For this get-together, we decided to have a joint dinner where we would each make a traditional dish from our country to have dinner together and chat.
We were able to eat potato omelette and Amber brought some traditional Pepernoten, which are like biscuits that are usually eaten at Christmas and have to do with the sinterklaas festival that Amber had already told me about.
I was really surprised that Amber didn’t know about the potato omelette as I thought it was quite a well-known dish. When I talk to people from Finland, they mostly know what I am talking about and many have even tried it. I would also have liked to have made croquettes but they really take a lot more time than I had time for, so it is something we have left unfinished.
In the case of Amber’s dish, I was surprised that for them pancakes with syrup or icing sugar can be a main dish while in Spain they are a dessert. In the case of eating them as a main dish, we usually fill them with savoury ingredients such as ham, cheese, bacon or mushrooms.
I was also surprised that herring is a typical Dutch dish as I thought it was a typical dish in more northerly countries such as Norway. I also didn’t know that liquorice was a typical dish in your country.
After dinner we shared more about the grammar of our countries, as the last few meetings had been more about culture and traditions and we had overlooked this aspect a bit.
We did a little review of our learning and explained to each other some important aspects of the grammar of our languages.
I talked about the use of the masculine and feminine and some of the verbs, although we really have a lot of verb conjugations in the Spanish language.
Amber told me about Dutch verb forms, but it was very confusing for me because I’m not used to it. She told me about endings and how to tell if the ending is a “d” or a “t” and explained more about pronunciations.
Afterwards, we tried to apply all this to the previous knowledge we had and everything we had gone over, but it was really complicated. Maybe we should have talked about all this before and had our meetings also with a little grammar base. However, I think it was a good choice because we were able to go over everything we had learnt and realise that we are really making a lot of progress.
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