dutch home.

Hello all!

Last week, we had our first real experience with some real dutch locals. Even before arriving, Cake, who's this girl who was in Maastricht the semester before passed our email addresses to this dutch local guy by the name of Cyrill and he's been emailing us about our details of arrival all the way til our first meeting. The email conversations were going pretty smoothly and regularly like how i would a friend or maybe a penpal for this context, until our friend Cyrill revealed that he was close to 50 years old and enjoyed taking exchange students out for a tour and especially mainly asians. This was a total shocker for both of us as we also recently caught the movie "Hostel 2 " at Ian Kwok's place and that showed reminded us how foreign european hostels can be really interesting with the sale of body parts or sadistic tortures going on these days. So i tried to be non-offending when i questioned Cake about this flying dutchman and she re-assured me that Cyrill was really genuine and sincere about meeting us! we went in the end, so much for our parents warning us since young about 'don't anyhow go strangers house ah!' hahaha

Cyrill agreed to pick up at 7pm at our hostel gate and make a 7-minutes (Dutch are incredible precise with timings, 'like 15.5seconds later turn right ..etc') ride to his home and kid you not, its like a couple of minutes away from the border of Belgium! (This is the beauty of Maastricht, its probably the only fascinating thing about this boring student town, its at the borders with Belgium and Germany). Indeed, at like 7.02pm, he arrived and he even apologised for the 2 minute delay which was really polite of him, cause 2 minutes is nothing to me back home in singapore i normally average a waiting-time of 15-20 minutes?. And so we finally saw him, the man whom others described as dodgy dutch man by our fellow sg counterparts back in the hostel when we told them about our plans. He was 1.9m? typical of a Dutch and he is really infact nice and he drove us to his home! where his half deaf mother, 'Gery' was waiting and she is a pleasant old lady. Below are some pictures of that night where we were served a typical dutch cake which tastes exactly like my apple strudel pie back home and some really authentic dutch tea. Before that we had coffee, and did i mention that i do not know how to mix coffee? shit man its embarrassing, i was taking my ques from like Cyrill about how much sugar and milk to add into the coffee to get the standard taste. It was going alright with the coffee mixing under i realized theres no standard taste with the coffee as later Gery told everyone, 'excuse Cyrill and his excessive sugar intake' and there i was pouring my 4th bag of sugar into my coffee. I learnt.

But besides talking about asian cultures meet dutch blah blah blah i was taught how to roll a manual cigarette! Thohir admitted to me that he was secretly waiting to find a moment to smoke as he was dying for a smoke and was worried he would give a bad impressive but when Cyrill tossed over an ashtray, tell you the 2 just hit off like some old chimneys or something. And you thought that was it, there suddenly old lil Gery pulls out her dainty lady cigars and she was commenting on some random nicotine thingie in her cigs under her gibberish tone. The next thing i know, both the 2 dutch were teaching me how to fold cigarettes like similar to those budget smokers back home who try to fold some filter paper around some wood shavings like kinda content and most of the time, the sticks folded looks really budget with the shavings coming off. Don't worry i didnt smoke, i think i dont like the feeling of having hot random smelly air down my throat, respect to those who can do it.

Yes, the night ended when i requested to see their garden, and when the dutch people talk about their back yard gardens, we not talking about your 5m by 5m gardens in sg, the gardens in maastricht are akin to what we call farm. At the back of his house, he had like plot of land pretty huge which the Cyrill used to grow all sorts of shit from rosemary to etc i cant rem the names but chian was have the time of her life out there, picking plants out of the grown and smelling them like one ratatouiie and then amazingly identifying them correctly! amazing.

By then the time had stretched to around 10.30pm and it was time for Cyrill to send us back but before that he had one last surprise for us and it was to show us this really random road with house on both sides of it and he said, this road is the border between holland and belgium. So there we were in the car being 5 seconds in holland the next 5 seconds in belgium, Cyrill was having fun steering the car left and right into belgium and then back to holland while everyone was getting car-sickness. joking. but you get the point.

Well, hope you enjoyed this post about some really genuine, sincere, warm dutch hospitality101, really wished most of you would be able to experience this one day. Anyway its 2.09am now and we gotta wake up at around 5.30am to go to Brugge tomorrow. Til then, enjoy and have a fruitful one.

Poh

the man himself

Hail and Cyril best buddies

Gery - The unconventional grandma

Chian and Cyril enthusiastically sharing recipes!

lee indulging in a cup of Maastricht tea

listening attentively to Cyril giving us more insights into the dutch culture. lee said it felt like intercultural comms LIVE!