supermarkt de (~s)
1 grocery store

It would be accurate to say that my sandwich article received a fair amount of feedback. Okay, quite a bit of feedback. Thus, allow me to explain the long gap between these articles by telling you that the interest was so intense I decided to leave to study the mystical arts of sandwich making in the Orient. Yes, the sandwich arts there are so mystical and secret, you never even see the indigenous peoples with sandwiches. They’re that good.

However, upon my return, I was informed by my instructors that revealing their oh-so secretive select sandwich secrets would result in Ling chi performed with a cheese grater. So, rather than become Filet Americain I’ve decided to back off and explore areas that are only tangentially related to sandwiches. More specifically, I’ve decided to look at where sandwiches come from, because, well, it’d be kind of gross to write an article about where sandwiches end up.

Now if we were all adults here, I’d just tell you the truth about sandwiches which is that they’re born when two pieces of bread fall in love and the Daddy bread takes his lunch meat and-…But like I said, some kids might read this so I’m just going to lie and say that sandwiches come from the grocery store. So, we’re going to talk about grocery stores.

Dutch grocery stores are initially a little unsettling to the foreign eye. Growing up in America, you get very used to the concept of all grocery stores being more or less identical. Winn Dixie’s, Publix, Kash & Karry, Kroger’s, Food Lion, Save-A-Lot, change the colors of the coupons (okay, color of the boxes in Save-A-Lot) and you’re left with basically the same thing. Same foods, same prices, same aisle layout, same half-dirty/half-clean bathrooms, same boring flecked white tile floors, same sense at an 11:30pm visit that any sudden movement might cause the pale, anemic, fluorescent-bleached forehead of the cashier to split open and eject a flesh-eating Cthulu baby at your throat. The minor variations between each serve only to highlight the wholly homogeneous banality of the experience. You can almost feel the sterile white kid gloves the culinary corporate overlords have collaboratively chosen to corral their collective customers with.

So, if you’re expecting me to say that the Dutch have a magical food distribution methodology that doesn’t make you feel like a lab rat, you’re in luck! They have one, but unfortunately, it’s not the grocery stores. It’s called the tree-times-per-week farmer’s market they have in the middle of town but that’s another column (Yes, roughly the same as the farmer’s markets in the states).

In terms of their shared similarities, Dutch grocery stores are essentially the same as their American counterparts, just with a different set of cliches and this is what ultimately makes them feel so odd. They have some common things with American grocery stores (you usually enter in the vegetable section) but there are also some things they don’t (the very existence of a “cheese counter”, which in the Netherlands is less of a “counter” and more of an altar. In ancient times, foreigners were sacrificed on these by cloaked, clog-wearing druid types, to their frightening pagan dairy gods. Luckily, times have mostly changed except in the Liedl franchise where the managers still wear the cloaks and occasionally the stray expat goes missing).

The most obvious difference is one of size. We’re used to grocery stores being quite large, with high ceilings, long rows, and numbered aisles. The average Dutch grocery store is probably about the size of the average Barnes & Noble. I’ve yet to find any store in the Netherlands even reasonably close to that of a Wal-Mart or Publix, except those that deal in furniture (Ikea, Leen Bakker, etc) which necessitate large amounts of floor space. Dutch grocery stores are usually inserted into pre-existing buildings, like the Albert Heijn built into the Korenbeurs in Vismarkt here*. Yes, the building with the columns in the foreground of this shot is, in fact, now a grocery store. Makes your grocery store look nice, huh?

Another disconcerting change: everything is grouped just slightly different. The perimeter of an American grocery store tends to flow in the order of vegetables, wine, deli, meat, some frozen crap, dairy, lunch meats, bakery, pharmacy, registers. The Dutch grocery store tends to differ from this model by flat out rejecting the concept of a standard perimeter. As I said earlier, most begin with a vegetable section but that’s just to trip you up. Some of them might begin with a bread section. Some of them might put the raw meat next to the veggies. Or the ethnic foods next to the cheese, which makes no sense! Candy next to cleaning supplies (Watch your kids, folks). Canned goods next to breakfast cereal! The bread next to the dairy! The dairy next to the bread! Is there no end to their madness!

Okay, seriously, it can be hard to find what you’re after sometimes because things are not where they’ve been in every grocery store for the last insert-your-age-here years. Even when you can find the section you’re looking for, choices can be a bit different: Pasta next to pickles? Soft drinks next to milk? Frozen pizzas next to the wine? Sometimes this assuredly comes from space constraints, some of it must be the result of strange subliminal marketing studies, and some of it can only be culled directly from the mind of a malicious madman. Dr. Lecter to Aisle 10 please.

At any rate, we come now to the greatest change of all in the Dutch supermarket system: the balance of power between the employees and yourself is radically shifted. And not in your favor, my friends. Not at all. American supermarkets must be carefully regulating the salaries of their employees, making certain that they never have the money for a European vacation, because the second just a single one of them came here and saw what working in a Dutch grocery store is like…there would be no end to it. For you see, the Dutch unions have obtained for their workers the one thing that has been long denied their American counterparts. That thing all cashiers dream of, that one crucial thing their bosses possess that they do not, that one crucial thing with which they can rule over their minimum-wage peons. You see, the Dutch grocery store employees…have chairs.

