And then a few days later I reopened it to take a survey: how many of the items result from moving to a foreign country. (Whether they make you any smarter or not is a separate story.)

#10: Learn a language. Learning a new language really does explode your mind. Our conversation group has in two weeks given me the confidence to be bursting out garbled Dutch phrases all around Delft. In the chocolate shop: Ik wil maak een kleine… box. I’ve also loved discovering etymological connections between Dutch and English, two languages that feel very different.

#19: Refine your thinking. This plays out here every day. When we are communicating with people who speak English, but whose first language is not English (and it’s not always Dutch–our church and Tim’s work are very international) we have to consciously practice clarity. Say things simply. Don’t use idioms. Find the clearest way to communicate. Go.

#4: Get news from Al Jazeera. OK, we don’t watch Al Jazeera. But the point this item makes is to get your news from different perspectives. We are gradually becoming more aware of how the world is viewed from the Dutch perspective, and how America is viewed from the European perspective. Let me tell you: our European friends are following the American Presidential race with a focus that challenges me to keep up.

#6: Sleep. A lot. I’m going to give this one to Tim, because he gets way more sleep in the Netherlands. Why? Because people here work closer to where they live. He doesn’t have a thirty-minute-plus commute, dependent on traffic. He gets on his bike and is at work in ten minutes. Thus, he is routinely able to be at work at 09:00 after waking at 08:00.
…I get a lot of sleep too.

#2: Eat turmeric. Done. Spices are so cheap here. I go to the market and get a plastic bag of whatever spice I want for €1. Oh, I guess saffron might be €2.

#5: Toss your Smartphone. OK, I never had a Smartphone, and you could definitely get one here. But we’ve never wanted or needed to get entangled in a phone contract (given the relatively short duration of our proposed stint) (plus we operate on a strict budget) so for the past eighteen months we’ve used the cheapest, most-lame phones that we were given for free and recharge with supermarket minutes. And even still we go months without having to recharge them.

#12: Join a knitting circle. One of the direct consequences of moving abroad was liberation from any and all time commitments we’d had in the US; we started fresh. I, in particular, have enjoyed great flexibility with my schedule (a huge, wonderful blessing—and also a responsibility, since I do not aspire to waste my time abroad). Last year I decided I wanted to learn how to knit. This was so I could have cool hats and scarves without having to pay a ton for them, and give them as Christmas gifts. My early attempts to teach myself (books, internet) only got so far. So in de zomer I took a course at a British-run shop in den Haag called Woool. It was a three-session introductory course, and it was just enough to totally launch me.

#30: Write reviews online. A direct result of how much traveling we’ve been able to do. My TripAdvisor contributions have skyrocketed.

#8: Go to a literary festival. Does it count that we’re going to Edinburgh this year, UNESCO City of Literature? (Also, send me your Edinburgh recommendations!)

#31: Get out of town. In a word: accomplished.

]]> http://unquiettime.wordpress.com/2012/01/26/get-smart-move-abroad/feed/ 1 Meghan IMG_4710 http://unquiettime.wordpress.com/2012/01/20/conversation-group/ http://unquiettime.wordpress.com/2012/01/20/conversation-group/#comments Fri, 20 Jan 2012 13:13:19 +0000 unquiettime http://unquiettime.wordpress.com/?p=3643 Continue reading →]]> Kostbaar. The Dutch word for expensive is (acc. Google translator) kostbaar. I had to look this up this morning because something I was not able to say last night was still driving me nuts.

In December I tore a little slip off a homemade (huisgemaakt—blast—I typed this 3 different ways wrong before I got it right….) sign in a shop advertising Dutch conversation lessons in an informal group setting, one evening a week, for €5 per person. Yes: it’s 2012 and we are making another charge at learning Dutch (Nederlands leren).

The new arrangement (two weeks in) is about the right level for us in terms of time and financial commitment. An expensive (that’s right: kostbaar), lengthy, course with homework was really just not going to happen, whatever our best intentions might be. So now on Thursday evenings we go to a local cafe and sit with one teacher and two or three other learners. The teacher asks us questions (in Dutch), such as: “Who is in your family?” and we all butcher our ways through answering.

