Yes! Anne can!

Like for me it's quite normal to eat peanut butter with 'gekookte worst'. Gekookte worst is a boiled sausage made of pig meat. Or peanut butter with sugar, or peanut butter with 'hagelslag'. (Hagelslag is made of chocolate sprinkles in all different kind of flavours). I think you can combine peanut butter with a lot of things, but the most surprising thing I heard was the combination of peanut butter with pancakes. I have to say that I declared the guy crazy after hearing his peanut butter combination.

I think that from the typical Dutch food , Liquorice is maybe the most shocking to people when they first try it. I know that when one of my best friends brought liquorice to South Africa and let it taste to some people they we're really shocked that she liked it because of the awful taste. Some other quotes from classmates from outside Holland can be captured in a few words: “gross!” “yuck!”. I never really crossed paths with someone from outside Holland who was really fond of liquorice.

Something which keeps surprising me are differences in eating times. Like in the Mediterranean countries. Although it makes sense to eat later in the evening when it's really hot.
Lately I was also chatting with a Dutch friend of mine who’s studying in Spain at the moment. It was around 20:15 when he said he had to go because he had to cook dinner. I replied that I already ate two hours ago. I thought that the Spaniards only ate late in the evening in the summer because of the heat. Well that was clearly not the case, and I think that my friend adapted himself quite well. The funny thing is that the Dutch eating habits are also changing. People used to eat hot meals as a second meal, and bread in the evening. This is currently changed but especially elderly Dutch are still eating a hot meal as lunch.

Further away there are even more differences in eating habits! For example in Asian countries they're really creative with their food. They really eat everything! I still have to find the courage to eat fried scorpions!My niece told me that they tasted like all fried stuff. And that they had a nice crunch.

(<-- My cousin with scorpion)

When I was in China I did eat some different stuff which I don't consider normal! Like Slush puppie ice with beans.. brown beans! Shock! I'm still surprised how they came up with that combo. Brown beans weren't the only things put in, they put in everything with the word bean in it. I had to admit that when I didn't thought about the beans in the ice cream that it was actually quite tasteful.

In return a Chinese friend of mine keeps saying that he really dislikes that Dutch habit of 'het prakken' of their food. Prakken is like mashing all their food together, it's also called stamppot. A few stamppot recipes are Hutspot and Boerenkool. He keeps saying that it's typically Dutch to mash all the food together and that he doesn't understand it.

I think it's really interesting to see how two different cultures are surprised by each other. And that they don't seem to understand why the others are doing that. My point that I wanted to make with these anecdotes about food was that it's all an state of mind. And that as long as you keep an open mind there is a lot more to it than you would think at first. As long as I didn't think about the beans in the ice, it was surprisingly good! You cannot only use this philosophy for food but also with other things. Like for example how to communicate with each other despite culture differences.

All you need is an open mind!