random mutterings

I don’t understand why the Dutch don’t have cheesefries. They serve patats frites at every opportunity, with mayo, ketchup, curry ketchup, garlic sauce (aka mayo with garlic, though I suppose you could call it garlic aioli), and sate sauce. And they’re famous for their cheeses. Yet they never put the two together, not even at the snack places by the bars. They’re missing the perfect beer food.

Rudder says I should blog my comment the other day, on why I needed more books despite still having a couple unread ones here: “Books are like toilet paper. You never want to run out.” (Others may disagree as to whether this really needed to be shared.)

We were in a store this evening that had what seemed like the weirdest grouping of stuff ever – cosmetics, luggage, jewelry and electronics – until I realized it was exactly the distribution of Service Mechandise, in the US. It’s kind of fun playing Match the Store, actually; for instance, I’ve decided Blokker equates to Wal-Mart, in that if we can’t find it anywhere else it’s likely to be there. (Though Blokker is far smaller and even farther less unpleasant to shop in than Wal-Mart is.)

I also can’t figure out why so many people have trouble understanding my attempts to speak Dutch – it’s not that I think my pronunciation is perfect, but your average English speaker can manage to decipher some fairly grievous manglings of the language. Maybe my pronunciation is even worse than I think it is. Maybe there are just more close homophones in Dutch. Or maybe a noisy restaurant isn’t the place to attempt a word like “garnalen” (shrimp) given that ‘g’ and ‘r’ are the two most difficult letters to pronounce in Dutch. (In some positions, they sound very much alike, at least in the local accent. When someone with the common name of Ger or Geert introduces himself it sounds like he’s gargling.)

Oh and if anyone Dutch reads this, would you have any idea where I might be able to find knitting yarn in or around Eindhoven?