Musings

It is a fact, not just our opinion, that there is no country in this world that does food better than the U.S.A.  The quality, quantity and prices in an ordinary American supermarket put the rest of the world to shame.

Further, we can say without a doubt, that consumer products sold in the U.S., from toasters to refrigerators to fabric to plain old screws, are superior.  It's almost as if buyers in America have said to manufacturers, "Hey, don't try to palm off that inferior piece of garbage to us....we demand better."  Europe is is catching up though.

I am not sure that the Dutch are doing us any favors by readily and, oh so easily, switching to English for us during conversations.  We don't have to stretch and consequently have learned very little of the Dutch language.

Being strangers in a strange land with an unknown language makes us slobberingly grateful when someone does a favor for us.  For instance, we cannot add time to our prepaid cell phones because we don't speak or understand Dutch, especially automated phone instructions, so when a customer service representative took the time to recharge each of our phones, listening for the Dutch phone prompts, then punching in the numbers, we felt like hugging her but restrained ourselves to thanks, dank u vels and wide smiles.

Also, because almost everyone here speaks our language, we know when we are being insulted.  In France, much of the time we couldn't understand half of what was said to us, so we would smilingly go on our way thinking "ah,what nice people."  Here....well, it's not so easy to ignore some stinky comments, however few there are.  Although Dwight has noticed that it is mostly the younger people who are comfortable with English and that when you get out into the country, bi-lingualism gets rare.

Ladies, one of my better purchases before leaving home was a butane fired curling iron.  No electricity needed; it is small, portable and it does a great job.  I am so pleased.

I keep mentioning Dutch phones (plural).  We decided, before we came, that we needed 2 cell phones.  Each of us keeps a phone with us at all times, even when walking the dog.  We are old and there is no telling what can happen when.  It's comforting to be able to phone home.

We love our bicycles.  We also love the fact that we aren't the oldest among the bicycle riders.  It seems like Sundays is the time when couples, energetically young and the more sedately old, and families tour the countryside. Dads and Moms transport the babies, with the older kids riding their own bikes.  And, there are more ways to carry young children on bikes here than there are styles of bicycles; there are seats for the font of bikes, seats for the back, trailers, as well as seats for the middle bars of men's bikes.  If you concentrated on loading a bike with children, you could carry a young Brady bunch! 

Our only problem with our bikes is the traffic.  The city of Groningen has bicycle paths alongside of almost every road.  It's not the cars but the other cyclists that scare us.  They whiz by us, so close that their jackets touch ours, then cut right in front of us, as if to say, pedal harder damn you.  We also share the bicycle lanes with motorized scooters and those drivers do more than just whiz by....lordy mercy, they blur right past us, all too closely I might add.  Although, we can't take it personally, everyone behaves the same way to everybody else.   It is a wonder to us that there aren't more bodies lying in the gutters.  So far, we have remained upright!!