According to the Volkskrant, only one student has registered to study Frisian this year at the University of Groningen, the only university in the country that offers a Bacherlor’s and Master’s degree in the country’s second official language.
Professor Goffe Jensma said on a local radio show in Groningen that new rules allowing universities to set their own fees for second degrees was at the heart of the problem. Grytsje Nicolaij, who already has a degree as a musicologist, was planning to study Fries on the side to keep up with family and friends who spoke the language better than he did. If the university does not attract more students (how many, we don’t know) before October 1, Grytsje will have to brush up on his Frisian elsewhere.
What does Frisian sound like?
Frisian Duo Twarres had a huge hit with ‘Wêr Bisto’ (‘Live, with a Dutch translation). The girl is the guitarist, the guy is the back up singer and they are childhood friends:
Frisian model Doutzen Kroes (L’Oréal, Victoria’s Secret) promotes her mother tongue:
A can’t miss bargain to be had at De Slegte in Amsterdam right now: copies of Gr’omnibus, a treasure trove of sequential art from Groningen, the Athens of the North; an invaluable treasure now yours for only two euro fifty! Why you should bother? Because you get to sample some 40 odd (some very odd) Dutch (as well as the occasional furreign) cartoon talents, culled from the pages of one of the most consistent of Dutch underground comix zines, Gr’nn.
Groningen (Grunn in the local dialect) is one of [the interesting cities outside the Randstad], a university town big enough not to be overwhelmed by it with a decent local art scene and night-life, a city in which over the years a thriving alt-comix scene has been established.
In 1996 a few of them started Gr’unn, which since then has published a lot of up and coming cartoonists. People like Barbara Stok, Mark Hendriks, Amoebe, the Lamelos collective, Marcel Ruijters, Reinder Dijkhuis, Berend Vonk, all had strips in Gr’nn. [...]
So if you’re in Amsterdam and you want a cheap way to sample a huge chunk of the contemporary Dutch comix scene, go get Gr’omnibus from de Slegte. It’s in the middle of Kalverstraat so even tourists should be able to find it.
He is right you know, and today I grabbed myself one of the last four copies. You guys need to hurry!
De Slegte is a chain store for second hand and remaindered books, and very popular in this book-mad country.
Illustrations: cover artist unknown, Vlerk, Jan Krol, and Nico Visscher respectively.
Legend has it that when God created the Groninger, the Groninger said: “Get off my land.” And as if to prove a point, Groningers (and Frisians) still walk across dozens of miles of sea each day, as New York Times reporter David Corn attests:
After about an hour, Mr. Kraster comes to a stop. He says he has some good news and some bad news. For the next stretch, the ground will be less muddy — but the water will be higher. He points in the direction we’ll be heading. I still see nothing but sky and water before us. He could be leading us anywhere — including into deep water. He takes a step, and the water is close to his waist. The rest of us realize we are standing on a ridge and about to take a plunge.
The activity described here is mudflat hiking, wadlopen in Dutch, and is possible because of the unique properties of the Wadden Sea. At high tide the area is a sea, at low tide it is land—partly—and you can cross from the mainland to the Wadden Islands over some of the muddy watersheds. This is exactly what 30,000 people in the Netherlands do each year. Mudflat walking is also possible across the Wadden Sea portions of Germany and Denmark.
Kyteman’s Hip Hop Orchestra won the Popprijs 2009 (‘Pop prize’) in Groningen last Saturday.
The 12-piece-band won one of the most prestigious pop music awards of the Netherlands for its contributions to the genre. The chairman of the jury, Hans Kosterman, called the orchestra “authentic, a source of inspiration, strong-minded and very successful.”
The prize consists of 10,000 euro and a statuette. The annual award was introduced in 1986, when it was given to singer Mathilde Santing. Despite having 10 MCs, the band is perhaps best known for its instrumental, Sorry.
Last night, a group of young artists hung up their own works of art in three major Dutch museum, the Groninger Museum in Groningen, the Bonnefanten Museum in Maastricht and Museum de Fundatie in Zwolle. This act of protest was meant to draw attention to the fact that not just established artists should be in museums, but young, up and coming artists as well.
This morning the Bonnefanten Museum (shown here) said that they found a large black-and-white photo in the old art wing, while de Fundatie found a small colour painting among its collection. Both museums were closed at the time and neither of them has any idea how the art got there. Employees of the Groninger Museum saw a big object in their security cameras and when they went to check it out, the big object had disappeared. Spooky.
So besides this stunt making the news and all, it also tells me how useless the security actually is at all three museums.
This map shows the fake island kingdom the Netherlands could be if its geography fully followed its politics. In the real world, top left dogs Nijmegen and Groningen are separated by 200 kilometres, as are right wing islands Kessel and Urk.
The two regions that in reality do exist as geographical areas are the Bible Belt and the Rode Regio, an area that used to have a lot of communists, basically the Groningen country-side.
