Sunday, February 26, 2012

Advertising works (sometimes)

Today I fell as a victim of a commercial, in other words the commercial worked as it is supposed to. Few days back I happened to see an ad of a new McDonald's milk shake. In normal life these type of commercials would go totally unnoticed, but this time it was different. They had managed to create a dream combination - speculaas milk shake! For all those who are not familiar with this pearl of Dutch cuisine - speculaas is a spicemix made of several spices creating an addictive combination. In other words, it is really good. I first got familiar to it while eating an apple pie made by the Dutch guy and immediately went on sniffing the jar of koek en speculaaskruiden. I don't know though whether there is a difference with the pure speculaaskruiden and the koek en speculaaskruiden, but that remains to be seen. Even though the milk shake was good, I had maybe just a bit too high expectations for it.



Then to a more serious topic, commercials can be affecting also in other ways. On our way to work the Dutch guy asked did I see the picture on the bus stop with a text "Ik ben inmiddels overleden". It is a campaign to promote the awareness of ALS disease, and the pictures represent people who have it. However the twist is, that the pictures are only published once the person has passed away, thus the text "In the mean time I have died". Quite powerful I'd say. There was one guy interviewed who has/had the disease, and he said he refused the campaign because he did not want his under-aged kids to see big posters of him throughout the city afterwards, which is also quite understandable.

Wednesday, February 22, 2012

Mushroom buns

Learning and adapting to new things also makes you think more about where you come from. In certain moments, when for example lunching with Dutch colleagues and feeling really frustrated when your Dutch conversation skills are matching to a level of 3-year old, it is sometimes good to just do things you are familiar with. Or so I thought...

Finland is by no means a catholic country, but we do have our own carnival type of celebration this time of year. It is called 'Laskiainen' which means something like counting down but also freely interpreted as sledding downhill. It usually is around the skiing holidays in week 8, and as well as going outside and playing in the snow and doing lots of sledding, we also eat a special kind of sweet pastry, 'Laskiaispulla'.

I had the recipe, I had my imported baking bowls and cardamom, accompanied with yeast, flour, butter, milk and sugar from the Albert Heijn. Yes, the Dutch guy thought I was a bit loosing it when I came back from my last Finland trip with three pipes of cardamom, but it is different here! Really! :)



I was ready to go and amaze the Dutch guy with some nice pulla from Finland. As a modern day expat, instead of calling home to mom I googled the recipe and followed it very precisely. I was thinking, that I didn't realise they are so healthy as I needed really small amount of sugar and butter for the baking. The dough felt good, and I left it to rise. The pulla's went to the oven and everything was still fairly OK. During the 8 crucial minutes they were in there, something strange happened. I took out from the oven 8 mushroom looking little pulla's, which had a very hard outer shell, almost like bread. This is of course not at all how they are supposed to be.


I felt kind of sad, and said to the Dutch guy that basically these are now totally disastrous and maybe I just need to hand in my "I'm Finnish" card because even this goes wrong. We ate few with whipped cream, and indeed the looks can deceive, as they were not completely bad. Somehow they just didn't taste really sweet, but the Dutch guy claimed they are very nice. (He is a well raised Dutch person).

Today I called mom and complained also to her about failing miserably when making the pulla. When I told about the recipe I used, she said it sounds really strange and it turned out, it had 50 % too little butter and sugar. That sort of explains! Now I got a new real recipe to my email, and I will try with better luck in the coming weekend. Learning point, even though being separated by few thousand km's, call mom when in doubt :-)

Sunday, February 19, 2012

Legendary ice-skating

I knew the Dutch are extremely enthusiastic about cycling, but what came as a surprise that during winter time the enthusiasm stays the same but the target shifts. Elfstedentocht. Ice skating. The world's largest and longest speed skating competition, and probably the most irregularly and unexpectedly held sporting competition ever, takes place in the Netherlands. Since end of January I have learned many new and most probably very useful Dutch words, that I just needed to share here a few.

