Don Landlord

We’ve just had our land lord visit to check if everything is in order with the house before we move out next month. Its the first time we’ve ever met the man face to face since we’ve usually dealt with another member of his family. I woke up early this morning to tidy the house even though I was feeling a little hung over from a night of drinking with co-workers and making drunk plans to challenge other games companies in a series of dance offs.

Our landlord runs one of the Italian restaurants in town which also seems to be a family business. He’s a man of few words and seems to prefer wearing suits. This all added to the effect of him looking like an aging Don when he arrived with his wife and a plumber in tow. We suspected if he really is a Don the plummer was actually a hit man who is involved in ‘wet work’ that does not include pipes and water.

The whole process had to be done in Dutch since they did not speak much English. Luckily my Scottish flat mate is flaunt in Dutch but this meant I was reduced to smiling and nodding. However so was he when they started talking in Italian amongst themselves.

The reason for the plummer was to check the damaged shower (and luckily not to whack us). We where never able to get them to do anything about it before so I had to fix it myself in my own un-skilled way. Now they are going to have to take the whole floor out to see where the shower is leaking and fix it. The good thing is it seems like they are not going to charge us for it. Maybe it was the day of his daughter’s wedding when no Don can refuse to do someone a favor.

However this might mean Don Landlord will ask us for a ‘favor’ in return one day.

Stuart

Stuart is an accident prone Englishman who has been living in the Netherlands since 2001. Even his move to the country was an unintentional accident, the result of replying to a cryptic job advertisement he found one day in a local British magazine. Since then he has learned to love the Dutch (so much so that he married one of them) and now calls the country home. He started the blog Invading Holland in 2006 as a place to share his strange stories of language misunderstandings, cultural confusions and his own accident prone nature.

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