But unfortunately, the heartbreaking tales of what really happens at the Dutch cash register….is in part 2 of this post, coming later this week. Roll credits!

_{Not my photo of Vismarkt.}

I was trying to decide on what to write about next today while eating a quick lunch. Originally, I was going to write a post about the Dutch penchant for strange time-related idioms but those really aren’t that different. (don’t worry, you’re still going to hear about them later on). Still, I wanted to write about something else. Something with more meat to it. Something more substantial. Something in dire need of mustard. “Ah ha!” I exclaimed, thrusting my hand into the air and promptly losing the salami between my bread to gravity’s nimble fingers. “The dutch obsession with sandwiches! That’d be a great post!” Of course, I’m trying to practice my dutch more in the house so it came out more like: “Ah ha! De Nederlands…whatever-the-Dutch-word-for-obsession-is…met sandwiches! Or should that be broodjes? No, broodjes are just rolls and stuff. Crap, what IS the dutch word for sandwich?”

I checked my dictionary. No listing. Odd. Interglot doesn’t have anything either. Babelfish just says sandwich still. Aisha’s off at theater group rehearsal right now, so I can’t just ask her. Maybe it is just “sandwich.” There’s plenty of other imported words here and it is an original english word, Duke of Sandwich and all that. Have I ever heard another word for it here? Ponder, ponder, ponder. Scratching my beard a bit while I think. I think it would’ve come up before if I had. Hrmph, stroking my beard makes me look too much like Freud. Shouldn’t do that. Ok, sandwiches, huh. Well, damn, I just can’t think of another word. It would’ve definitely come up if there was. I’m going with sandwiches. Okay, good, but I guess I need a different highlighted word for this post. But what then?

obsessie de (~s)
1 obsession, hangup

Ah, there we go. Funny that the dictionary doesn’t give a sample sentence like with all the other words. It’s probably because you can’t make a sentence with obsession that doesn’t sound creepy. “Brainy’s obsession with Smurfette was becoming dangerously deviant.” “Walter’s love for his palm trees was almost an obsession.” “By Calvin Klein.”

Anyways, back to work: The dutch eat a lot of sandwiches. I mean, a LOT of sandwiches.

Seriously, the heart of a stereotypical dutch lunch is the same as an entire dutch breakfast: Two pieces of bread, some sliced cheese, and if you’re feeling decadent, a small amount of paper thin meat slices. The only difference is that for lunch they eat more then one of them. That might not sound too unusual, but imagine every day? Two meals a day, sandwiches? Usually with the exact same thing? And not to mention, if you get in late and you’re too tired to cook, what about some soup…and sandwiches? Three meals of sandwiches in a day! This isn’t just the Dutch college student equivalent of ramen either, everyone here eats sandwiches, young, old, invalid, healthy, short, tall, fat, thin. If you ever want a nail in the coffin of the pop-culture interpretation of the Atkin’s diet, it’s the Dutch and their vast amounts of bread they consume while still remaining thin.

When I first started studying Dutch, my book warned me that while the dutch still tend to do three meals a day, usually only one of them is a hot meal. The other two are what the book loosely termed “bread meals.” This seems to consist of laying out a couple kinds of bread, cheese, meat, couple condiments, etc. I think you can see where I’m going with this. A better name for these might be “sandwich meals” because that’s what they always boil down to.

Now, anyone who knows my eating habits can testify to the fact that I am no stranger to the sandwich. To the contrary, the sandwich and I are old friends. College roommates. Buddies. Perhaps even lovers, on one distant, far away evening in the Caribbean, glazed with rum and sweat, on the soft silky sand of the beach with the drumbeat of our pulse muffling the far away echo of The Palm Tree Resort’s complimentary nighttime cabana band. What I’m trying to say is, I’m a busy young professional, I eat a lot of flippin’ sandwiches. I think they’re great. But the thing is, even I get tired of them after a while. Lunch pot at work is always sandwiches but I can switch to granola for breakfast for a week or two and all is good with me. But see, the Dutch don’t tire of sandwiches. Ever. EVER. It’ll be 11:00 at night and we’ll be at a friend’s house and suddenly some one will say “Willen jullie een toasti?” (Translation: “Yo homies, who up in here wants a grilled sandwich?”) and suddenly everyone in the house will be jumping up and down like a 14 year old schoolgirl at a Backstreet Boys concert in 1998.

But you’re saying to yourself: “Ross, what’s really so wrong about a delicious melted sandwich as a midnight snack, aside from all the fattening agents you shouldn’t be eating so close to bed time?” Nothing, absolutely nothing! But the dutch dedication to sandwiches is not so much a sprint of how many sandwiches can be devoured in all hours of a single rotation of the earth, but a marathon of how many rotations of the earth you can continue to eat sandwiches at all hours.

