I realized that recently I've had the bad habit of just using this blog as a place to describe my travels, and have been neglecting writing about life in Maastricht/the Netherlands/Europe. So, for now I'll put writing about the last couple day trips I've taken on hold, and get into one of my other favourite topics: food!
In the first couple weeks of being here, I had the habit of translating words that I saw often on signs. Translation and food are things that us exchange students have been experiencing hand-in-hand, since most of the products we buy in stores have only Dutch on them. The following scenario is quite typical
*Chatting in the kitchen with roommates while cooking*
Person 1: Hmmm, just a second *runs to their room and comes back with a computer*
Person 2: Translating the directions on your food?
*laughter ensues*
This turned out to be a really effective way of picking up useful Dutch, and I'm proud to say that I now can understand "pierce holes in the plastic and microwave for X minutes" without my friend Google.
Similarly, I've been picking up the words on menus and advertisements as I see them. So when I started seeing signs advertising "koffie met vlaai", I already knew that this meant "coffee with".....vlaai? Whatever that was. This interested me at first, but once Google informed me that vlaai translates to "flan," I lost interest.
Fast forward to me reading a website about specialty foods in different parts of the Netherlands, only to discover that I'd been mislead-vlaai actually translates to, get this: pie!
That's right, I'd been turning down pie. Local specialty pie served at restaurants with seating outdoors on lovely cobblestone squares.
Needless to say, I rectified this, heading the next weekend for pie and coffee with two of my friends. This was promptly followed up with my roommate buying me a pie as a birthday cake. An idea which I then
This situation, of course, stemmed from an interesting problem: since exchange students live predominantly in exchange student accommodations, and since many of the English classes have few Dutch students (since a Dutch option may also be available), I have few Dutch friends from whom to learn about local cultural things (like pie). Of course, I'm making an effort to meet more Dutch people, but in the meantime I've found an interesting, if bizarre, window into local cuisine: grocery stores.
Specifically, I've come to realize that you can learn a lot based on not only what the grocery store has (or doesn't have), but on what they have a lot of. For example, a few weeks ago, I noticed that there are sprinkles-a lot of sprinkles. The internet confirmed my suspicion-in the Netherlands, eating sprinkles on bread is very common, including for breakfast. And so, I bought a sample pack of sprinkles (or hagel slag) and went to town. Along with sprinkles, there's quite a bit of sausages, schnitzels, and various types of saurkraute-ish products.
As for sweets, the "stroopwaffel" is currently my hand-down favourite, being a combination of wafer-thin crunchy waffles and sweet syrup (McDonald's even makes a McFlurry version). There are various other types of waffles-mostly Belgian- as well. Milka chocolate is available in a wide assortment, mostly geared towards combinations of Milka chocolate with other sweets.
A final interesting observation for today's post is the impact that different international relations have on food. Being next to Belgium, there's a wide variety of Liege waffles, Flemish fries, and Belgian beer. The Netherlands' history as a colonizer in South-East Asia also means that there is a massive amount of Indonesian food available-albeit in a modified form that removes most of the spices and a bit of the flavour.
Of course, these are only the observations I have after a few months, and mostly based on where I live (a day in Amsterdam showed me that they seem to have some different food habits). If I find anything else interesting, I'll let you know!
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