My Neighbour

We live in a neighbourhood of Leidschenveen, in the outskirt of The Hague. The short lane to our house only have 4 houses and all the four houses share a common gate which is situated on the bridge over the canal. My house is right at the very end, no 4. Naturally I have to pass their houses in order to go to my house. I know all my neighbours, even though we rarely meet on everyday basis. Two of the couples are quite elderly, whereas the other couple are perhaps in their forties. 

Below is Marion (I think that is how it is spelled, anyway). She and her husband Henk live at No 1 house, so their house is the very first house you see once you go through the gate. Both of them are very nice. Every week Henk takes my rubbish bin from outside the gate and brings it to my own gate. You see, rubbish collection is once a week, so every Monday night, my DH would push the bin and leave it outside the gate for collection the next morning. Most of the time, Henk would push the bin back to my house after the rubbish has been taken. He does that to all neighbours, "It's the neighbourly thing to do" he said one day when I told him he need not take my bin from outside. I'm surely blessed with having good neighbours who help me with rubbish and they happen to have the same first name!!! Read about the other Henk who was my neighbour in Amsterdam here.

 

Marion and our visitor Jas, in front of her house

Anyway, Marion is also nice and friendly. One day she called up to me when I came home from picking DS from school, just to show me a type of fragrant flower that she claimed only blooms for 2 weeks. 

The other day when I met Marion at the other neighbour's party read here, she told me one very interesting and amusing fact. She said that all my visitors who came to my house, seemed to like photos of trees. Apparently, she has been observing from the quietness of her house the antics of my visitors. It amuses her to see them going from this tree and that tree and taking pictures (with them in the picture of course). Some trees according to her did not even have leaves !!!

I laughingly said that we come from a rainforest country and naturally we love trees and nature :D The sight of beautiful flowers blooming on Dutch trees are so beautiful we just have to take pictures of them. And in response to the "no leaf tree", I said that they (my visitors that is) have never seen trees in winter with just empty branches and no leaves, after all in our country we have greens all year round.

Her statement caused me to recall all the many visitors we had with their cameras practically hanging on the necks clicking here and there in front of the neighbours' houses :D  The photo above was taken just after our visitors Jas and Jak and also my DH been taking photos in front of her house and naturally she couldn't resist and came over to say hello and cheekily mentioned the very same fact :D

 

Invitation For Coffee

A few days before Christmas, we had a surprise visit by our next door neighbour. He came to give us this....

A Christmas wreath !!! It was specially made by his wife for us to hang on the door....

That was nice of them. No doubt they knew that we did not celebrate Christmas, but it was given in good faith, so I accepted it and thanked him profusely... :D 

He also invited us for a long overdue coffee, the date to be set sometime in the new year. Again, I accepted his invitation.... after all it's only coffee. It crossed my mind that when a Dutch invites you for coffee, that's what you get, coffee, nothing else, well maybe a biscuit or two.... So we would not be in danger of being in a position of explaining to our gracious hosts "Ohh.. I'm sorry I do not eat this... or I do not eat that..." I wasn't worried. In fact, our neighbour did further ask me, what drink should he offer us. So I said to him that tea or coffee is just fine with us.

So on that coffee day, we were ready to go by 4.30 pm. As we walked the short distance to their house, we saw another neighbour walking to the same house. Hmmm... it seemed that we were not the only guests. It turned out that they invited all the neighbours around the house... about 5 couples of all. The coffee invitation seemed more like a new year party, well the elderly fashion that is. "A biscuit or two" that I thought, turned out to be a small party with a few finger food varieties. Our gracious hosts painstakingly tried to explain to us that all the food with the exception of one, were all vegetarian and fish based ingredients. There were two types of fish pate, boiled eggs, dates stuffed with cheese, fruit salad, garlic breads, various types of cheeses and a few others. They did it out of consideration for us. That was sweet of them.. I really appreciated that, it was a great relief that we were being informed of the ingredients without having had to ask :D

It also turned out that our Dutch hosts were actually Germans !!!! They came to the Netherlands after World War 2 and decided to stay here for good. Now it all made sense... for one thing, they were not as tall as the other Dutch neighbours (They came from Bavaria, where the people were not as tall as those from Hamburg, their words not mine), and for another, why there were more food on the table and not only biscuits as I had imagined !!!

