Two (not-so) quick things

Happy Easter!  Entertaining fact of the day: in Dutch, Easter is called Paasdag and Easter Monday is called Tweede Paasdag (Second Easter).

The grocery store has been stocking lots of Easter cookies and chocolate eggs and such for the last month or so.  Most of them are very, very good.  So when we saw these, we figured why not?

They look like Cadbury Mini Eggs, right?  Yeah, that's what we thought too.  They are indeed candy-coated chocolate.  However, the chocolate inside is that super-cheap waxy kind.  That would be tolerable, except for the coating.  I don't know what in the world they did to these, but they tasted like they'd been dunked in a vat of perfume and left to soak for a few hours.  There's a really strong floral taste to them.  Seriously.  It's incredibly strange.

So my annual mini-egg craving was doomed to go unfulfilled, unless I wanted to eat the perfume chocolate, but Jessi kindly sent me actual mini-eggs, without the weird floral taste.  Yay!

Also, before I forget: the election.  Because we intend to come back to Canada after our visas expire, we retain the right to vote in federal elections while we're here.  That meant that we applied to the government with a surprisingly brief form, photocopies of our passports, and mailing addresses in Canada which could be used to determine our ridings (i.e., our parents' addresses).  I figured there'd be an election sometime this year, given the recent frequency of elections, so I applied back in the fall.  Six days after the election was called, our ballots arrived in the mail.  That's about how long mail takes to get from Canada to here, so they must have had them ready and waiting to be sent the moment an election was called.

Here's how it works.  They send you an envelope containing these pieces of paper:

From top to bottom, those are the voting instructions (which fold out and are impressively long), the notice of the election date, because it needs to be in Ottawa by 6 p.m. on election day, and the ballot itself.  As you can see, they don't give you the usual riding ballot with the pre-printed names.  Instead, they give you a blank ballot and get you to fill in the name by checking the list of approved candidates online or at an embassy.  Makes sense: they can get these things in the mail faster, so that we can get them back to Canada faster too, if they don't have to personalize each envelope.

The envelope also contains these:

That makes a total of four envelopes: the one your voting package arrives in, plus the three voting envelopes.  Their multi-envelope system is really quite brilliant.  First, you write the name on your ballot.  Then, you put the ballot in the top envelope and seal it.  Then, you put that envelope in the middle envelope and seal that one, adding your signature and the date.  The bottom envelope is your return envelope, pre-addressed to Elections Canada (and yes, we did have to pay for postage in order to vote).

The whole idea is to maintain the secret ballot.  As you can see, the top envelope has no identifying markings whatsoever.  The middle envelope, though, has my name and a barcode indicating my riding, so they can cross me off the elector list when they receive my ballot to confirm that I've already voted in this federal election.  When they get the ballot in the mail, they take it out of the mailing envelope and scan it to mark me off the list and figure out what riding the ballot is for.  Once they've checked it, they pull the inner envelope holding the ballot out and drop it into that riding's box, waiting to be counted on election day, and not connected to my name.  It's certainly the easiest way to manage mail-in votes without worrying about the secret ballot problem.  And since I'm obsessive about voting and haven't missed an election since I turned 18, I'd hate to break my streak now.

Have a good Easter, everyone!

Learning language

I saw this article on language rhythms a few days ago, and I found this part particularly interesting:

The only languages in which newborn babies can’t hear a difference in rhythms are Dutch and English... because it’s exactly the same rhythm.

I believe it.  The rhythms and stress patterns of Dutch don't sound very foreign to us, even if some of the sounds do.  The worst is the throaty G: if you want to hear it, Google Translate will pronounce words for you, like "good morning" (just click on Listen).  We can both manage it now, usually.  Sometimes it's a matter of remembering to pronounce a word that's very close to English, or even identical, just with Dutch Gs.  (You try saying "garage" without the letter G.  It's tricky!)  The words themselves are sometimes very similar to English and sometimes very different: I've put a bunch online here to show you.  The two languages seem closer and closer to one another the more I learn.  For example, the word for "close" is used both for "the door is closed" and "that is close by."  Idioms often translate directly, and most of the irregular verbs are verbs that are irregular in English too (swim/swam, eat/ate, buy/bought, etc.).  The words aren't necessary the same, but at least it helps to remember that if the verb is irregular in English, it's likely irregular in Dutch too.

