the late Kerst dinner
I just came back from the late Kerst dinner generously offered by the Faculty’s dean to all its staff members…
Of course, this is just a way to make us go to the entrance hall and listen to him giving his new year’s speech…
But as a good buitenlander, I stand there, clap when they clap and laugh entusiastically when they laugh… I love doin’it! 
Then it’s lunch time. The table is set nicely like if we were about to eat at some designer food restaurant. The food is
hidding inside alluminium containers, which normally indicates that there will be real food inside. The tables have only
a cloth napkin nicely wrapped up standing on itself and in the middle there is a floral decoration that would look nice on
my desk… not bad at all don’t you think?
…
Then the moment arrives, we can serve our selves. We all get the right to fill 1 mini-dessert dish with as many kroket, loempia,
kaassoufle, broodje, kaas, ham, and (I must confess I was not expecting this) 2 types of salad and a healthy fruit salad… Oh!
I was forgetting… The hot things were there to keep the the kroket, loempia, kaassoufle and the state of the art omelette made
with all the leftovers from yesterday. Dellicious it was, I dare to add… Then you seat down, noticing that most of the people there
don’t normally use napkins for starters so they won’t know what is that cloththing doing there anyway, reacting to it in the same
way they react to the floral decoration… I’m hungry, I start the offensive strike on the food and when I begin to feel satisfied it’s time to
stop a bit and look around once again. This time I see something positively amazing. From the schoonmakers stripped from their
uniforms all dressed up nicely, on to the causal student and professor and right up to the mr. suit nobody knows and the dean
himself, everyone is seating at the same space, eating the same stuff, using their own not pre-washed hands to taste the holy
kroket and drink the spiritual orange juice. It’s something I would like to see in my country, serieuse!
…
And of course, after such a duur meal, it would be too much to expect for cookies and koffie… After all the service was self-service,
so we can always go back to our koffie corner and self-serve it out from the machine ourselves.
F’e cryin’out loud!@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@… I was laughing all the way!
JO
January 5th, 2006 at 5:52 pm
Great post JO! I experienced something similar before Christmas, yeah, it’s real fun… The cleaning ladies are all dressed and made-up, so you can’t even recognise them, while the professors keep on talking about physics with their mouth full of kroket, and the students are serving wine or drinking wine…
January 6th, 2006 at 1:55 pm
it’s even more fun when you understand what he is telling … because he isn’t intentionally being funny … he’s just not that good in speeching / presenting …
for example, at one point he stated that the goal for phd-graduations of 2006 for our faculty is 22.5 … we all wondered who the 0.5 is ?
at another point he was talking about the reorganisation he initiated and that some people had their doubts about it, which was good because there needs to be a dialogue … ‘but you eventually have to do what i say’ he concluded … (you can see he’s a former army officer) … and more of this …
… i was expecting broodjes kaas en hesp for lunch … so i was surprised to see the kroketten en souflees and salad …