Boodschappen Doen

"Boodschappen doen" is the Dutch equivalent to "running household errands" or "doing household shopping." It's the title of the post because today is the first time I went grocery shopping on my own :-) I suppose I cheated a bit by using the self-checkout option, but it's still a first for me.

I started my next level of Dutch classes yesterday. The book moderately sucks though, and has to be supplemented by 70-ish pages of worksheets. At least B2 goes back to the same format we had for A. There's 15 people in this class, all from different countries. Very diverse! A couple are from Indonesia and Belgium, so they speak enough Dutch to skip the A level. Everyone seems to be at about the same level, except one guy who consistently got inversions wrong.

I have to admit, it's easy to get word order wrong in Dutch, especially if you're accustomed to speaking a language where you can speak while you're still forming the thought. If you try that in Dutch, odds are your "extra" bits (referring to time or place) or verbs and subjects will end up in the wrong order somewhere. But it's also hard to keep track of the whole sentence you want to say, if it's more than 10 words or so. I guess we should focus on shorter, concise sentences when speaking spontaneously :-P

Even though the work is harder, using more grammatical rules in combination with each other, the pace seems slower now than it was for A level Dutch. Not a lot of homework, and we just cover 5-8 pages per day, but the stuff we do cover needs a lot of practice to get it to stick.

The class I'm in now is in the morning, which is much nicer. I can stop at the shops on the way home (like today!) and get stuff done without trying to cram it in during the evening when everything is super crowded. Stores close very early here ... the grocery stores aren't so bad, staying open til 8 usually, but the special food stalls all close at 6pm. With the craptastic traffic, that makes it impossible to shop at the stalls after work. And I like cooking fresh, healthy dinners. It's so much harder to eat right when coming home hungry with no chance to shop and little time to cook. It's also more fun being able to shop every other day, and get really fresh stuff, instead of loading up once or twice a week.

The stalls here are something I'm not used to in the US. Although there are supermarkets with a bit of everything, there's also smaller shops around specializing in a certain type of food: cheese stores, fruit & vegetable stores, fish stores, meat stores, poultry stores, bakers, etc. Although they exist in the US, they're far more common here, and pretty essential if you want anything atypical. The supermarkets tend to have a limited selection of everything, though will have 10-20 different varieties of each popular item. It's annoying :-P