Maastricht – Groningen
(Originally published at http://www.troysgonewalkabout.com)
From the very south-east of the country we spent the entire morning on four separate trains getting to the very north-east, ending up in the university town of Groningen. We enjoyed the afternoon in customary fashion, traversing the town’s squares and parks and passing by the rusty old boats crammed end-to-end along the canals.
It was my last night in the country and I had a hatchet I wanted to bury before I left. As kids, both my sisters and I had gone to schools originally founded by Dutch immigrants to Tasmania after the Second World War, and two generations later the cultural ties within the schools were still strong. I remember as an eleven year old at the school fair tasting Olliebollen, a kind of fried doughnut without a hole, but was so overwhelmed by the awfulness of it that even after all these years I could not bear to go near one again.
But in the spirit of reconciliation and letting by-gones be by-gones, I was willing to relinquish my long standing gripe with the Dutch delicacy by having another crack at it. Unfortunately it didn’t even seem to exist in its homeland. I had tried to find it along the beach promenade in The Hague and at stalls in the market square in Maastricht without any success. Now my last chance was here in Groningen and when I went into a takeaway shop as a last resort the man behind the counter looked at me with about as much incredulousness as if I’d asked him for a lap dance. Had the people at my school been making this whole Olliebollen thing up? Had they thrown together any old household refuse they could find into balls, deep fried them, covered them in icing sugar and dished them out to unsuspecting non-Dutchies like myself as some sort of joke? It was only after I returned to Geneva that I found out the truth, Amber had done some more research and e-mailed to tell me that Olliebollen do actually exist, it’s just that they’re only served in Holland as a treat at New Years. That being the case my bigotry against Olliebollen will now probably continue for a while yet.
