A few weeks in the USA

For my winter break, Bob and I decided to travel back to the US to be with our families for Christmas and in Portland with our friends for a few weeks. After a rather harrowing journey, we arrived in Boston. There was a snowstorm in the Netherlands that kind of paralyzed transportation, so our tram was delayed, our train was cancelled, and we got to run through two different airports to try to catch flights that turned out being delayed anyway. Ah, the holiday travel season. Upon arriving in the US, I must say I began to look at some things differently right away.

I did some grocery shopping to help my mother prepare for Christmas dinner. I walked into the Portland Hannaford and was immediately overwhelmed at the height of the ceilings, the size of the store, and the amount of people shopping with HUGE carts of food. In Rotterdam, I shop nearly every day at a small store toting a small, polka-dotted shopping basket that was given to me as a gift when I moved into my apartment. I buy food for a day or two and always have nice fresh produce, dairy products, bread, and cheese (plenty of Gouda). At the Hannaford, it looked like everyone was stocking up for some apocalypse that I had yet to hear of.

As I stood in line at the large deli counter to order some sliced pepper jack cheese, I turned around and noticed a giant disply of hummus. Why, I thought to myself, did we need to have 20 different kinds and brands of hummus? Isn't that overkill? Who needs that much choice? I marveled for a moment at all the different sizes, flavors, and producers of the chick pea based treat that I am actually quite fond of. As I continued to roam the store looking for vegatables for a salad and parchment paper for the Christmas cookies to be baked upon, my mind wandered back to when this was my shopping experience. I might shop once a week, loading up on food that I hoped to cook but often wouldn't be able to finish before it went bad. Super sized packaging and buy one get one free deals often lured me into buying much more than I needed. The more I thought about the Hannaford, the more I realized that some things about me have changed in the five months I've been away. I yearned for my polka-dotted shopping basket, the modest supermarket next door to my modest flat, and my Dutch bike.

Snow

I awoke to snow a few days ago. An inch, maybe two at the most, but it transformed Hillegersburg. One of the first things I always notice when it has snowed is the quiet. Our neighborhood is usually quiet anyway, but when there is a cover of snow it's different kind. Having spend my whole life in the northeast United States, snow is nothing new to me. I grew up praying for snow days, gambling from time to time by not doing my homework. For some reason, though, the first snow here was exciting and different. It was unexpected, and it was just sticky enough to really cover everything. I woke Bob up, despite the early hour and the darkness, so he could see our first Dutch snow as well. I'm not sure he was as excited as I was, but he didn't need to be up for a few more hours so I do understand his lack of enthusiasm.

I dressed for work in the silent darkness and enjoyed a hot cup of coffee and some breakfast looking out my big picture window onto the snowy wonderland below. The traffic was slow, drivers tentative. A few brave souls biked slowly down the road. I bundled up and stepped outside to walk to school. Though it was still dark at 7:45 (the sun doesn't rise until about 9 am right now) there were kids playing outside. Their joyful shouts in the neighborhood made me smile as they had snowball fights and built snowman in the pre-dawn light.

I expected the snow to be gone in a few hours. Everyone here said it snows from time to time but melts rather quickly.

Three days later. There is still snow on the ground and an occasional flurry in the air. And it's cold. Much colder than I expected. We're going home to Maine on Monday for a few weeks, so this is really just a dress rehearsal for the frigid temperatures and possible feet of snow we will likely face in the coming weeks. My first Dutch snow, though, was magic.