Elfstedentocht is a legendary 200 km ice skating tour that is held every year in the Netherlands - if the weather allows. I believe it is legendary for two reasons; skating 200 km in one day is amazing, and you never know when this competition takes place. Last time the race through the canals of northern Netherlands took place in 1997. This does not stop the yearly speculation though, and this year it was my first chance to fully see the Elfstedentochtkoorts (Elfstedentocht fever) in action. Lukily (?) I was few days also sick at home having a regular koorts, and this gave me chance to extensively dive in to the skating excitement. Around the same time a Dutch movie "De hel van '63" was shown on TV, which was a story of Elfstedentocht in a nice winter weather (-18 c). Combining my media research through non-stop news, discussions and talk shows as well as this movie, I learned at least the following important Dutch words.

It giet oan!
This is actually not ducth, but Frisian. However, since the tocht takes place in the Friesland, it is good to learn as well. In Dutch it is "Het gaat door" which very freely translated means "It's going to happen!". When already the waiting and speculating of the Tocht gets the media completely excited, I think hearing these three words would be enough to make the whole country go upside down. Since 1909, it has taken place only 15 times. Interestingly three of them took place during the Second World War.

Rayonhoofd
These guys are extremely important for the Elfstedentocht. The tocht takes place in total of 22 regions, and each region has it's own rayonhoofd. This guy (probably there are no women involved) is responsible of the ice thickness of his region. The gathering of the rayonhoofden is extremely big news, that means of course that there is a bigger chance to hear the magic words announcing the Elfstedentocht will happen this year! Only thing missing is live coverage within these meetings, as well as the black or white smoke indicating the outcome. These guys are so important every January and February here. I wonder what they do the rest of the year. Maybe just gather some stamina for the upcoming media circus..

Ijstransplantatie
In the 200 km route, the ice must be at all places at least 15 cm thick. Otherwise the rayonhoofd will state, that the ice in their region is not good enough. Of course you would not want to be the only black sheep. Besides, it is good money! What to do then? The good old ice transplantation! There is plenty of ice in all kinds of places, let's just take it and move it to where it is really needed, in the Elfstedentocht route. This activity must be invented by the Dutch people. One poor milk factory got almost expedited out of the Netherlands for accidentally dumping some warm cooling water to the Elfstedentocht route, outrageous!

And the prize goes to.. Schaatshistoricus!
Schaatshistoricus means ice skating historian. This person was interviewed several times in all kinds of talk shows as an expert of all things skating. Netherlands must be the only country with such a profession.

Unfortunately, year 2012 the tocht did not take place (It giet nog net oan). Hotels were booked and Friesland was expecting 1,5 - 2 milion visitors, Elfstedentochtbarometer showed good percentages and the rayonhoofd was having their meeting. TV was showing documentaries from the past tochts, analysts telling facts and figures about ice, competitors and the weather and of course eager reporters going around in Friesland trying to find news about the tocht taking place. But unfortunately somebody decided to turn the heating on, and that was the end of the Elfstedentocht dreams for 2012. Apparently there is another nation who are ready to pitch in and arrange the Alternative Elfstedentocht. Of course - the even more crazier Finns! It is quite easy to see who the alternative tocht is aimed for, when going to the website - the information is available in Finnish, English and of course.. in Dutch :)

Tuesday, February 14, 2012

Washing the dishes

I noticed a new topic in the Expat Blog Hop and decided now it is my time to make a contribution. When it came apparent that I would move to the Netherlands, I started googling for information. I was happy to find several expat blogs describing the adventures of relocating to the Netherlands - besides information it also proved that people have survived here without going completely crazy :) One of the blogs I stumbled on also had a weekly topic for other blog writer's called the Expat Blog Hop. I decided that on some beautiful day I will also start participating, and now that day is finally here, although rather rainy and grey.

The topic for this week is to describe an object in your new expat country, that you now use daily but before had no idea such a wonder even existed. It wasn't too difficult to identify this, it is of course my magical refillable dishwashing brush! Yes.. I like things to be clean and tidy around the house :) To get to the essence of this magical device there are two paths

Path 1 - Crazy dutch dishwashing people!

