I just want to post a little note about a particular eating habit I picked up rather seamlessly last week. The first time I was in the center of the city running some errands, and I was starving. I could have bought a candy bar or a little bag of chips, but instead I made a beeline for the nearest bakery and bought a croissant for €0,70. The second time was on Saturday morning while Niek and I were doing our grocery shopping. We had just finished going for a run, and there wasn't much in the way of food in the house, hence the grocery shopping trip. Right after we purchased our three loaves of bread from the baker (that's not a typo, the two people in house consume three whole loaves of bread per week) which also consisted of an embarrassing incident involving the woman behind me in line making a comment about me kissing the loaf of still warm bread in my hand and my stuttering reply that I was merely smelling the bread and not kissing it in some sort of strange ritual which is what she had assumed, I practically ripped open the bag to eat a piece of bread for breakfast. Apparently I've passed over into the Dutch universe where it is the norm to always stave off hunger by eating bread and just bread. If you couple this eating habit with my newly found ability to ride a bike in the rain while I hold an open umbrella, you almost can't tell the difference between me and the Nederlanders around me. If only I could grow about eight more inches...then you really might start to think I was Dutch.
That is all. Back to yet another overdue chapter, a looming deadline, and a conference panel application, etc., etc.
I think I write a lot about bread on this blog.
Riding a bike in the rain and keeping your bread dry is quite an accomplishment. I remember passing by a pissoir and seeing a man with a baguette enter, relieve himself and exit without the baguette moving at all. That's when I knew for sure I wasn't French.
ReplyDeleteI used to eat dry bread to stave off hunger. Stopped when I couldn't find good cheap bread and didn't bake as much.
People don't think I can pass for American, though I've lived here all my life! I'm not fat enough, obnoxious enough or obsessed with wiping every surface with disinfectant (and I've always thought the Dutch were clean-obsessed!); my friend Narsi said that with brown contact lenses and the right clothes, I could pass for Sikh.
Your photos don't suggest you're that short. I thought Niek was unusually tall.