on our field trips we stopped at least twice each day, sometimes three or four times, to have a sit-down in a gezellig cafe. Even when we were running three hours behind schedule.

So the Dutch drinking ritual is sacred, as is the fact that every hot drink comes with one, and only one, small cookie or piece of candy. The best, and most common, are crispy, cinnamon spice cookies; the worst and least inspired are miniature candy bars. If you want another cookie, you order a second drink: this is why my four-cookie hot chocolate was probably the second biggest language-related accomplishment of the week.

The biggest was making a successful joke, in Dutch, on the third field excursion. Instead of wondering what the joke actually was and whether it was in fact funny, please consider the primary non-mud-related trial we went through on our second trip, which I forgot to mention before:

After our second stop on the first morning (at a cafe, naturally), we returned to the van to discover that the sliding door wouldn't open. And wouldn't entirely close. Rain was falling, as it would continue to do for most of the morning, and the six of us not sitting in the front seat of the van were stuck on the outside. It took about 15 minutes to go through several repeats of a dumbshow I like to call "Another person walks up, sees that the door is stuck, but is fairly certain that if he gives it a try, it'll open easily."

At one point I climbed in through the back of the van to see if there was anything on the inside I could unlatch. There wasn't, but eventually the rest of the van followed me, dirty boots and wet coats tumbling over the seats. After everyone was in, we realized that the seats can recline, which drastically cut down the awkwardness and made me less worried about our ability to exit the van in case of an accident. Three or four stops later, we had actually become faster at our doorless exit than we had been using the normal way, though we were still glad when we arrived in Emmen for the night and the professors took the van to be fixed. Mostly, our happiness was due to the fact that the side door remaining just barely open kept us from being able to lock the other doors, meaning we had to bring all of our worldly possessions with us on each stop or risk losing them to the bands of backpack theives that roam the peatlands of Holland.