Things we learned in the Netherlands

Being out of your normal environment always seems to heighten the senses to what is new or different from one's usual surroundings. That's even more true when you are in another country. Since we our trip to the Netherlands was the longest we've ever been able to do, we had the chance to learn some things we had not observed before.

New Words

Listening to Dutch radio is great fun, just to hear the language from native speakers and see how much one can recognize. Sometimes you learn new words like this one - "puntenell". This one is always a suffix which is applied to the end of other words. For example, we heard "zevenkattenpuntenell" and "wolhallapuntenell". Now the Dutch love to create compound words, but these are a bit of a challenge. It helps when you can see them broken down into smaller pieces, or just written - like this: zevenkatten.nl or wolhalla.nl

Opa Freek

I'm sure that there a lot's of folks who think I'm a bit strange, maybe even a bit of a freak. Well, in the Netherlands we received confirmation of this. Here's a photo of me to prove it.

I'm standing next to the sports complex across the street from our apartment. The game is voetbal there, but there are sponsor ads just like little league in the U.S. See that yellow sign to the left of my shoulder? Well here's a close-up:

My guess was that this was for a dentist, but it turned out to be a local firewood and oak barrel supplier. (Of course this isn't really pronounced like the English word "freak". It's pronounced "phrake" and is the Dutch nickname for Frederick. Still, it's fun to notice the differences in languages and where they'll take you on first glance at something.)