How to treat with Dutch 3

Today is, probably as you know, my birthday :D
None of the things i asked at my list on this blog came true, not yet..
But still i'm very happy and i like all the presents i got!!
I will write them down, or some of them, in a later blog because first i have to finish the "How-To-Treat-With-Dutch" course. Here the last points you should remember:

21. Don't bother to rend a car. There's not only the fact that you can steal more bikes than you can use, but the traffic of cars in Holland isn't something you can really enjoy. In other parts of the world they tell the traffic jams in kilometers, in Holland they use a note of weeks. To be quite honest, the harder jams are nice to visit as a tourist. The sight of hungry people in their expensive Mercedes can make your mood better, if you like to think about life and the world. It's good to take some bread and throw them through the windows. The following fights are very spectacular.

22. Are you a christian, muslim, jew or admirer of Urrrgl, the God of all honest politicians, in Holland you can find easily the church, mosque, temple or tree as you want. Dutch are known as very tolerant to other beliefs, faiths or religions.
That is not true. The only reason that there are so many churches and sects in Holland is the fact that Dutch have an other opinion about..... everything. A Dutch is always right, and anybody that doesn't have exactly the same opinion as him can buzz off and start his own church.

23. Holland is a kingdom. But it doesn't have a king, no it has a queen. And her husband is called a prince, and not a king. She's not really in the government, well.. not so much, but she's very good in cutting ribbons and visiting other countries. She's very decorative at state banquets too. Her son, the crown prince, will do her job when she stops queening. But... his wife will be called a queen, to complete the confusion. And in that case Holland will have a queen ánd a king. The 30th of april is called Queen's Day, but this is not the birthday of the queen. It's the birthday of princess Juliana, who was the previous queen. Isn't this confusing?? Besides, Queen's Day is the excuse of the Dutch to drink liters of beer and sell his old rubbish on the street.

24. It might be useful to learn how to swim before you come to Holland. No, the dikes won't break, that's not the problem. But the great number of canals, rivers and other things with water can bring you to painful errors. The glimming new road of asphalt where you want to drive at during some rain, could also be something else...

25. If one of your Dutch friends invites you for a birthday, prepare for a unique experience. More than 1 foreigner was made completely mad at a Dutch birthday. A normal Dutch birthday is, most of the times, sitting at a chair and talking about your work, your car, politics, the weather and foreigners. When you are invited at day: they expect you to leave before dinner. When you are invited in the evening: they expect you to leave before 11, and you will be grateful you can. And remember: you only get one cookie with the coffee.

26. Holland has more cities than only Amsterdam. For example there is..... eh.... and.... Anyway, there are more cities.

27. The Dutch beer has a good reputation. Some people are even drinking it!! Brewing is one of the things a Dutch does well. Holland has never been a country where you could do something more interesting than brewing beer and painting little landscapes. This made the beer industry very popular. People are sure that, once you have drunk real Dutch beer like Heineken, Amstel or Grolsch, all the other kinds of beer taste like the drinking water in a hotel in Rotterdam.

28. The Dutch drinking water is safe to drink when it comes out of the crane. That is quite special when you know that most of the water comes out of dirty rivers like the Rijn. Plans for making the quality of the Rijn water that better that fishes are coming back to have their babies are not popular between the Dutch. They don't like the idea that animals are having sex in their drinking water.

29. There are more pigs than people in Holland. That is astonishing when you realize that there are 16 million people in Holland and that they mean the animal "pig" with pig, not the human kind. Well, take now one pig and feed it. Wait a little. Wait a little more. Now you see happening two things. The pig is getting a little fatter, that's good. And there comes some rubbish out of his backside. It stinks. It stinks a lot! Now take that smell 16 million times. The Dutch don't seem to have problems with it. This doesn't only prove that "Money doesn't stink", but also that it's able to hide this horrible smell! Oh, and you get used to the smell... after a few weeks.

30. Dutch political debates are as much exciting as a three day during reading about Lithuanian sportheroes between 1762 and 1809. No shouting like "Hear, hear!", no fights, not even a few politicians calling each other incompetent (and between the Dutch politicians, there are quite a lot of that!). No, telling your opponent that you are doubting about his politics is something like the worst thing you can say. The result is that the interest in politics in Holland has decreased dramatically. At the last elections there only came 2 people. The first was lost on his way to the toilet and the second was an illegal refugee that thought this was the right place for getting a visa.

My God, i live in such an interesting country.... Marloes