3 meats 3 cheeses

LIZ SAYS:It started when I told my French friend Frederic that we were going to visit Amsterdam. We had taken him to one of our new Chinese finds to have the fab cabbage and some noodles. Delicately picking the red papery pepper flakes out of his food with his chopsticks, he remarked,
“The Dutch have 3 cheeses and they all taste the same and they have 3 hams which also all taste the same.”
Okay, Frederic was being his lovely French self, so of course any cuisine but French would be inferior.
Cut to our breakfast cart in Amsterdam. Lift up the cover and what do we find? 3 meats, 3 cheeses that did in fact taste all the same. Okay, the darker ham was closer to, but yet, far from prosciutto, but seriously, the cheeses were all the same. Okay one had some sort of seed in it, but it did not affect the taste.
So, we take a taxi to visit our friends Eric and Jo at the Milkweg. They run the restaurant, but more about that later. The driver is what Dick calls a card. He is funny, clever and has an answer for everything. He immediately launches into world politics. Every one in Europe is a bastard for one reason or another, mainly they started some war at some point. So, being caught up in the whole cheese thing I ask, “Which is better, Gouda or Edam”. He launches into a whole diatribe. The politics of both are bad, and they hate each other. I am totally lost in “what the hell land” when he says, “Oh, you mean the cheeses.” At that point, I could not stop laughing.
When we went to a couple of restaurants, the menu listed “New Dutch cheese and Old Dutch cheese,” period.
Coming from France, this is a truly sad state of affairs. What is new and old? What about sheep, cow, goat, even soy? Aged with ash, paprika, secret waxes, you name it for how long. My God, are these people savages?
I never figured out what the breakfast cheeses were, gouda, edam or other. My, my, I am a long way from Wisconsin.