“Zooo Nederlands!” (Sooo Dutch!)
Yasna from Iran points at a ground-floor window of a typical Amsterdam residential building.
On today's field trip we explore Oud-West, a historic working-class area with early 20th-century homes. In part, the original residents have made way for dual earners, students and internationals. But judging by the windows, some archetypal Amsterdammers still live here.
One such window caught the eye of Yasna. It’s not the first time one of my students shows an interest in Dutch windows.
Displayed in front of this one are a number of plants—azalea, begonia, pannenkoekplant (UFO plant). Lined up between them are Delft blue figurines of a kissing peasant couple. A baroque style vase contains dried flowers that have seen better times and the clay candelabra in the corner appears to be handcrafted by a child.
Does this mishmash of items mean anything? Does it tell a family story?
I never really spent much thought on why the Dutch—and Belgians, for that matter—fill up their windowsills. In the Netherlands there even are windowsill trends: one day you see goose figurines everywhere, the next it’s Buddhas.
According to a common cliché, Belgians opt en masse for a plant with the misogynistic name ‘woman’s tongue’—a species in whose thick, pointy ‘leaves’ one could see a tongue shape.
But now that Yasna makes me think of it, I suspect that Dutch residents don't want passers-by to peer inside, but at the same time they don’t like their own view outwards obstructed by opaque curtains.
That’s why they create a ‘curtain’ of objects, functioning exactly like a oneway screen in police series, through which officers outside the interrogation room can observe the questioning of a suspect without being seen.
To the same end, Dutch people hang vitrages (voile curtains), and residents on higher floors often have a spionnetje mounted to their windowsill—a small mirror strategically aimed at the pavement to spy on passers-by.
After all, Nederlanders can be quite nosy.
Yasna doesn’t buy my spy narrative. She believes that the Dutch are sociable people who place micro exhibits in front of their windows especially for passers-by to enjoy.
”Zooo Nederlands!”
I teach NT2 (Dutch as a second language) to internationals who came to Amsterdam for or with love and are here to stay. The conversations presented here were all held in Dutch. For privacy reasons the names are fictitious. Soon out: my bilingual book Nederlands is zooo makkelijk | Dutch is sooo easy. You can pre-order it now in my webshop.
Lingo with a view
Window - het raam
Windowsill - de vensterbank
Voile curtain/net curtain - de vitrage
Spy - de spion (noun), spioneren (verb)
Exhibit - de expositie/de tentoonstelling