I was few weeks ago in a place with relatively many Finnish women who live in the Netherlands. As it happened, I ended up helping in doing the dishes after we were ending the gathering. I did the dishwashing according to the hygienic and following the health standards like any good, well-raised and overly hygienic Finn would do: first wet the item you are washing, then apply soap, rinse the soap, dry the thing and voila, you are ready. One of the Finnish women commented that if we would have Dutch people here, they would be upset by the amount of water we are wasting, which led us to an interesting discussion. I learned, that apparently the step called "rinsing-the-unhealthy-and-toxic-soap-from-the-thing-you-are-eating-your-food-from" -step is not an universal step in the art of washing dishes. There are people who - believe it or not - actually dry the item immediately after applying the soap.

After I got home I confronted the Dutch and asked him to give a detailed process explaation on the dishwashing topic, without giving a hint first why I am asking this. When he got to the point where he mentioned that after applying the soap, he gets a towel and dry the item and put it on to the shelf I thought, these people have really lost it. Like, where were they when the information of rinsing potentially toxic dishwashing stuff from the plates, cutlery and glasses was given! And no, the drying with a towel is not enough. I felt a great sense of starting my own personal crusade on enlightening Dutch people from the hazardous toxics that all the dishwashing soap must consist of. I also made it clear, what is now the standard of handwashing dishes in this house. This of course provided an easy escape to the Dutch for not doing any dishes anymore - but hey, at least we are not dying of terrible dishwasher soap cancer! And luckily we have a dishwasher also :)

Path 2 - Smart dutch dishwashing people!

One of the most brilliant things since sliced bread is this - refillable dish brush! I was asked to bring some of those "fillable dish brushes" to Finland once, and after doing some binary search (which included e.g flying to Finland with two refillable barbeque grill iron wire things) I found the right one from Albert Heijn.

Of course I had to make an investment and get one for myself. And it is absolutely brilliant! Whenever washing something by hand, you can get the perfect dose of the soap by just squeezing the thing on the top. No need to deal with those half-sticky washing mashine bottles and use way too much soap. OK, not using this daily but multiple times a week anyway.



I got some more orders from Finland for this, and I think the local AH cashier's must've thought, that the girl has some severe pile of dishes to wash when I bought 10+ dishwasher brushes when shopping there, although in two consecutive days. Of course I didn't dare to empty the shelves in one go.. :)

Sunday, February 5, 2012

Winter is here

Roughly a week ago the winter arrived here in the Netherlands! I was already bit sceptic whether that would happen because we had few weeks ago still crocus' growing outside. On Friday it started to snow which meant also interesting trip from getting back home from work. Especially after reading the news from Helsinki where there had been a real snow chaos. The ride home went without problems although I started to doubt severely whether the "winter tires" are in reality some kind of "let's skid in the snow" tires.

Luckily this country also knows a bit about winter sports! Without any mountains or open wide areas skiing and long-distance skiing are not really options, but skating is very popular. Some weeks ago I noticed that somebody had flooded the field close to us. That of course meant that there is soon going to be a skating rink! Today we went out to test it, with a nice sunny and -5c weather.

Sometimes - like today - I miss a country which is 8 times as big in geographical size but has 1/3 of the population of the Netherlands. It was quite busy! However, the ice was very nice despite being on a grass field and it was also very cheap (15 eur for a family season card).

After few slightly chaotic events for getting the ticket and getting the skates on we were finally on the ice. The way it works here is that people skate counter-clockwise around the area. I've mainly used to the big round skating rinks where you can basically skate to where ever you want. I soon understood that would not work here at all. In practise the ice was full of people, some with skates, some without. First of all we needed to get through a wall of people and then choose one of the three lanes.

In the inner lane there was already a woman reposing while the others were waiting for an ambulance. Apparently she had slipped while walking in the ice with her shoes. There were also tens of approximately 3 - 10 year old mini-rockets going around, with high speend and totally unpredictable turns, stops and directions in general. Few times of course they fell over and ended up sliding in an horizontal position just in front of your skates. I also spotted a dad pushing a chair while his daughter was sitting on it, many many sledges being pulled by all kinsd of combinations (e.g. a small kid who had put the rope around her knees while pulling even smaller kid in a sleigh) as well as a woman with a dog on the ice. Not to mention all kinsd of other activities taking place there. The skating was really really nice, but I have to say my stress level was just few notches higher than normally :)

I know the problem is just tussen mijn oren (between my ears), but I was still amazed that one guy managed to pass us while saying to another person "it is so nice and quiet here today". Say what?!?