Photo by Alex Selim

I recently worked in Amsterdam for a week. At the end of my second day at the office, I decided to go on Instant Messenger and see if any of my friends were online and in the mood to chat. I found one. Kelly, a friend of mine from Madrid.

We chatted for a few minutes, playing catch up, until the clock in the corner of my computer screen caught my eye, and I realized I needed to catch the metro in order to be home in time for dinner with the couple I was staying with.

“I should go” I typed, “Dinner will be ready in half an hour.”

“Dinner?” Kelly wrote, “At 6?”

“Yuck!” she wrote.

I typed in a smily face and hit return.

The eating schedule is only the beginning of what make Holland and Spain different from each other. I’m sure to Kelly, and to me too if I had been in Madrid, eating dinner as early as six seemed ridiculous. The restaurants in Madrid don’t even open in the evenings until after eight. Even then, the restaurants are empty until nine or ten.

But I wasn’t in Madrid, I was in Amsterdam. Knowing that in the home of the friends I was staying with dinner was served every evening at 5:45 on the dot, I expected to have no appetite. However, somewhere in the last 48 hours my stomach had gone Dutch on me. I was hungry.

That evening I ate food with a passion one rarely finds in Olympic athletes. It wasn’t only the eating schedule either. I was craving Dutch food. I had visited my friends in Amsterdam on several occasions, even lived with them for a period of three months. My stomach knew Dutch food, and it wanted it now.
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