“Welcome to Koeienland”
A tale of Mark, slang, and the foreigner who dared to learn too much

He’d been in the Netherlands for two years.
He’d mastered the grammar, the fiets, the Albert Heijn bonuskaart.
But still… something was missing.

He wanted real Dutch.
The stuff they don’t teach in NT2 classes.
The things whispered behind Lidl at midnight, yelled from scooters, or muttered on TikTok over mayonnaise-drenched kapsalon.

“Teach me slang,” he typed into Reddit.
“I want to understand words like kankermongool and koeienland.”
He chuckled.

But then…

A gust of wind.
A low hum from his Ziggo modem.
The lights flickered.

And then—

Mark.
Rutte.
In the room.
Uninvited. Unflinching. Unstoppable.

“You want to learn Dutch slang?” he said, eyes like parliamentary coalitions—endless, shifting, inescapable.
“Slang is power. Slang is survival. Slang is… strategy.”
He took a step closer.
The room smelled faintly of stroopwafels and wet bicycle seats.

“You think kankermongool is a joke?”
“It’s a linguistic nuclear weapon, my friend. Wielded only by those born between dijken and doom.”
Then he leaned in—far too close—
And whispered in Dutch, perfectly enunciated, with deadly calm:

“Welkom in Koeienland.”
And he laughed.

Not softly. Not politely.
He laughed kijkhard, the kind of laugh that echoes down marble corridors and into coalition agreements.

When the lights came back, he was gone.
But every time the man now hears Dutch teens yelling from a bus stop,
He feels it:
The shadow of Mark.
Watching. Judging. Laughing.

Forever.