Sunflowers

From my morning walk with the dog through our neighborhood.

gezellig

If you have an inclination, the curated twitter feed for The Netherlands (https://twitter.com/Netherlanders) this week (7/16/17 or so to the present,) is crushing it. (Normally the Netherlander in question tweets under https://twitter.com/MENEERDEGREEF (just in Dutch.)) He seems a bit brash and loud (yes, loud on twitter.) But I must admit that he is entertaining. He's been covering the untranslatable Dutch concept of "gezellig" all week. (While I just said that the concept was untranslatable, it's closest English equivalent seems to be a hybrid of "cool" and "chill" (Cool, as in "be cool" and chill as in "chill out.") But it also seems like more than that, with an element of hospitality thrown in there for good measure... Wait, wasn't there another paren to close? Yes. Yes there was.)

I love the idea of these curated feeds (popularized by Sweden, and signal boosted by Stephen Colbert as he tried to take it over without being a Swede.) The concept being that a selected "typical" person tweets their unvarnished feelings out at the world from your country's official twitter account. It's too bad the US is too tightly wound to ever go for such a thing.

I think Coloradans, as a subset of Americans, are gezellig enough to handle it, but Californians are definitely not.