Ik heb een zus en een broer en een moeder en een vader… 

Linguistic chaos strikes quickly. Everyone in our beginners’ group has a different level and vocabulary. (Tim and I are on the low end, but in our defense the other people in our group have lived here more than twice as long as we have. I have, we have discovered, an extensive written vocabulary, but my pronunciation is awful and I don’t always recognize words when I hear them.) Our original languages are different: English, Italian, Hungarian. We all drift into broken combinations of multiple languages when our vocabulary fails us. It’s kind of crazy, and when I leave my head is really swimming, and I have a sheet of paper with all kinds of words and phrases hastily scrawled on it.

Somehow, last night, we got to the question of “Do you prefer European or American fashion?” (I’m going to be frank: this topic is not one of my immediate conversational needs.) And what I wanted to say was: I like European clothes, but clothing here is expensive. I think what I actually did was stare at the ceiling for a while concentrating really, really hard, and then say “My sister works for Calvin Klein,”* because I knew all those words.

*Technically, she works for the company that owns Calvin Klein, but guess what: I don’t know how to say that.

Now, I love the Oxford English Dictionary. I am always learning stuff from it, and I don’t mean how to spell. The other day I wanted to clarify use of the phrase “under way.” I always hesitate on if it’s “under way” or “under weigh.” The OED firmly tells me that “under weigh,” though common, is “erroneous” because the actual phrase comes from the Dutch onderweg, literally “under way.”

Add it to the vocabulary list.

With honkball — baseball. And breien — knit. And wetenschapper — scientist.

Then next week when my teacher asks, “Wat lees je?” I can say: “Ik lees het woordenboek.”

The pizza was good, but if you’re going to write it in marker on the wall—I say look it up first.

So, I threw out the bag the chickpeas came in and cannot therefore accurately report the quantity. All I can say is: they enlarge when you rehydrate them. Overnight, I had a sizable supply of chickpeas to find uses for… which leads us to the kitchen conundrum at hand: things to make with chickpeas. (There was once a similar challenge involving a kilo of rhubarb.)

1. Hummus. (Repeat every time the bowl empties.)

So simple I’ll just spell it out: 2 cups chickpeas (or 1 can), 1 TBS lemon (or lime) juice, 1 tsp salt, 1 tsp ground cumin, 1/4 cup olive oil, food processor, go. Add a little water or olive oil if it’s too chunky for your liking.

2. Spinach and Chickpeas, via Smitten Kitchen.

3. Fried Chickpeas with Chorizo and Spinach, via NY Times. I went hunting for a recipe that seemed similar to a restaurant dish I loved in Barcelona: a tapas order of fried chickpeas with spinach and ham. This came close. Why are spinach and chickpeas so frequently paired (other than the surface-level “They taste good together”)? I don’t know. Food chemists, you tell me.

4. Curried Eggplant with Chickpeas and Spinach, via Food and Wine. This looks delicious, and the curry takes the flavor away from the Spanish direction, but I’m going to be honest and say I didn’t bother because my husband is staunchly opposed to eggplant.

5. Curried Chicken Salad with Chickpeas and Raita, via Gourmet. This was fantastic, though I wish I’d had the foresight to have some tortillas or other bread on hand to make it into a wrap.

6-sort of. In Ana Sortun’s cookbook Spice, there is a recipe for chickpea crepes that makes for a great snack. The basis is chickpea flour, so it’s sort of a leap from chickpeas in a bowl, but I have to mention it anyway, because I never get tired of mentioning how much I love Ana Sortun’s recipes. A while back I read Julie and Julia and saw the movie and all that, but I own Mastering the Art of French Cooking and I would never, never have the desire to cook my way through it, item by item. Spice, on the other hand? Cooking my way through every recipe in there sounds like receiving a present.

Chickpeas: finished. Dietary variety: commences now.

