opening hours a la NL

February 10th, 2006

For those who've missed the cheerful, inspiring, fulfilling and encouraging rants of this blog, there really are two reasons for my recent absence. One is a lack of internet connection at my house, that should get fixed around Easter hopefully. :party: :lazy: :wallbang: The second is, as people often have encouraged me to pursue, I got myself a life. Since I started school on Tuesday, it's been busy times and a stressful schedule. Exciting though. I did in fact have several blog ideas on the stack last week, some not fully developed, but after doing nothing but studying for four days, I've flushed those out of my mind.

In light of this foreign and funny land, I've decided to open a new category - dutchness, for all Dutch things big and small.

With the formalities out of the way, to the meat of the issue. I open today with an excercise. Get up from the chair, walk to the back of the room and read the following text out loud:

9 - 21

Two numbers and a dash, right? Good. This means you are qualified to go shopping in Norway. You see, in Norway, and many other normal countries, stores plaster their opening hours on the neon board next to the store name and you can see it all from 2 blocks away, day and night. Not so in NL. Over here I suppose they saw that and said "where's the fun in that?". And they decide it to make it 'more interesting'. "Maybe if we make our customers come closer to the store, they will more likely enter it?" So they made charts. That's right, charts. This is how you check the opening hours in NL:

9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18
Monday X X X X X X
Tuesday X X X X X X X X

..etc

If you think it sounds silly, I can assure you that it is. The printing is very small, so you have to go right up to the door to read it. A simple 9-21 will just not suffice if you want the semantics to declare opening hours on an hourly basis. You could even fill it in to read (9-12, 14-15, 16-20) just by coloring the boxes.

:: random entries in this category ::

3 Responses to "opening hours a la NL"

  1. erik says:

    I've never seen that... Then again I don't pay much attention to them; having grown up here one simply knows.

  2. ash says:

    We never have huge signs for opening times - though charts aren't really done either. Just small list of the days of the week, with 9:00-19:00 alongside each day, or whatever. They're all pretty small though, so you do have to go right up to the door.

  3. Diana says:

    I have seen those charts also in Germany... :rolleyes: