So this weekend was a long weekend here in Spain, because today is the Feast of the Immaculate Conception. I know; I’d never really heard of it either. But apparently it’s a national holiday here. (To be fair, a lot of the kids at my school knew they got the day off but didn’t know what for.) Anyway, I went to Amsterdam to visit my friend Dan, from Haverford, who’s doing a Fulbright research project in a small town called Groningen in the northern Netherlands.

(Netherlands side-note: Nether-land, low-lands — that’s what we call the country today. They call it Nederland, which I assume means the same thing. In French and Spanish, it’s the same idea; Pays Bas, Paises Bajos. Except not really, in Spanish. I mean, they can say that, but they tend to just call it Holanda and call the language there (Dutch, in English) Holandés or even Flamenco (Flemish). Which seems odd to me since neither is really correct — the language is correctly Neerlandés. Then again, we still sometimes say Holland to describe the country, which is not quite correct, since Holland is only part of the country. (The west-and-south.) It includes most of the big cities, though.)

Anyway, yes. Dutch is a weird language — a little like German, which I also don’t speak, but unique nonetheless. Interestingly, I can hear conversations in Dutch and think for a few moments that it’s English — similar intonations, I guess? But it does sound different, of course: consider the name of Dan’s city. It’s not pronounced Grow-nin-gen, not the way we would say it. Dan explained that when he first got here he would ask English-speakers something about it, and they wouldn’t know what he was talking about. The pronunciation can be heard here. The g is a soft-k, maybe, and the r is very slightly rolled. Not really sounds we have in English. Of course, most of the Dutch speak fluent English. I definitely met a number of people in stores and the like who spoke perfect English — most of them with an American accent — that could’ve convinced me they were foreigners except for their speaking Dutch with their co-workers. Even the people with bad English speak it in a way that’s easy to understand, for the most part, I think since the sounds of the languages are quite similar.

Right, so we’re three paragraphs in and I have yet to mention food. Well. I was in Amsterdam for three full days. In that time, I managed to eat some Dutch food, and a lot of Asian food. We also managed to get good Belgian beer (oh man, a fantastic Tripel ale, a Gouden Carolus — at a cool bar called Gollem, Raamsteeg 4), and see several museums: the Van Gogh museum (the gh in Gogh is pronounced with that soft k, again, which I did know), which wasn’t amazing but wasn’t bad; the Rijksmuseum, which was kind of not as impressive as I would’ve liked (it’s been undergoing rennovations for a long while now, although honestly I think I was just expecting some amazing portraiture and some cool landscapes; there were landscapes but I mean, all the good Bosch paintings are elsewhere, and I mean the Brueghel clan are almost unilaterally displayed elsewhere), although it has some nice Rembrandts and a Vermeer (Girl with a Pearl Earring is in the Hague, though); the Tropenmuseum, or Museum of the Tropics, essentially a cultural anthropology museum with collections of things from old Dutch colonies, and a kind of intriguing exhibit about Surinam and the “Maroons” there, which I knew very little about, as well as this modern art exhibition of work by this guy Henri Dono; the Heinekein “museum”, which was essentially a tour of an old Heinekein factory that gave us free beer but honestly wasn’t really worth it; and finally the church — De Neuwe Kerk, which had an exhibition about Oman and was also just a kind of cool no-longer-used-as-a-church. We also walked around a lot, explored most of the interlocking landmasses that make up the center city of Amsterdam. Saw this beautiful old ship-related building, wandered through the Red Light District and saw the Old Church there, walked through two markets.

Which actually brings me finally to the original point: Dan’s not a big Dutch-speaker, but he’s been into exploring Dutch foods, at least to the point that he knew what was going on when we went to the open-air street markets. Now, street markets in Madrid aren’t really food places, and even in Argentina most of the food sold in them was prepared foods, but street markets in the Netherlands seem to be about half food and half other-things. So besides prepared foods, they have vegetable stands, butcher’s stands, poultry stands, fish stands, and so forth. Some have significantly different prices, it seems. We went to two, although the second was almost entirely closed by the time we got there — one was the Albert Cuypmarkt, and the other was the Dappermarkt, both in the South. Things we ate at the markets:

1. Fresh stroopwafel, sort of like the cones of dulce de leche they sell in Argentina, but more like caramel and less sweet.
2. Hollandse Nieuwe, or soused herring, a sandwhich (so technically Broodje Haring) with cold stewed herring, onions, and pickels. Very strange, and with this weird gelatinous texture, but not bad at all.
3. A pastry filled with almond paste, which was possibly called Banketstaaf (according to google, that might be it). Interesting but not wonderful.
4. Apple pastries. No clue what they’re called, although surely the word is appel in dutch. But they were basic, delicious sweet pastries filled with apples and goo.
5. We bought fresh whole mackerel, and fried it in a pan at our hostel, with rice and asparagus on the side, and some store-bought garlic-pepper sauce. It was actually very good. Dan did the mackerel, I did the sides. Weird for me to eat from a whole fish, but still.

All of those things are typical Dutch foods, understand. We also had Dutch pancakes, called Pannekoeken, which honestly are more like a cross between pancakes and crepes than either one. See? Those we got in a restaurant on Sunday afternoon, for lunch — mine came with bacon and apple slices. I was interested by the fact that both the apples here and those in the pastries are cored and then sliced down the center, rather than quartered first — you end up with apple rings, yes?

Anyway, we also ate some good Asian food:

1. Indonesian. On Friday night, we went out to eat at this place called Coffee & Jazz (Utrechtsestraat 113), which our guide book claimed was cheap. It wasn’t, not really, but we ate a full meal that was mighty delicious. There were five tables, and one cook/waiter/owner, who clearly loved the fact that he’s labeled as eccentric (he had print-outs of reviews that called him such, on the table) and made us saté, and then two chicken dishes with veggies and served on quite good rice with toasted coconut. Definitely the best meal we had.
2. Surinamese. Okay, sort of. It was a Surinamese/Chinese/(Indonesian) restaurant (Kam Yin, Warmoestraat in the north of the Red Light District, before it really starts, and it was super-cheap and pretty good — I had Surinamese roti, which I quite liked. I know Surinam isn’t in Asia (it’s next to Guinea), but for whatever reason the food was pretty damn Asian. As it says on wikipedia, “In Suriname roti refers mainly to roti dahlpuri or roti aloopuri. It is most often eaten with chicken curry. Roti can also refer to a dish of stuffed and spiced roti wraps. Due to mass emigration of Surinam Hindustani in the 1970s, roti became a popular take-out dish in The Netherlands. It usually includes chicken curry, potatoes, boiled eggs and various vegetables, most notably the kousenband or yardlong bean. Another variation includes shrimp and aubergine. It is custom to eat the dish by hand.”

Right, so there we go. My trip to Amsterdam, as though it were a food vacation. I need to do some more food-explorations of Madrid. Jeez.