Two weeks ago, I spent a few days in Belgium to attend a friend's wedding. As this was my first time in the country - layovers at Brussles Airport do not count - I was eager to get a chance to explore its literary scene, one which I primarily know through the comic book production of the great Francophone masters of the ninth art. However, as I was in Flanders, most of the available literature was in Dutch, a language that I do not speak, but which I find easier to read than French. Moreover, since I travelled via Schiphol, my first opportunity to buy reading material was also in the Dutch language, represented by the Donald Duck comics. For reasons of time and available luggage space, my literary exploration did not delve too deeply into the shelves of Standaard - a Belgian chain of bookshops that I was happy to learn about - but in-between sightseeing, excellent food, and social activities, I was able to practice some of my very rusty Dutch through reading stories both unknown and - in the case of some Donald Duck stories written in the Netherlands and made available in the Norwegian Donald Duck magazine - very familiar. I'm happy to have some materials for learning Dutch, and I look forward to discovering some of those words that are typically encountered in comic books, namely words that might not be very common outside that literary universe, but which do nonetheless carry a lot of cultural context within them.
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