In order to aid them in this quest, true, they have diversified the art of sandwich making to a powerful level. Gone are the crude days of banging a rock of peanut butter against a rock of jelly and hoping for something delicious (for one thing, they find PB&J extremely gross. Heathens). There’s wheat bread, white bread, bread with seeds, bread with lots of seeds, bread with only a few seeds, round bread, brown bread, corn bread, bolletjes, stokbrood, baguette. The selection of lunch meat is also much expanded. Sliced chicken, for instance, is a very popular and valid lunch meat here. Very good. Lieverworst, pathe, some kind of orange paste called Filet Amerikan which I can only assume is made from less lucky expats than myself. The downside is that it’s rude to use too much meat, but the meat is so thin it’s almost not there. You can literally see through it. I think the culmination of Dutch lunch technology, their “sandwich singularity” if you will, will be the advent of meat-flavored bread: Ultimately no real meat in there, but it tastes vaguely like it and it’ll be ten eurocents cheaper then buying the actual meat too. The counterpunch could be their good selection of spreads, however this is offset by the fact they put butter on everything too. Seriously, you could be having jelly on toast and many Dutchmen would still put cow butter on under the jelly, just to make it softer.

So, the dutch obsession with sandwiches is a mixed blessing with deep ramifications on their society. There’s another few columns to be squeezed out on various aspects of sandwich making and eating, we’ll revisit it some more later, but I’d say in terms of general knowledge, this should do you for now. So, to sum up:

Pros:

Increased selection of breads, meats, and cheeses.

Cons:

Tiring after a while. Probably not very healthy. Population oblivious to their own excessive sandwich consumption.

Verdict:

Fail

Hond de (~en)
1 dog, hound pas op voor de hond ~ beware of dog

The dutchies love their dogs. A lot.

Now, before some of you start getting the wrong kind of mental image in your head based on what you may have heard about the Dutch, you need to slow your roll. The dutch love for dogs is entirely platonic. That said, they really do love the furry little critters.

Dogs are everywhere in the Netherlands. They’re on street corners, in shopping malls, on sidewalks, in restaurants, in parks, on bike trails. They get there in cars, trucks, bicycle baskets, by paw, by Vespa scooter, even those weird dirt bikes with the truck bed on front. They get carried in arms, in shopping bags, in old lady purses, young lady purses, middle aged lady purses, what straight men call urban messenger bags and what gay men call purses. They’re allowed in movie theaters, parking garages, moped seats, restaurants, grocery stores, corporate offices, my colleague’s office, my boss’ office, even my office.

My workplace has no less then two dogs there almost every day (three, if you count Warnar, the guy who works across from me. More on that later). One of the little rascals is a friendly, fast-growing pup named Mac who has a special liking for me (and anyone else who will scratch his belly). The other is a wizened old terrier of some kind named Dopey who alternates between sleeping in the sun and barking at anyone who comes past the first floor. Dopey is also of special note when considering dutch dogs because he has transcended multiple stereotypes by developing a perversely strong taste for cheese. Yes, that’s right: a dog so dutch, he’s addicted to cheese.

I think it says a fair amount about the Dutch relationship with dogs that they would think to feed them cheese on a regular basis anyways. From what I can tell, dogs here have some kind of honorary citizen status that enables them to do about 80% of whatever people can do. In fact, considering my status here as kennismigrant, they may have more rights then I do. For instance, there is a fine for letting your dog poop in public and not cleaning it up, but judging by dutch sidewalks the notion is token at best. In comparison, I think I’d get fined for relieving myself in public even if I did make a point of always cleaning up after myself. At the very least, I’m sure the fine is higher for me.

Speaking as a dog lover, though, I have to say that it’s refreshing to see animals treated so well though. Dutch people seem to treat their dogs with respect and dignity, they’re certainly not seen as dumb animals. Any nation that would allow dogs inside the majority of grocery stores certainly sees them as part of the family. Maybe not brother or sister, but certainly first cousin at least. They also seem to be exceedingly common here, perhaps as part of the dutch obsession with coziness (gezellig). I think it would be quite impossible for me to bike to and fro work in one day and not see several dogs. It’s a little stranger then you think at first, actually. I don’t know about a lot of you back in the States or in big cities, but how often was the last time you saw several people walking downtown with their dog casually in tow?

In return, the dogs for their part seem to be remarkably well behaved and understanding of their surroundings. I’ve seen several instances of someone biking down the street at a good clip, pursued on the sidewalk by a large dog casually weaving in and out of pedestrians to keep up with the weird human wiggling his feet on the big spinning gear machine. And while not all grocery stores here allow dogs in, in the ones that do I have yet to see a dog do anything at the butcher counter then sit patiently and wag his tail a bit. I don’t know if this is a nation of dog whisperers or what, but these are far and away the best behaved pets I’ve ever seen.

All that said, I’m still not sure I’d want to let Dopey accompany me into the kaashandel.

Pros:

Dogs are cute. They can go everywhere with you. In a nation of small yards, this is a good thing.

Cons:

Dog poop everywhere. Still not 100% about dogs in the grocery store.

Verdict:

Win