The Snowy Dutch

Last week on Friday the snow started to fall for the first time in what seems like AGES over here (it's only been since last winter, but a lot's happened since then :o) The temperature turned south, which is an ironic idiomatic phrase since the temperature in the south is undoubtedly warmer than here.

So Friday dawned with slushy snow falling and winter arriving. Little did I know what they day would bring! I decided to drive into work, since I wasn't at all prepared for the winter riding. What a mistake that was. All morning at work the heavy snow was falling mixed with light rain, all of which immediately turned to slush upon contact with anything earthly. About midday the snow began to build up a little, and it looked like it would be a interesting drive home.

I left the office thinking nothing of the drive home - big deal, it's just a little snow on the road, right? Yeah, something like that. Gotta remember I'm in a country where they're not used to snow. So my drive home, which normally takes all of 20 minutes door to door (which is why I don't drive much - way more fun to ride it and it only take 25 minutes door to door on a bike!), took a whopping 1 hour 10 minutes of near standstill traffic. Wtf?

The funniest/scariest part was while I was sitting in my car for so long with no iPod (which has crapped out on me and is currently being serviced back in the US) I got to listen to lots of Dutch radio. I was struck by 2 traits of radio in het Nederland: the first being that the Dutch like to talk A LOT on the radio (it's very annoying when you just want to hear music); speaking of music, the second thing is that Dutch radio stations play an alarming amount of Lionel Ritchie (http://www.lionelrichie.com/) and Bon Jovi (http://www.islandrecords.com/bonjovi/home.las). Since I was stranded in my car I was forced to choose between the two - naturally the Dutch radio announcers won hands down.

While listening to the Dutch announcers I was again struck by two realizations. In chronological order: at first I thought my Dutch was horrible and I couldn't understand what they were saying, but I soon realized that my Dutch was bang-on; the second, upon realizing I understood the announcer, was that this country is NUTS! I listened to the same news update at least 5 times, and at one point I timed how long it was - almost 90 seconds. What were they announcing you might wonder? Why, the list of traffic jams of course - what else? They were going through a roll call of ALL the highways in the Netherlands and listing how long the traffic jams were - ranging from 4km to 76km. Yup - not a typo - 76 fucking kilometers of traffic jam. Again, wtf?

In total they set a record - there were over 800km's of traffic jams on Friday, with some motorists being stranded for the entire day. The ANWB (same as CAA) was driving up and down the emergency lane handing out hot choclate and blankets (much better reaction than the US governement in New Orleans, but I'm not gonna go there).

Step back and think about that for a sec - 800km. This country is roughly 200 km x 400 km, smaller than New Jersey, and containing 800km of traffic jam. I'm sure you could see this from the Space Station! The CIA fact book lists the land use as: 26.7% arable land; 1.0% permenant crops; 72% other. I vote for a new category - 15.8% traffic jams (file in Dutch). Why can't the CIA get more detailed than that - 72% 'other' - that's a pretty large concentration of other, no?

Oh well, at least the Dutch have come to terms with their problem and sitting in traffic is the official Dutch pass-time.