I can vouch for the position of Nijmegen, having lived there for ten years. Nijmegen’s and Groningen’s progressive and left-wing attitude may at least in part have to do with a large student body, making up ten percent of the population in the case of Nijmegen. Would the Catholic church have thought that when they started their university there in the 1920s as a bulwark against socialist forces?
Radio DJs Coen Swijnenberg (‘swine mountain’) and Sander Lantinga (wholly unremarkable name) have elected their ‘shame name’ for 2009: Fokje Modder.
Fokje had to fight other strong contestants like Constant Lam (‘continuously drunk’), Wil Krikke (‘wants to have sex’), and Englishman Ben Brack (‘have a hangover’) in an involuntary election of the oddest name of the country.
According to NOS Headlines, Fokje (pronounced fok ye) has never been troubled by her name, but she has never been abroad either.
Considering the amount of Fokjes whose last names end in -(e)ma, I would guess the name stems from Groningen.
Camping ‘t Buitengewoon Groenhoff in Vriescheloo, Groningen, is using sewer pipes to build a ‘bear hotel,’ although intended to house paying human guests instead of bears.
The ‘caves’ will each have a bed and two chairs, and are meant to house the participants of team-building sessions and similar outings. Apparently, the brainstorm that led to this idea was drenched in beer. Staying a day under these spartan conditions will set one back about 100 euro, a price that includes three meals.
The camping is not the first to use sewer pipes as rooms, a hotel in Austria has done something similar before.
Last month, three coin treasures were found in Groningen during archaeological digs. Don’t get all excited though, as a coin treasure is defined as anything over five coins, or as Blackadder character Baldrick would have it, some coins. The biggest find was a collection of half-stuivers, stuivers and double stuivers (a stuiver is the Dutch equivalent of a shilling or a nickel) in a jar, estimated to be worth three monthly salaries at the time they were minted, reports Blik op Nieuws (Dutch).
So who gets the loot? After a find of celtic silver and gold coins near Maastricht two years ago, archaeologist Wim Dijkman of the city of Maastricht told Z24 (Dutch): “According to the law, half of the estimated value goes to the owner of the land, the other half to the finder. Since this find has become an official one, the finder is the city of Maastricht.” That find was estimated to be worth several hundred thousand euro, and since Maastricht wanted to keep the coins for its own collection, it had to pay the land-owners from its own purse.
(By the way, the coins in the picture were found in my own wallet and are not an official treasure.)
The story goes that Alfred Hitchcock phoned prolific French detective writer Georges Simenon (1903 – 1989) once, only to be told by the great man’s secretary that he could not be interrupted, as he had just started working on a new novel. “That’s all right,” Hitchcock said, “I’ll wait.”
In 1927 Simenon had his boat Ostrogoth built, a cutter modelled after the fishing vessels of the English Channel. In 1929, when he arrived in Delfzijl, Groningen, he noticed a leak, the repairs of which kept him there for four months. “I still have vivid memories of my discovery of this pink town, surrounded by dikes, with its walls that weren’t meant to keep out attackers, but were there to keep the streets from flooding with sea water during bad weather,” he writes in a companion article to the 1966 Dutch edition of Le Château des Sables Rouges.
He wrote that novel then and there (“I was still in the habit of writing two or three chapters a day back then”), and when he had finished it, he wondered what the next step would be. Drinking genever one morning in café Het Paviljoen—two, three glasses?—he saw the outlines of a broad-shouldered man through the alcohol induced veils of his imagination. A pipe followed, a bowler hat, a warm overcoat with velvet collar. In short, a proper police commissioner.
Theater te Water will stage a play about the birth of this most famous of all French detectives, Jules Maigret, in Delfzijl starting May 12. The play, called Noord Moord (‘Northern Murder’), will be performed on a boat. Where else?
(Link: Dagblad van het Noorden. Photo of a Pieter d’Hont statue of a Georges Simenon character by Wikipedia user Gerardus, who released it into the public domain.)
In 1996 a few of them started Gr’unn, which since then has published a lot of up and coming cartoonists. People like Barbara Stok, Mark Hendriks, Amoebe, the Lamelos collective, Marcel Ruijters, Reinder Dijkhuis, Berend Vonk, all had strips in Gr’nn. [...]
Legend has it that when God created the Groninger, the Groninger said: “Get off my land.” And as if to prove a point, Groningers (and Frisians) still walk across dozens of miles of sea each day, as 
Radio DJs Coen Swijnenberg (‘swine mountain’) and Sander Lantinga (wholly unremarkable name) have elected their ‘shame name’ for 2009: Fokje Modder. 
Camping ‘t Buitengewoon Groenhoff in Vriescheloo, Groningen, is using sewer pipes to build a ‘
Last month, three coin treasures were found in Groningen during archaeological digs. Don’t get all excited though, as a coin treasure is defined as anything over five coins, or as 
The story goes that Alfred Hitchcock phoned prolific French detective writer Georges Simenon (1903 – 1989) once, only to be told by the great man’s secretary that he could not be interrupted, as he had just started working on a new novel. “That’s all right,” Hitchcock said, “I’ll wait.”
