Smoky Cogs

I have been in the Netherlands for exactly a year now. Or at least it was exactly a year on Tuesday, and have survived to tell the tale.

It has often not been easy, but things are settling down quite nicely now.

Cole is happy in his school, Claudia is beginning to forge a decent social life here, and I have just started an awesome new job at a fantastic company.

Starting with virtually nothing here, we have a comfortable home in Almere, and I honestly cannot be happier.

We have had many difficult challenges here but have surmounted them all.

Now, do I miss South Africa? Of course I do. I miss many things about my former home, but my life has improved so much since moving here that it is inconceivable that I would ever return.

Every year on the 30th April the Dutch go completely bonkers, celebrating the queen’s birthday. Or at least on the birthday of the previous queen, Juliana. When Queen Beatrix came to the throne, she kept the official celebration on her mother’s birthday.

So do the Dutch celebrate with pomp and ceremomy?

No, the entire country turns into one giant flea market where everyone pulls up a piece of pavement and sells all their useless junk, and everyone has a fun, social time.

This year in Almere, the festivies started on Friday night already, with a rather spectacular fireworks display to start things off with a bang.

We managed to pick up a lot of good bargains today browsing the stalls, and even went home with a new pet hamster – we bought a cage for next to nothing from a stall, and then needed to stop at a pet shop to actually fill the newly boight cage.

All in all, it is a day that sees a gezellig crowd paying tribute to their Queen in the way they do best.

An exciting start
Claudia and myself had been wanting to joing a ballroom dance class for quite a while now, and then recently, I stumbled upon the website of De Happening dance school in Almere.

Despite the website looking like it last had a design change around 1995 (translated as ugly), I saw on the site that the dance school was offering a new beginners class that was going to begin at the beginning of April.

The first four lessons would cost €39 per couple , which was more than affordable, and would be held on Sunday afternoons. In addition, the added benefit of this class was that it was advertised as an international class, so it would be conducted in both English and Dutch, which would be idea for us.

So, I emailed the dance instructor, saying we would like to join, and in the same mail, also enquired how much it would cost after the introductory month. The only response I was able to get out of them was “By the third week of the classes full details of the pricing for the lessons will be given to us.”

We were really looking forward to it, as we were looking forward to doing something together.

The lessons start
Thus, we attended our first lesson, and were surprised to find that there were only us and one other couple who had arrived. Apparently five couples had confirmed, but we were the only ones who had arrived.

The class itself went quite well, and they even let Cole have an iced tea, putting the €2 on a tab for us, which we would pay the next week, since we had no cash on us at the time.

By the end of the end of the first lesson, they started pushing the full course of lessons already. Since there were only two couples in the class, they wanted to move us to the group that had started dancing in January once our introductory lessons were over.

Spring has sprung, birds are chirping, flowers are blooming…. and tomorrow our clocks need to go forward an hour.

Seriously, what is the entire point of having daylights savings time? It just makes no sense at all to me.

South Africa makes no use of daylight savings, which means this having to remember to change my clocks every six months is new to me, but it still doesn’t make any sense.

I have heard many theories, such as it was for farmers to have more light, for example, but seriously, we are living in the 21st century, and we are not limited anymore by daylight hours.

All this does for me is complicates having to remember the time difference between places.

I grew up on a healthy dose of South African cooking, and with its Indian and Malaysian influences, it has given me an appreciation of spicy food.

Curries, peri-peri and other fine spicy meals are very popular in South Africa, and the heat is certainly not turned down for the SA version of these dishes.

One of the most popular fastfood chicken outlets in South Africa is Nando’s, which made their name with their peri-peri chicken which comes in Mild, Hot and Extra-hot versions. Personally, I enjoy the Mild, can handle the Hot, but have serious difficultly with their Extra-hot peri-peri.

Now let’s shift to the Netherlands.

Cuisine in the Netherlands is also heavily influenced by eastern influences by way of Indonesia, which means that one would expect the Dutch to be quite at home with spicy food, but the exact opposite is true.

The curries and chilli-based dishes served up here have been severely toned down to suit the unadventurous Dutch palate.

As an example, for lunch today, I tried some sambal (a chilli-based condiment) which the bottle advertised as “Extremely Hot Chilli”, with several big warning labels on the bottle warning that this stuff should probably be deemed unfit for human consumption since it might cause spontanieous human combustion.

Did I suddenly start shooting flames out my mouth? No!

The spiciness of this apparently extremely hot sambal was actually less hot than a mild peri-peri chicken from Nando’s. It is seriously underwhelming in what it promises compared to what it delivers.

This, I have found, is comon right across the Dutch cooking spectrum.

Maybe I should try out a bottle of Bushman’s Chilli Co’s Hot az Hell sauce from South Africa on my adoptive countrymen….that stuff lives up to the label, and isn’t even their strongest stuff.

Cycling is second nature to the Dutch. Just about everyone here cycles from birth until your arthritis gets too bad at the age of 90.

The infrastructure for cycling is also superb, with cycle lanes everywhere, but long distance can be a bit of a problem. What do you do if you need to go to another town? Transporting bikes can often be a bit of a hassle.

This is where a rather good innovation rears its head – the folding bicycle. The folding bike can literally fold up, so that it takes less space than a normal bike, making it very portable.

The added benefit of this – and why they are so popular – is that, while you need to pay to take a normal bike onto Dutch trains, folding bikes are allowed on for free, so they are very popular amongst Dutch commuters.

They might look rather silly with there ludicrously small wheels, making anyone who rides them look like they just stole a bike from a clown at the local circus, but they are incredibly practical

As far as meat goes in the Netherlands, pork is one of the predominant meat varieties available, and you can get every possible pork product here from dozens of types of ham to pork sausages, chops, fillets, and even pork mince, but there is one pork product that is severely lacking in this country – real bacon.

The Dutch do pretend to sell bacon, but it is completely different to the bacon that I am used to – the kind of bacon that goes so nicely with fried eggs, fresh toast, and pork sausages.

The bacon you get here in general tends to be much thinner than normal bacon, and, in my exerience, either far too salty, or not salty enough.

The Dutch have the habit of eating bacon raw, on sandwiches, much like ham, but I do suppose that can be excused, because as soon as you try to cook this bacon, it turns into hard thin cripsy bits.

If anyone can tell me where to find some real bacon, I am begging you, please let me know where! A life without bacon is no life at all!