Just Speak Dutch to Me
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.
Hmm this might happen in Ams or Rotterdam or Den Haag but try living in Arnhem Zuid (not Arnhem Centraal) if you want to practise your Dutch – they will never switch to English even if you are struggling in Dutch ??
Haha. I remember those days. Oh wait, I’ve been speaking Dutch for 7 years and it still happens… hmm.
It’s been 18 years for me :D
Persist… face ’em down with your nederlands and see who cracks first, or whether you can pull off an entirely bilingual conversation, much to everyone’s confusion…
Ha! Or, the other that I often get bij de kassa in central Amsterdam: “Sorry, I don’t speak Dutch”!!!
From the person behind the kassa? :o
Yep!!!
I remember one time coming back to Holland (terug van weggeweest) en in the center of Amsterdam I sat down in a typical Dutch eatery and ordered een broodje kroket. I was dying for a broodje kroket as my culinary life for a couple of years had been a broodje kroket desert.The hunky waiter gave me a wide-eyed look and said in English that they didn’t have it on the menu. And he was a foreigner and didn’t speak Dutch. So my first meal back in my beloved homeland was in the middle of the capital where I couldn’t speak my own language and I couldn’t have a broodje kroket. You will understand that even remembering this now is a traumatic experience, but fortunately I now live in France and the wine bottle is open.
Are you sure you had arrived in the right country? :p