This year, things went a lot smoother. We refrained, for the most part, from sending items to the US—we planned ahead and brought most of our gifts in November, wrapped them, and left them. The things we shipped later we kept small and close to flat, because if something is in the ballpark of flat, you can call it a brief/letter here, and then it ships faster and cheaper (win/win).

Then a couple weeks ago we hit a minor snafu. I answered the door to see our package mailman holding a box from the US—but as he showed me on an invoice that this box had been subject to import tax, and I had to pay €22 to receive it. Cash only. Well, I ran all around our apartment but could only scrounge up about €15 cash. At this point, the mailman and I had exhausted our shared vocabulary, and I couldn’t communicate that I didn’t have enough cash. He kept pointing to my name on the box—”You”—and then pointing to “€22.” Finally I opened my wallet and showed him: not enough. Then we understood each other and he said I could go pick up the package later at a postal service point (quite convenient, actually). Then he drove off with my package, leaving me with Christmas sadness.

Anyway, not to brag, but we’re pretty popular with the post this time of year. And it’s always the same package mailman (regular mail comes via a different guy, also always the same, with a very distinctive whistle). So, the package guy and I have crossed paths probably six or eight times in the past couple weeks. Now each time I answer the door he begins by assuring me I don’t owe him any money! Awesome.

So, the kicker is, this afternoon I was walking home from running errands, and about two blocks from our house, I hear a truck honk, and look just out of habit to make sure I’m not about to get flattened. To my surprise, the driver is waving to ME, and it’s our package mailman! I zipped over and he told me he had just been to our house, but since I wasn’t home, he left the package with a neighbor (since retrieved). When they leave the package with a neighbor they leave you a slip, so I would have learned this when I got home—but this experience amused me greatly.

With thanks to Scott, who notes that video games have not adversely affected his eleven-year-old—since she pointed out this blunder herself. Good work.

I wrote about New Year’s Eve in Delft last year, and this year’s experience was similar (which means: I loved it). We had two friends and a dog over for the evening and around 11:45 took the champagne and the IKEA glasses and headed to the square. No more tourist feelings for us: we saw a group of our neighbors on the walk, and then just before midnight ran into a few friends from Tim’s work and joined up with them. Here are a few images from the arrival of 2012.

The partial aftermath

General haze of smoke on the walk home

One of my favorite sights this year was, for lack of a correct term, the fire-balloons. In our home footage below, after you see the clock showing just past midnight, the big glowing thing being released into the air is such a balloon, and then the tiny light in the upper left of the following clip is another one— the one we saw released had a short adventure, but several got as high as the clock on the Nieuwe Kerk.

Now the explosions have mostly ceased—I’ve only heard a few errant ones this morning. It’s back to work, back to normalcy, back to reduced amounts of sweets. Our 2012 looks good so far and we hope yours does, too. And I’ll just throw this out there, but does anyone in Delft know when / how I can dispose of my Christmas tree?

In the back of some of our pictures from the Christmas market in Brussels, you can see a big old church: St. Catherine’s. It looked open, so we wandered in, not knowing anything about it.

A small nativity set and some lights sparkled near the entrance; some people were milling about—including a news crew. The space was cavernous in that way old churches are. There was an odd feeling, as if some of the furniture were missing, maybe; or as if some repairs were going to be done. It seemed like someone was letting the place go. We wandered around for a few moments, and then Tim called my attention to some homemade signs: St. Catherine’s is to be closed on December 31, 2011, to be turned into a market. There were petitions in several languages to sign, and notes scattered on tables with visitors’ thoughts.

Feelings on the sanctity of churches will vary, but there is a sense of loss to me in a place that has been full of meaning for generations of people—weddings, funerals, gatherings, shelter—being repurposed into a shop. I found myself imagining where the statues would go; wondering if some of them will appear in a pawn shop window in a few years, or linger in some storage locker somewhere.

Tim commented that it is amazing that the Catholic church has held on to so many massive plots of “prime real estate” in the European urban centers for so long; that these things must happen in time; that any building is repurposed and morphs over the years. Still, it felt sad and odd to stand in this partially-emptied church at its pivot-point as the new year turns.