Kerstdagen Roundup

I hope you’ve all had a great few days, whether celebrating or not. We kicked off our celebrations Friday night with a delicious dinner of octopus (looks like an alien, tastes delicately like shrimp/lobster). Afterward, we headed over to the Potdeksel for a special Music Quiz Night. There were two games of five rounds. We didn’t do so well the first game, but the second game was a different story. We were getting correct answers left and right and eventually won the game with a tie-breaker thanks to our knowledge of local music sensation Sjarrel en Sjaan and their performance of the classic “Christmas in Cupertino”. 😉

We were ridiculously thrilled to finally win! Thanks to our Dutch team member, Mer, for her help with translation and famous Dutch voices, as well as her fine company! Our prize for the evening was a large bottle of Palm beer and an accompanying glass, as well. Rather snazzy! I think we might be cracking open a bottle this evening.

Christmas day itself was lovely. A bit of a late start to the day, a bit of present unwrapping, and then a lot of food and wine! We went with what has become a tradition with my parents and me, skipping the massive turkey dinner and instead having a variety of finger foods/appetizers to snack on. We had deviled eggs (natuurlijk!), smoked salmon, cheese-stuffed dates wrapped in bacon, chicken pieces wrapped in bacon with a honey mustard glaze, blue cheese tartlettes, eggplant balls, and crepes filled with a cheesy spinach mixture. All lekker, if I say so myself, since I was the chef! Later in the evening, we did give a nod to the Italians at the table with some pasta and some pan d’oro for dessert.

Our furry kids seemed to enjoy themselves, as well. They dined with us on a few nibbles and Pippo certainly enjoyed helping me unwrap presents. He never tries to tear paper any other time of year, but he seems to understand Christmas. He immediately grabbed a bit of wrapping paper from the gift I was unwrapping and started to pull. He did a fine job!

Our Tweede Kerstdag has been quiet and mellow, with bits of sunshine popping out on occasion. A nice way to spend the day! I hope you all have had equally pleasant days, no matter what you’ve been up to!

Different Donderdag: Trivia

I was reading a blog post the other day that I’d found through someone’s link on Twitter. It was an interesting look at how living abroad, no matter how short a time, can change you, or at least make you aware of things in a new way. I got to this part and felt a particular recognition:

For me, the second noticeable change was the gradual realization that, as knowledgeable as I thought I was, I didn’t know anything about anything, relatively speaking. Politics, history, culture, personality types, food, relationships, language… I was a rank amateur in nearly every way.

We’ve participated in our fair share of quiz nights since being here. The ones we go to are all in Dutch, although we’re lucky to have translations provided when needed. I can generally hold my own in an American game of Trivial Pursuit and as the writer said, I consider myself a fairly knowledgeable person. However, once you start doing quizzes in another country, you start to learn just how specific to a location your knowledge probably is. I’d had a hint of this when playing G (a native of Italy) in a game of (American) Trivial Pursuit. He commented on how much of the trivia is related to things that are specifically American.

Playing trivia games here makes me realize that while I might know a fair bit about general European history, I’m sorely lacking in the finer details which make up general trivia here. Plus, I’m missing all of the general entertainment trivia: music, books, films, actors, etc. When you no longer have the same frame of reference, it can be harder to relate, be it to the person or to an experience. It’s easy to feel left out or simply stupid. After failing to know something seemingly simple or trivial, I often want to cry out in my own defense that “I’m not stupid in my home country! Promise!”

It may seem trivial to be concerned about a lack of trivia knowledge, but it’s often these small differences that can drive home the fact that you’re “not in Kansas anymore”. Try not to focus on how little you know anymore. You’re not stupid. You’ve just got different experiences and frames of reference. Instead, try to remember at least one little trivia bit that you didn’t know before. We do monthly quiz nights and I often miss tons of questions, simply because I’m not Dutch or even European and don’t have the background to know these things, but I try to remember the answer to at least one question and then go look up more info when I get home. After all, you weren’t born knowing the trivia you do know from your home country. It takes years to gather all that useless information. Don’t expect to know everything about your new country, either. Just take it in stride. Eventually, that random bit of knowledge that you’ve picked up will come in handy or seem impressive someday, maybe when you least expect it!

Woordenboek Woensdag

We’ve been without phone and internet since Sunday afternoon. The reason? I like to think of it as the modern version of “the dog ate my homework”: my cat vomited on the modem. Mijn kat braakt op de modem. Echt! (Really!)

So that’s my new word for the week: braken (to vomit). I’m not sure if it was Luna or Lola who tossed her kibble, but regardless, it fried the modem. Being both a Sunday and a holiday (and Monday, Tweede Paasdag/second easter, also being a holiday), it meant that we couldn’t get anyone from Ziggo (our cable/phone/internet provider) to come out until today. We also learned through this latest misadventure that you can’t buy modems through a regular store, as you can in the US. It must come from your internet provider. We had thought to go to MediaMarkt or one of the other computer shops in town and just buy a new one, but soon found out that was not an option here. Another one of those small differences!

