Has anyone else put on a bit of winter padding? It makes sense: eat as much as you can in the warmer months, so you get (a) a nice layer of insulation once it gets cold, and (b) food reserves to tide you over the lean times. Only these days, in winter we have oliebollen.
Oliebollen [...]
I learnt my conversational Dutch mostly in the pub. It’s a method I recommend, for loosening up and just spontaneously sayin’ stuff, as well as for getting used to coping with background noise and non sequiturs and topic changes and all the things that make live conversation different from the examples you learn from in [...]
Word of the day: formication.
No, formication.
It’s Wouter’s brilliant translation of one of my favourite Dutch words, mierenneuken. Idiomatically this is similar to English ‘nit-picking’11. Thanks, Wikipedia — my previous rough translation was ’splitting hairs’, which captures neither the negativity nor the entomology. [↪] but literally it means having sex with ants (mieren-neuken — the pictures [...]
I had a close encounter with rockstardom last night. A bloke from De Dijk (keyboardist, according to Nikos) was at Dionysos where I went for an after-dinner dinner, and it turns out he plays baglama and bouzouki also. Hellenophiles get everywhere, it seems…
Just back from ESSLLI, about which more coming soon… Catching up on two weeks of news I find that LibraryThing has added a bunch of Dutch cataloguing sources.
De NRC Handelsblad heeft een stukje daarover, of je kunt direct naar LibraryThing.nl. Wees voorzichtig, het is wel verslavend…
So there are also Dutch words you perhaps shouldn’t wear on a t-shirt if you’re coming to New Zealand.
It’s not news that the English band I Am Kloot has an unfortunate name if you speak Dutch.
So it takes some serious cojones (so to speak) to wear one of their t-shirts around Amsterdam, like the bloke I saw in Centraal Station the other day. I like to think maybe he just didn’t realise, and [...]
Meisje op mobiel: “Weet jij wat overdose betekent? Ja, het Nederlandse woord overdose… want ik dacht namelijk dat het een doos moet zijn, die over is.”
#173: Under the railway overpass way off to the side of Centraal Station.
Not that I normally would, only the back tyre sprung a leak during a thunderstorm, and that was the closest place I could lock it up under shelter.
And not that it got stolen, either. Instead, some klootzak slashed the seat and both tyres [...]
This post combines a short review of Björk’s concert last night (short version: disappointing but good) with a rant about Dutch concert-going habits (short version: they’re tall and don’t care if you’re not).