Gezellig

I love Little Miss Sunshine. Of course my favorite scene is at the pagaent when little Olive is performing her dance. As she's dancing unaware of why the audience is offended, her family joins her on stage. It reminds me of how important family and friends can be when you are at the lowest point of your life. We all get through life scathed and unscathed in our own ways. We have those moments of disappointment when we have friends and family there to dance with you in those embarrassing moments. Sometimes, like little Olive you don't realize how embarassing.

I remember first hearing the Dutch word "gezellig" and I was instantly fascinated. It was given as an example of a word that can't be translated ironically in a Spanish class. The fact that it means cozy, belonging, intimate but as I understood it, you would know it when you felt it. To someone like me that always felt like an outsider. I had no idea what gezellig really meant, but I had an idea of how it would feel. I was a bit of an eccentric and honestly I enjoyed it, I had a happy childhood. As I grew into adulthood I realized that was the experience many people had unless they tried hard to fit in. This feeling of "gezellig" eluded me. The fact that the Dutch had a word for this made me all the more fascinated with the Dutch. A culture that has such a word must feel it so often. It's part of the essence of the Dutch.

Years later, in 2000, I would find myself about to start a carpentry class. As I went through the course catalog I found a Dutch class listed. As luck would have it, it was after my carpentry class on Saturday morning. I ended up taking the class for the equivalent of 2 semesters. It was a small class, as you can imagine. Like many Dutch people have asked me with a laugh since I tell them this story, "Who takes Dutch classes?" There were 2 women that were married to Dutch husbands. The first semester there was one woman who was expecting a baby the following spring so she was only with us the following semester. Then there was also a journalist that was moving to the Netherlands to be with his Dutch partner. He left in the spring. Last but not least there was me, who was just there to find a sense of gezellig. After the beginning class there was a much larger advanced class comprised mostly of Dutch Americans that studied Dutch as part of their heritage. They would discuss literature and poetry in Dutch. I relied very heavily on my 4+ years of German classes. The year prior to that I was taking German classes at the Goethe Institut to refresh my German. My Dutch instructor was very understanding, and being Dutch she was fluent in German, as well as French, so she was able to help me with pronunciation.

I feel a sense of gezellig now that I feel like I'm making Leiden my home. I felt it when I was speaking to the peony vendor in Dutch. I know I'm going to feel homesick and I still haven't gone through a Dutch winter, but like the Dutch, the feeling of gezellig will get me through it.