fierce allegiances
Tuesday, June 16th, 2009by Rachael
Stellendam, Zeeland, The Netherlands
To be honest, we were overcome with the politeness of the drivers in Germany. You needed only to turn your indicator on and even the biggest trucks would move over to allow you passage into their fast-flowing stream. Even when you were obviously not going to keep up. And if you forgot to turn your indicator off again (very easy to do when these vehicles rattle and bang so much that a gentle tick-tick-ticking easily goes unnoticed), they will draw up alongside with a friendly wave and hand signals, which you eventually interpret long after they have disappeared off into the distance.
We also noticed that although the traffic flowed quickly, no-one really seemed in a hurry. There was no zipping in and out of traffic, no dangerous overtaking, no dodgy manouvres, no impatience. Just all orderly. “German,” you might be inclined to say!
Then we got to Holland. Everyone is in a hurry. Not the type of hurry that fills three lanes with six rows of cars like in Asia, but they are all going fast. And squeezing into spaces that they really don’t fit into. And overtaking. And they don’t let you in no matter how long your indicator flashes. And they honk. Yes, they honk at us as they go past. Now, we are not sure if it is because we are too slow, or if it is the German registration and big D sticker on the back. Is there perhaps a not-so-friendly rivalry between these neighbours?
We’ll let you know when we take our next drive. Because now we are clearly no longer German:
The D sticker has been replaced with an NZL and some kiwi flavour created-by-Jgirl14, held in place by boys with sticks and sprayed by Rob. When we meet Aunty in less than a week, we’ll have a flag to fly as well!
Actually, one of the things we have noticed about almost all the countries we have travelled through, both in Asia and Europe alike, is that the citizens are more patriotic than us Kiwis. Finding a national flag to snap a picture of is no problem whatsoever. In fact, in Holland, many of the housing complexes we have walked around have had flagpole holders beside every door. I suspect the most frequent time a kiwi would fly a flag is at a rugby game, and even then, it will be the silver fern, rather than the flag reflecting our heritage. Maybe it’s because we have such a short history. More likely it’s because we don’t even know our history and so don’t connect with it in the same way ancient cultures can.
This would seem an appropriate place to consider our history as a nation. Here we are in Zeeland, the original. In 1642 the Dutch explorer, Abel Tasman, became the first European to see our islands and assumed it to be part of a southern continent connected with land discovered in 1615 off the southern tip of South America. Our name originated with some later Dutch cartographers, who called the islands Nova Zeelandia after the Dutch province of Zeeland. No one is certain who coined the term, but it first appeared in 1645……about when the buildings we visited in Amsterdam the other day were being built! British explorer Captain James Cook subsequently anglicised the name to New Zealand. History lesson from Zeeland over.
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rayres