I am ………… a seasoned survivor of tough moments here in Holland (which surely entitles me to
a much worthier title)
It’s been 13 yrs since I first moved here so I won’t give you the full story but I will fill
you in on how it all started (I assume you’re similar to me in that I can’t help being
interested in people’s “stories” - how they got to be where they are …… particularly the
beginning).
It all started when I spotted a cute big broad dutch guy called Hans, working on same the
campsite as me in the Loire Valley where I was doing my 6 month college placement
back in ‘94.
We started seeing each other and after a few months when he had to go back to college in
Arnhem, we were both heartbroken…….. so he hit the road in his big green Peugeot
which our courier family had christened Croc Dundee. I was miserable moping around
among the caravans and tents while he sat with a sad face behind the steering wheel.
After a week or 2 back in Holland he decided to quit college and come back to work on
the campsite - in fact the way he did it was (and probably still is) the most romantic
gesture a man has ever shown me – he drove through the night, through Holland,
Belgium and half of France to surprise me on a rare night out … he walked into the bar,
picked me up in his arms, twirled me around and said he’d come back because he
couldn’t stand to be without me. I was ecstatic.
I moved to Holland, finished university, got my first job here and after we broke up (3.5
yrs later) I stayed on for a while before taking off to do some travelling.
To bring me back to the tough times I’ve endured here ……. the first I’ll mention is
undoubtedly familiar to anyone who’s moved here, that whole smiling-politely-whileyour-dutch-company-babble-and-laugh-in-dutch-whilst-you-can’t-understand-a-word
experience. This was something I frequently had to endure as my boyfriend had an
unusually large family so the ubiquitous birthday parties where everyone sits around
drinking coffee on a weekend afternoon (still don’t get that timing, Sat afternoons are for
getting things done !) while you feel like a spare tool, not being able to join in and
dreading the moment when someone cracks a joke and they all laugh in unison.
Then of course as I slowly started to learn dutch, I had to go through the awkwardness of
pronouncing a word with a “g” in it for the first time (yes the one that requires that
throaty sound which doesn’t come easy to us native English speakers). Dropping it into
my broken conversation, hoping and praying the listener would recognize it and not laugh
at how silly I sounded. Of course most of the time they smiled or giggled at how cute I
sounded, which drove me nuts but hey I could see (or hear) their point.
I then spent 6 months finishing off my course in Vlissengen and travelling most
weekends by train to see my boyfriend in Arnhem. My course was in English which
limited my chances to improve my dutch so one of my favourite ways to practice was by
chatting to elderly people in Vlissingen. Whenever I had an afternoon free, I would sit on
one of the benches in front of the stadhuis and sure enough an elderly person would come
to sit beside me, start chatting, show me photo’s of their family and just babble about life
….. it was a great and interesting way to learn conversational dutch.
Then one day I knew I’d got too confidant speaking dutch - as I stepped on a tram in Den
Haag with my strippenkaart in hand I mistakenly shouted to the conductor who was
trapped behind the Perspex screen “mag ik bij u even strippen?” which caused a lot of
sniggering and expectant glances from him and other passengers (what I’d asked him was
“could I do a quick strip for you”)
In between finishing university here and starting my first proper job, I worked in several
part-time jobs via uitzendbureau’s. One of these was as a catering assistant at the Groene
Ruimte in Arnhem, I use the word “in” loosely as it was in fact out in the sticks, in the
middle of a forest way way way outside Arnhem. It took me 50 mins of hard pedaling to
get there from our apartment in Presikhaaf and as I started at 8am it meant I usually had
to cycle in the dark along quiet deserted cycle paths. In fact, one dark Winter morning on
the way there I came crashing down at top speed as I hit a patch of black ice  And as
the Groene Ruimte was an army training camp, our customers were very hungry young
cadets with little patience to explain how they wanted their broodje kroket.to a little irish
girl with broken dutch. My colleagues were all 45+, very kind and patient with almost no
English which meant my dutch improved immensely.
I also spent several months working nightshifts at the Albert Heijn distribution centre in
Tilburg. It was during the hot Summer of ’96, there I was driving my little forklift around
the refrigerated section, dressed in several layers of clothing including gloves and a cap.
More than once I accidentally rammed my forklift into a case of milk cartons so i’d do
my best to quickly mop it up before the boss spotted the expanding white puddle. Coffee
breaks were awkward as again, I was the only non-fluent-dutch speaker in the canteine so
conversation was stilted and difficult.
I would finish my shift at 7am on a hot morning, peel off the layers before getting on my
bike to cycle home to sleep for the day (well, I was staying with my ex-boyfriend’s uncle
and aunt who also had no English)
Anyway, after all these student jobs, I finally got my first proper job as a sales rep for an
american publishing company covering the Benelux region. I had to set up an office in
the spare room of our apartment and I was given a company car. As I had just got my
driving license from a driving school in my native rural Mayo I wasn’t exactly used to
driving through more than one set of traffic lights in a day. Hitting the A2 towards
Amsterdam with 4 lanes of traffic in the spitsuur resulted in me getting out of the car in
Amsterdam with sweaty palms, shaky legs and a huge feeling of relief washing over me –
so happy that I managed to get there in one piece with an undamaged car.
…. amazing how things which we now do so effortlessly were once such a struggle, and
I’m referring to that difficult G sound as-well as the motorway driving 