CHAT: Amsterdam and Germanic woes ...

Hello folks ...

I'm just back from a li'l trip to Amsterdam with some fellow exchange students.
I didn't think of the possibility of trying and organizing a meeting with some
of our netherlandically resident list-members until to late, but that was
perhaps for the best since we* displayed an almost unfailing ability to miss
any and all deadlines, including two international trains ...

* English really could use an incl-excl distinction in 1st pl pronouns!

This was just a three-day trip, see we saw far from everything, but I really
liked the city (except how expansive the restaurants were!). I'm definitively
going back for a longer stay sometime in the future.

Remember me saying I should perhaps learn Dutch to get my Germanic languages
thoroughly mixed up? Well, just visiting the Netherlands seemed to be quite
sufficient for that - I repeatedly switched to German in the middle of
supposedly English sentences. My English-speaking ability shut down completely
when confronted by a guy at a restaurant who spoke some mixture of Dutch and
English - "You want a grote or a kleine? A grote is better!". I finally made my
order by pointing at the menu ...

I also tried reading a Dutch newspaper, which went reasonably well. I was most
amused by an article  about the growing market in the US for special coffins
for seriously overweight people, especially the bit about a group of concerned
citizens trying to get forbidden the obnoxious praxis of charging extra for
double-width burial slots.

Knowing my luck, this is going to create a flurry of official-language posts
and translation exercises ...

                                                     Andreas