We were there for 2 1/2 hours, chatting and mingling, drinking tea and eating German bread and fish pate.... And towards the end of it, my back and legs were begging me to sit down !!! Was it the Dutch way or maybe I should say German way that they did not invite you to sit down?? I realised that no one was sitting, so that means we were expected to stand. Briefly, a thought of new year parties in the movies came to mind, right..... no one is sitting!!! Everybody is standing or dancing and drinking !!! Hmmm no wonder....

It's all right for me to walk for 2 hours, but to practically stand still for 2 hours???? It's actually very tiring... trust me. But it's worth it, we learned that most neighbours on the street were originally farmers, rich farmers in my opinion considering their big houses.

It's been an interesting and enlightening beginning of the year 2012.  It is now already 2 weeks into the new year, and yet sometimes I feel not ready to face the new year... why??? New year means new and more difficult challenges??? I do not know. But the following cartoon strip best explain my feelings sometimes.... :D

H and J

 

Mr H was our neighbour in Amstelveen, he lived alone right in front of our house, whereas Ms J lived not far away. H was a very good neighbour, even though he didn't speak English and my Dutch was nonexistence, it did not prevent us from communicating to each other. We must have sounded like "ayam dan itik" when we talked to each other :D

 

H and J

I do miss him when I move to Den Haag. Why do I miss him?? For one thing he would take my rubbish bin from the collection place and bring it to the house, every week. And sometimes, when I forgot that it was Thursday (collection day) he would bring the bin to the collection place for me. And another thing, he would scrap the snow from my front door, everytime it snowed and last winter, it snowed all the time until February or was it early March!! So wasn't that sweet of him?? He..he..he.. I suppose one would think that I miss his services he..he..he.. No, truly I miss seeing his cheerful face, and anyway I happen to have a neighbour now in Den Haag coincidently with the same name H and he would also bring back my rubbish bin!!! Aren't I lucky!!! Anyway back to H in Amstelveen, H must be lonely, I hardly saw any relatives drop by, in fact I had never seen his children (he has 2) and grandchildren came, not even on Christmas!!! And being a "nosy" neighbour that I was, I would know if anybody came !!! He was good to my son too, during world cup time, the nearby supermarkets would give out free world cup Gogos (little cute creatures) whenever you purchased a certain amount. Every time he went grocery shopping, he would drop the colourful Gogos through our post box. Ilham had a bagful of Gogos and most of them were from him.

J was a lovely lady from Indonesia. She's been staying in Holland for almost 30 years. She enjoyed talking to me because it gave her the chance to practice her bahasa Indonesia :D

We must have shown good example of Malaysian hospitality, because H decided to go for a holiday in Malaysia recently. DH recommended a few places for them to visit (based on their likes and dislikes) and they celebrated their 10th anniversary(I think) as a couple at the KL Tower.

We invited them for lunch one day, DH earlier promised to serve nasi lemak daun pisang and that's what we cooked that day.

Nasi lemak and sambal udang

Since J said that H could eat spicy food, I decided to cook the sambal the normal way, with only little adjustment to the amount of chillies. I think, the sambal must have been a wee bit hot for H, because he seemed to be "concentrating" on the prawns. Or maybe he found it difficult to eat because it was unshelled prawns!!! I should have bought the shelled ones!!! My initial thought was H couldn't eat it, but he had 3rd helping of the prawns!! so that means he had no problem with it :D

Look at H's flushed face he..he.. too hot for you?

We served them with lempeng pisang as well and sagu gula melaka

Lempeng pisang

We have yet to invite them over to Den Haag since we moved here. Must do it one of these days.