Slowly but surely, we're both becoming more proficient.  It's easy enough to learn to understand numbers and a few words you hear repeatedly while shopping ("Would you like the receipt?", "Do you need a bag?", "Do you collect Air Miles?" and such), but it takes longer to figure out more complex conversations.  We're by no means fluent, but we can go to the market and obtain fruit, chicken, fish, cheese, and bread entirely in Dutch, with quantities and everything.

Side note: We buy vegetables in English, but the vegetable stand we go to is using us to practice their already-excellent English.  Apparently there was some disagreement over our country of origin, which they narrowed down to "not American, British, or Australian"; when I said we were Canadian, one of the guys immediately asked why we didn't sound like Robyn on How I Met Your Mother.

Simple conversations are getting better, too.  For example, I can make a hair appointment entirely in Dutch, and have a conversation with the lady at the fabric store about a pattern that wasn't in stock and when it would be in, without having to switch to English.  My Dutch teacher speaks only in Dutch to us, even when we reply in English, and I understand almost everything she says now (she speaks slowly enough that it's easier to separate and understand the words).  I figure I understand about half of what I hear at normal conversational speed, and more if the words are slower or the situation is more common.  We can even watch the news now, and follow the items and the tone, even if we don't catch every detail.  We've got football commentary down (despite the speed of the commentators' speech, you only need fifty words or so to understand what's happening), but not all the halftime and postgame discussion.

Reading is even better.  I could read kids' books before Christmas, but now we have to translate fewer and fewer of the letters that the city and various utilities send to us, and I can often read the subtitles before the English words are spoken on TV.  Part of it is that I'm using to translating from text, so I can put together sentences faster that way and I can see the word origins better on paper and guess at meaning from that.  Not quite able to read the newspaper yet, but getting closer.

It would certainly be possible to live here for three years and never learn more than a few words, but it just doesn't seem worth it.  I would rather be able to go about my daily life without making everyone around me switch to English just to accomodate me.  It takes a bit of effort, sure, but another language never hurt anyone.

Sunday afternoon

Lately, as the weather gets nicer, we've been trying to go for a long bike ride at least every couple of weeks.  So we biked all the way to Ikea one weekend, and through the national park up near Arnhem another weekend (where I forgot to bring my camera, of course).  Yesterday, we figured we'd stick closer to home.

The whole country is covered in bike paths.  They run through all the cities, and through the countryside too.  You could quite literally bike across the whole country without every having to bike along the shoulder of a major highway the way cyclists do in Canada.  So we picked up one of the maps for our province.  The routes are all coded by colour in each province, and then by number, so the green map is Eindhoven and surrounding areas.  After that, all you need are the numbers: go to number 71, then 89, then 28, and so forth.  The routes are fairly well-marked, although occasionally they're a bit confusing, and we ended up taking a couple detours while we trying to figure out how to get back to the route numbers.

Here's where we went:


View Larger Map

Our house is at C, and we went to Aalst and Waalre, both towns with around 10,000 inhabitants, just south of the city.  The loop we did ran about 25 kilometres, including our meandering.  Most of it was park and rural paths, and it was a beautiful day, so we had a wonderful time.  The pictures are here.

Warning

Just a quick note today, about one of those things that you'd never expect to change when you move to a different country.

We're both pretty used to hearing sirens in our apartment.  In Calgary, both of our apartments were right on major routes directly to hospitals and just down from fire stations, so there were sirens all the time.  You don't notice it after a few weeks.  Here, we live on a fairly busy street, and there's a small police station across the street and a much larger one a few blocks away, so we hear sirens fairly often here too (in fact, I hear one as I'm typing this).  The sirens in Europe are different than the ones in Canada -- more noticeable, I think -- but again, you get used to it pretty quickly.

Except on the first Monday of every month, at noon.

All over the Netherlands, on the first Monday of the month at noon, they still test the air raid sirens.  It's remarkably loud, much louder than an ambulance or police car, and lasts a good two or three minutes, blaring constantly.  And yes, it does sound like the air raid sirens in WWII movies.  I didn't grab my camera, so I don't have a video from my window for you to hear, but here's one on Youtube.  It's very odd, especially the first few times.  I know it's a test, I know exactly when it happens, but because it's only once a month, you forget about it in between.  And really, who expects to hear air raid sirens in northern Europe in 2011?