Random Dutch Things

• If Iceland and the Netherlands are anything to go by, The Eighties Are Back, Baby--mohawks, members-only jackets, and all.

• Remember Mr. Bean's bête noir?  Or I suppose, more appropriately, his bête bleu?  The little, bitty, three -wheeled car?  Well, on the way back from school yesterday, I saw its cousin--a little, bitty, three-wheeled pick-up truck.  It was barely bigger than the car version but it had a wooden box on the back.  And there were two men riding in it.  Tall men.  I couldn't see the driver very well but the passenger was sitting kind of hunched over, with his arm out the window, and his elbow was almost touching the wind-screen.  Unfortunately, they were zipping down the road when I saw them so I didn't get a picture but I will be keeping an eye out.  They were actually making a left turn through an intersection and you could see the whole vehicle wavering as it tried to make the turn.

• Bike shops are all over the place around here.  There are three or four different bike shops on my ten minute walk to the metro.  They are all tiny little shops but they have loads of inventory.  They fill the store with as many bikes as it can hold, just jamming them in together, and then, every morning, they open the front door and, one-by-one, start pulling out the bikes and lining them up along the side walk.  They pull out enough bikes so that they can get into the store and to the cash register and then they are set to go for the day.  Then, every night, they have to load all the bikes back into the shop again before they close up.  

• There are also a couple of car repair shops on my walk to the metro.  But they are just in little store fronts--and they are filled with parts and things.  There is just the tiniest little corridor to walk to the back.  So, to do repairs (at least sometimes), they just pull the car up onto the sidewalk, jack it up, and go to work.  It makes getting by a little inconvenient and you would think the street cleaning guys would be annoyed, but in the two weeks I've been here I've seen them working on on at least three different cars that are just pulled up on the sidewalk.

• On Wednesday, I went to the Afrikaanderplein Markt next to my building.  I was looking for the Suriname(?) booth that I saw last week.  Since I couldn't find it, I decided to try out the "braadworst" that the "Verse Patat" booth was selling (that means "Fresh French Fries"--and they were fresh--I had to wait a pretty long time for my braadworst and they made their french fries from potatoes that they were peeling themselves in the booth).  They cooked the braad by deep-frying it.  Now, I figure you can't go much wrong by deep-frying food.  And there are many deep-fried things that I like.  And when you deep-fry a braad, the skin gets all nice and crispy.  However, it takes a really long time to deep-fry a braat thouroughly.  Possibly longer than it took them to deep-fry mine.  I haven't died yet, so I might be okay, and the braad was definitely hot all the way through, but it was really kind of pink and extra juicy in the middle.  But the thing which really made a Dutch braadworst not the same, and not as good as, a real German bratwurst, is that they just hand it to you in a little paper wrapper, with no bread of any kind.  And I am pretty sure that those crusty chunks of bread that real German brats are served in are about half of what is good about them.

• Also, there are a lot of people around here who look an awful lot like Gerrit.