It turns out that was not the worst of our troubles this weekend. The electricity in the laundry/water heater room went out. At first we thought it was just a blown fuse. Of course, this problem was also discovered on Sunday and we were out of fuses and being a holiday and a Sunday, there were no shops open. Fortunately, it wasn’t too cold (since our heater is related to the hot water heater — the heater that broke recently), so we just bundled up a bit Sunday night and hoped to get a new fuse at the grocery store the next day. At the grocery store, though, we found out they no longer carried fuses. Argh! On the walk home, G thought to stop by the Potdeksel and ask if they had a spare fuse. They did! Unfortunately, it turned out that that was not the problem. The power still didn’t work!

So, yesterday, we called an electrician, and the news is that we’ll most likely have to tear up floors and/or walls in order to fix and update the wiring. Maybe the word of the week should have been “to cry”. That, or I could teach you some swear words in both Dutch and Italian.

On the bright side of things, last night was the monthly Quiz Night at the Potdeksel, and thanks to M (a Dutchie) being on our team, we came in 11th out of 14 teams. Our best finish yet!

On the downside of things (as seems to be the norm these days), I’ve had a debilitating sinus headache all day, and Pippo braakt in de slaapkamer (bedroom). Hopefully, we’ve come full circle.

Trivial Pursuits

Last night was Quiz Night once again at the Potdeksel. G and I managed to maintain our track record of coming in second to last, always beating at least one all-Dutch team (usually made up of more people than our lonely two). The fact that we can beat an all-Dutch team is a big deal, because the quiz is done in Dutch (although we can get translations) and more importantly, many of the questions are about Dutch topics (tv hosts, radio DJs, athletes).

Still, we do learn things on occasion. Here are two facts we learned last night, which might come in handy if you’re ever playing a Dutch-themed game of trivia.

• The capital of Aruba is Oranjestad, which basically translates to Orange City. Did you know that Aruba, along with the Netherlands Antilles, is part of the Kingdom of the Netherlands? (I knew the last part; it was the capital of Aruba that we didn’t know.)
• We also learned that the first castle that Queen Beatrix purchased when she moved out on her own was Drakesteijn. It’s actually here in the province of Utrecht! She purchased it in 1959 and took up residence in 1963, a few years before her marriage. There’s some renovation work being done on it, I gather, so there’s speculation she may move back there when she eventually abdicates the throne to Prince Willem-Alexander. It’s really quite an interesting castle; octagonally shaped with its own moat. It’s like a very tiny island.

Round-Up

Despite quiz night and dinner with friends, it’s been a fairly low-key week, so not a lot to say. I’ll just cover the highlights here.

• Tuesday was another Murphy’s Quiz Night at the Potdeksel. Our goal is simply not to come in last, and once again, for the third month in a row, we’ve achieved that goal. This time we tied with another team for second-to-last place. One round had us putting names to the faces of child actors. I believe René said we came top in that round. We could have done even better if I hadn’t changed my guess of Natalie Wood to Judy Garland. G came through for us with Jodie Foster. Nice one!
• Friday we had Willianne and Edmar over for dinner. It’s always a pleasure to see them and we always have fun. I’m looking forward to doing it all again sometime soon.
• After dinner and dessert on Friday, we all headed over to the Potdeksel to finish off the evening. I met a woman who was very pro-Obama and sort of cheered me on for the US finally having a good president. I met a guy who was pro-America, and a third person who hates America and says that Americans are liars. I figure two out of three is good odds. It’s certainly nice to at least not have people hate me because of a president I didn’t vote for.
• I put up our (fake) tree on Friday, with only the lights. Last year I wanted to get all blue lights, but only found one short string of blue lights, along with a longer string of multi-colored lights. Today, we headed out to Gamma (hardware store) to try to find some more blue lights, while also picking up some paint supplies. Unfortunately, their lights selection seemed to be limited mainly to outdoor Christmas lights, or fancy indoor lights only in white. I’ll keep looking, but for now, our tree is multicolored again this year, because I wanted to go ahead and get it decorated. It does look quite pretty, though. Maybe it will help get me in the holiday mood. So far, I’m just not feeling it this year.
• Finally, the picture at the top is of a set of teddy bear ornaments that I’ve had for years. Andrea, my best friend at the time, gave them to me some time in the very early 1980s. I’ve held onto them, though, and they’ve moved with us from Florida, to North Carolina and now to the Netherlands. It’s nice having a fond memory of something that can be pulled out and pondered every year.

And Seven Ran …

Last night was Quiz Night again at the Potdeksel. As I’ve mentioned before, the quiz is in Dutch, unlike some of the other quiz night’s in town, although we’re fortunate that René is the quiz master, so he’s kind enough to translate when we don’t quite understand some of the questions. We can sometimes get the basic words, but lose the meaning due to the word order, so we’re making progress with understanding the language, but are a still quite a ways off from understanding properly.

There were seven teams competing last night and in the end, we came out sixth for the evening. Not too shabby, since we still beat some natives. Although I suspect that was due more to the fact that we’ve got at least four years on the two who lost, so we were able to do slightly better on the music round, which was songs from the 1980s last night. Despite my love of ’80s music, I still didn’t do too well on that round.

Today I was supposed to go clothes shopping with Merian, but unfortunately I was laid out with a severe headache today. I’m feeling better now; just a bit of a dull ache. Much better though than the piercing pain I had earlier today. I guess pride really does come before a fall. 😉