A Danish friend of mine reported that one day he was taking the bus, the busdriver suddenly stopped, turned to look at his passengers and asked if they knew which road he had to take.... I kid you not! That has never happened to me (or not yet) I have given directions to the cabdriver on more than one occasion back home in Denmark but then again, my parents live in a maze of villas.
In Belgium everything gets served with fries, then again, why shouldn't it - they invented the grease soaked little buggers. And mayonnaise.... I don't mind, I actually like the combination but sometimes I miss a good baked potato or rosti's or just plain old boiled taters.
Everything is in at least two languages, French and Dutch and that includes the subtitles on the movies in the cinema, quite confusing to hear the language spoken in English and then rush your eyes to the subtitles and get confused twice followed by missing the next 30 seconds of the movie, having to read more subtitles so get what just happened but not understand it fully.... No need to say, I hardly go to the cinema, I'd rather stay home and read a book where I can turn the page back again if I didn't get it the first time.
Everyone is eager to help you with your language skills (or lack of) and will repeat a word multiple times to get the pronunciation right.... that's very sweet but sometimes my tongue just doesn't turn that way and that word becomes impossible.... much to their amusement. They do not laugh in your face, no they are rather polite people but they give you a knowing smile and a small suppressed chuckle - Dutch is NOT impossible to learn - just bloody hard!
When you around the 6th of December stumble across a thing called Sinter Klaes, when Santa comes by boat from Spain with minions (all painted black as the night) leaving candy and cookies in your shoe and instead of putting out milk and cookies or ricepudding as we do in Denmark, you leave a cube of sugar or a carrot for the white horse the Sint is riding on... oh yes, and all children who are bad, gets put in the sack and taken back to Spain. Of course the children also gets presents on Christmas but also on New Years....
When you have a discussion with your grandmother, trying to explain to her again where you live, that Holland and Belgium is not the same country, they are neighbouring countries and they have the same national language but both have their own government and different monarchs.
They use Azerty keyboards instead of Qwerty (which the rest of the world uses) It's only a few keys difference but dang it makes typing difficult.
I think I could continue for quite a while
