Long hiatus again—never good for a blogger—but today got me thinking that Holland still has much blogging fodder to offer me. I’ve been quiet in recent months as the novelty of “Dutchness” has worn off—the honeymoon period is long over and I’ve grown accustomed to what was once strange. But today, sitting eating lunch at a brown café in Utrecht, I was tickled by a by-line I read in the Newspaper. The author was a Mr. Speksnijder or Mr. Bacon Slicer to you English speakers out there and no, this was not his stage name.

On an interesting historical note, the Dutch didn’t really use Surnames until 1811, when Napoleon annexed the Netherlands, establishing a registry of births, deaths and marriages. The locals, suddenly obliged to pick a surname, didn’t take old Bonaparte that seriously (it’s been argued that many thought this was temporary), opting for irony instead. Amongst the surnames I found in the newspaper today were: Korteweg or Shortcut, Snoep or Candy and van Geen or of Nothing. Other popular ones are Naaktgeboren (born naked) and Zeldenthuis (seldom home), which puts a wide grin on this expats’s face because it gives a window into the folk who once traversed the very cobblestones I now cycle over.