Greg and I went out to dins last night with my boss here and it was so funny b/c I come home and tell Greg all these funny work stories and stories about funny things she says, and then last night she said them all at dinner and Greg and I were both just trying so hard to not laugh too hard. my favorite things she says (and picture them in a funny dutch accent) are:

1) "oh thanks god" instead of thank god
2) "lookie lookie cookie cookie"
3) "oh, I am top!" to indicate being busy
4) "he is not so speedy"
5) "this is so handy dandy, don't you think so?"
6) "popie opie popie popie" for "the pope"

I ran across this Dutch word in a cover letter: verantwoordelijkheidsgevoel. Dutch (and German, where many Dutch words and constructs come from) are pretty funny languages for a native English speaker. So many of the words are similar or the same, and so many of them are so very very different.

When I was riding home, an older lady riding in front of me dropped her 4-pack
of toilet paper out of her side bags on her bike. So i rode up to her and
said "excuse me" and pointed back at the road, but she just gave me the evil
eye like i was some kind of biking salesperson trying to sell her some road

I was living in the Netherlands and wanted to go to the grocery store. This is harder than you might imagine.

I went to the Albert Heijn in Den Hague right by the H&M in the shopping district. It's closed almost all the time that I could reasonably go there. On the following weekend, I bought some fruit and other stuff and went to the checkout line. First, the person spoke passable English, thanks to the big guy for that one. Once we got beyond her saying something in Dutch, me giving her the "deer in the headlights" and her trying English which served for a few weeks until I learned "sprek u Engels?" So, she asked why we didn't weigh the vegetables. Uh...why would I? Apparently this is standard to weigh your own vegetables in other places which cracks me up because you could just weigh less than your total produce and lower the price of your good without having to look like you are stealing...