Free Samples

Free Samples

As I walk through a particularly busy part of Amsterdam on my lunch break I notice two girls across the street. I’d seen them there several times before, every day in fact. They were always standing outside the shop where they work, both wearing aprons and holding a plate of free samples which they would offer to passers-by.

At this particular moment on this particular day they had attracted the curiosity of a short middle age couple who were walking towards them. One of the girls notices this, holds her plate a little lower and asks if they would like a free sample. The man who seems the most interested picks up one of the free samples and sniffs it cautiously.

Between them the two girls start to happily explain what it is and that their shop sells a lot more of them inside when suddenly he does something that (it seems) neither of them were expecting; he takes a great big bite.

There is a sudden look of horror on the girls’ faces. The man simply looks confused. The two girls suddenly start talking very fast, trying to stop him from doing it again. They are too late. As if in hope that the taste might get better with a second try he takes another bite.

But the taste does not get any better because these two girls are not giving out free samples of cake or sweets or anything else tasty or edible for that matter. No. They are giving out free samples of soap.

The man slowly starts to chew.

Suddenly realizing that he is a tourist who does not speak any Dutch or English, the two girls resort to sign language. One of them starts to frantically mime bathing with an imaginary bar of soap while the other repeats the word ‘soap’ over and over again in a desperate attempt to stop him swallowing.

This only results in the tourist looking even more confused as he tries to work out what on earth these two very strange girls are doing and why they would have given him such terrible tasting candy.

Eventually he decides that he has tried enough. He spits the mouthful back into his hand and shakes his head apologetically at the two girls as if to say sorry but in his opinion their baking is not very good. He walks off, talking to his wife in a foreign language (probably about the strange eating habits of other countries) and throws the sample in a nearby bin.

The girls, looking slightly stressed, breathe a sigh of relief.

I carry on walking down the street, chuckling to myself.

Free Samples Soap

 

A few days later I returned to pick up my own sample for this photo. The first thing one of the girls said to me was, “Do you speak English? Don’t eat this. It’s not food.” It seems they are not keen to repeat the incident with the soap snacking tourist.

 

Stuart

Stuart is an accident prone Englishman who has been living in the Netherlands since 2001. Even his move to the country was an unintentional accident, the result of replying to a cryptic job advertisement he found one day in a local British magazine. Since then he has learned to love the Dutch (so much so that he married one of them) and now calls the country home. He started the blog Invading Holland in 2006 as a place to share his strange stories of language misunderstandings, cultural confusions and his own accident prone nature.

10 Responses

  1. MOl S says:

    Lol. That is hilarious! Poor tourists. It does look a lot like candy though :)

  2. Alison says:

    It does look an awful lot like some sort of candy! I’m so relieved we never gave out samples like that during my days working at The Body Shop!

  3. Terri says:

    Though it looks edible…surely it must still smell of soap?

    Can you just imagine the conversation that couple had later about the terrible food in Amsterdam?? Too funny…

  4. Antoine says:

    Brilliant – I have a similar blog post coming up soon as I experienced something similar in Helsinki last year. I was at a fair and we had a bowl of gold lapel pins with our logo on them … and people still thought they were sweets!

  5. Jess says:

    Baaahahahaha. Unfortunately, it probs wasn’t much worse than the frikandel he had a few moments earlier. ;)

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