Have you ever found unexpected humor while learning a new language or adapting to a different culture? Share your funniest, most eye-opening moments!
I’ll go first…
I really didn’t want to think about a certain very small indoor ceremony, nor did I want to spend my whole day bogged down in a mire of cable news snippets, witty Notes & Blueskies, and the general dread that precludes the official return of the circus to Georgetown. We just moved to a new country so that we wouldn’t have to listen to all of that, and so, it is fitting that we spent the better part of today making the trip to The Hague for our biometrics appointment.
William and I are fighting the time change hard.
Somehow on all the other trips we’ve made, it was never this powerful. I suppose it is partially because we have been living in a strange limbo for the last few weeks, between homes and nations. We’ve not been observing the usual ways of organizing our days, eating a big meal in the middle of the afternoon and sleeping whenever we felt like it. But William is currently sacked out next to me on the sofa and will probably be wide awake again come 3 or 4 am…meanwhile, I’ll hit a wall of fatigue at 9 pm but wake up at midnight for a couple of hours.
Ships in the night in a tiny apartment.
The Dutch immigration service is, like most things in this country, very specific. Our appointment was for 1:49 PM and the letter indicated that we should be “right on time.” Honest to goodness, Goldilocks language: if we were more than five minutes early, we should wait outside. If you’re more than five minutes late, you will reschedule.
Being close to two hours early, we made sure to find the office we needed before we took a look around town. It was another cold and grey day, the wind finding a way right through our warmest layers and taking all the joy out of an exploratory “wandeling.” After an unsuccessful attempt to find a restaurant that is inside the food court that is closed on Mondays, we ducked into Granny’s Corner.
While we weren’t decided on emigrating to the Netherlands, I have spent the past couple of years studying Dutch. I started because we were making a scouting trip so that I could see more of the country than the airport (all I’d managed to visit in my travels). I like to learn a bit of the local tongue before a trip, even if it is only hello, goodbye, please and thank you because it makes a difference when meeting locals.
I did, however, make an exception for Icelandic.
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