Dutch/Example 13

Tempo Doeloe
Tempo doeloe (or tempo dulu in Bahasa Indonesia) is a term that means something like the Old Days and it mostly refers to the days of Dutch colonial rule before the Japanese invasion of 1942. This video gives you a glimpse of what Batavia (now: Jakarta), the capital of the erstwhile Dutch East Indies, looked like about a year before peaceful Tempo Doeloe came to a violent end. There had been Dutch people living in what was to become Indonesia for many generations. Some already came to the Netherlands around 1950 after the Dutch were forced to throw in the towel on a brutal and cruel War of Independence that it fought against the Indonesians. The last Dutch people to remain in Indonesia were expelled in 1957 and saw all their possession and businesses nationalized at that time. Some had preciously few ties with the cold rainy country they had to learn to call home. They spoke their own variety of Dutch with a verrry rrringing and rrrolling R that you can hear sung by Wieteke van Dort, a Dutch artist who was amongst the exiles of '57. She created the character of 'Tante Lien' an elderly woman from the Dutch East Indies with which she was very successful on television, not just under the Indische Nederlanders.

Study the text of the following two songs and go see the video. The first song describes the culture shock people had when arriving from the Tropics.

The second song is about a beautiful girl with a very specific taste.