Wednesday, March 24, 2010

You Can't Walk On One Leg




As long as I can remember, I have always loved language.  The study of it, that is.  I must have gotten it from Mom who, for instance, not only read The Lord of the Rings trilogy but studied Tolkien's appendix of the language he created.  I never went that far, nor does it mean I speak languages (as in plural) but I do enjoy how they work and the mathematical formulas behind them.

Perhaps nothing charms me more about language than idioms--those peculiar expressions that have a meaning indirectly derived from the literal words and which almost never have a direct translation into another language.  Some examples are beating around the bush, chewing the fat, enough is enough, every picture tells a story, etc., etc.

When the idioms come from another language than my own, they often are funnier or more powerful because I've never heard them in quite the same way.  A missionary-linguist friend told me years ago, for example, that the Filipino tribal group with whom she worked would often say, "That's just like God!" whenever they'd read or hear something they didn't expect.  To this day, I still use that phase when something surprises me.

So far here in Holland, as I get situated into this new culture and language, no one idiom has charmed me more than the one I have now heard several times:  You can't walk on one leg! I've heard it mostly in the context of eating and kissing, as when offered a second cookie or kissed twice...because you can't walk on one leg.  In other words, you can't eat/have just one!

The one time, however, that takes the cake (see what I mean) was when Astrid and I ate at our favorite Greek take-out café here in our neighborhood.  While most customers come and leave quickly with take-out, there are 5 tables for those of us who like the atmosphere and eat in.  With that kind of intimacy, we have grown to know the owner, his son and his mother, all of whom keep the business hopping.  Two weeks before our wedding in February, we told them how excited we were that a date had finally been set...an excitement they appeared to share with us.  That meal we celebrated with a bottle of their
Kechri wine because we loved the shape of it and decided we'd make it into an oil lamp...and even told them so.

At the cash register as we left, to our delightful surprise, the son (with father looking over his shoulder) handed us another bottle of the same wine, gratis, and said, with a big grin,  "You can't walk on one leg!"  It was their congratulations to us.

How can you ever forget an idiom like that!  It makes you want to be generous and go out and do random acts of kindness just so you can say it all the time.  Ahhhh.  The power of language.  We could have a feeding frenzy with it! 




Tuesday, March 9, 2010

When They Give You a Lemon




...go to Delft, of course!

Now back up a minute, alstublieft (please).

A week after Astrid and I got married, we took the 35-minute busride to nearby Utrecht to submit my application for a residence permit.  It had to be put in motion by March 5 or else I would have to leave the Netherlands for 3 months.  That wasn't gonna happen!

There are 9 IND/immigration offices in the Netherlands.  It was a no-brainer for us to choose Utrecht because it was the closest (20 miles away) and the city to which we had gone for several photo hunts in the past two years.  As a college town, it's quaint and charming.  You'd love it.  It took us an hour to submit all our important papers, with Astrid as my sponsor for my residence here.  We knew they were allowed 6 months for their official response, but the lady said it would probably be 1-2 months at the most.  Good.  We crossed our fingers and held our breath.

Many of you saw my post on Shutterchance about how
Once in a Blue Moon you can be so shocked all you can do is howl at the moon.  That day in Utrecht was Friday afternoon.  By the following Tuesday a letter was written telling me I was accepted!

However, I still needed to wait for my ID card to be prepared and ready for pick-up.  THIS is where the lemon comes in!  When I received the letter, I was given the clear instruction to pick up my card in Rijswijk, not Utrecht.  Rijswijk is near Den Haag, 31 miles away, but when you don't have a car, it seemed much farther.  It was one hour by 3 different trains instead of 35 minutes by one bus...and the difference of €14.  Astrid was so spitting mad she actually called to ask why I couldn't pick the card up in Utrecht, where I had applied.  No way, José.  I had to go to Rijswijk.

But guess what!  That famous city of
Delft, home to Delft Blue pottery and Johannes Vermeer, was just 4 minutes by train before Rijswijk, which meant it was also 4 minutes after Rijswijk going home.  It took me exactly 30 minutes to get off the train in Rijswijk, go find the office, take a potty break, pick up my card, and get back on the train before getting off 4 minutes later in Delft...where I then spent 3 hours.

The above church is Delft's
Oude Kerk (old church), the oldest parish church in the city from 1246 and the burial place of Johannes Vermeer.  Its 75-meter tower leans 2 meters from the vertical and is seen here from the Nieuwe Kerk (new church, started in 1396 as the second oldest parish), across the market square. The tower of the Nieuwe Kerk is 108.75 meters, with 356 steps to the top.  YES, I did it!  The only other church tower taller than this in the Netherlands is...guess where!  The Dom tower in Utrecht (112.5 meters), which I climbed with Astrid back in January of 2008.

See what I mean about making lemonade when you're given a lemon!  I have now climbed the two tallest church towers in the Netherlands.  Woo Hoo!  (And someone even threw in a soulful windmill right there to the right of the church at mid-section.  See it?)