Posts under ‘Social stories’

Yup, I’m back in Holland.
Jet-lagged in the extreme.
And I didn’t send a single maple syrup-y photo.
But I did find a couple Dutch things while I was in Canada that I didn’t expect to see and thought I’d share them instead:
iBeginShare.attachButton(’share-tool-37040912313′, {title: ‘Sorry I didn’t bring any maple syrup back for you…’, link: ‘http://blogs.rnw.nl/curiousorange/2009/08/12/sorry-i-didnt-bring-any-maple-syrup-back-for-you/’, content: ‘http://blogs.rnw.nl/curiousorange/?ibegin_share_action=get_content&id=1172′});

Hi All…
Any regular readers will have already noticed a bit of a slow-down in the blog postings here on Curious Orange… what can I say, it’s “cucumber time” (that’s what the Dutch call the summer months when everybody goes on vacation so absolutely no work gets done!).
And now, for me at least, it’s really cucumber [...]

Ok, the death of Walter Cronkite is not an obvious Curious Orange story.
But he was great. Really great. So I was reading about him… and I saw this quote in an AP article:
Cronkite was the broadcaster to whom the title “anchorman” was first applied, and he became so identified in that role that his name [...]

Ages and ages and ages ago, when Michel and I were in Afghanistan, I did a video about the management of, well, sh** on kamp Holland.
I finally got around to editing the video… and here it is.
And btw, no, the first two systems don’t smell… and yes, the third one does. A lot.
Have fun!

iBeginShare.attachButton(’share-tool-93871366978′, {title: [...]

In these times of financial crisis, many of us are making cutbacks. Maybe we used to go to the local bakery for their fresh baked loaves of bread… and now we’re eating the cheap stuff from the local supermarket.
But one Amsterdam bakery has a solution: bake your own “recession bread”.
I went to that bakery - [...]

Guest bloggers Anna Ritchie and Marijn Koolen tell us how to make your own traditional Dutch croquettes - apparently it’s pretty easy (though pretty messy too!). And you get to know exactly what’s in your version of these “mystery meat” snacks! Move over, Febo!
Ever wonder how those funny little snackbar batons are made? Ever thought [...]

Huge traffic jams are a major problem in Holland.
No huge shock there - the country just wasn’t designed for the number of vehicles that are on the roads here every.single.day.
But how should the government deal with the problem? Apparently, they’re going to pay people to stay away.
The plan is simple: “Traffic avoiders” steer clear of [...]

Turns out 85 percent of the Dutch are just like me (or I’m just like them) - we’d rather trade in our TV and mobile phones for two weeks than live without the internet!
Apparently, older Dutchies are more addicted to the TV than their phones- over 2/3 said they could barely do without it. On [...]

Dutch crunch!
When you write it like that, it looks a bit like you’re announcing that the Dutch eat very loudly.
But, apparently, it’s a type of bread that you can find pretty much only in California… which is especially strange since it seems to be derived from a Dutch type of bread called “Tijgerbrood” (tiger bread), [...]

Who’s Dinie? That’s what a woman named Nieves wondered for years after finding a letter in a bottle that had washed up on the shores of her home in Cuba. Four decades after finding the letter from Dinie - all the way from Holland - Nieves decided to find out who Dinie really was.
The letter [...]