Cat man cometh

We don't talk about it much on this James D.-centred blog (tending to focus on the easy positive aspects of an adorable and generally entertaining subject) but life in a little provincial Dutch town can get boring and lonesome at times. Don't get me wrong, we have made good friends here that transcend the cultural gaps easily and who make life enjoyable. I guess the difference is with other places we've lived in our own culture; after a couple of years you expect to feel pretty comfortable and set in some sort of social scene. The general feeling you get with most people here (and I mean in the region we are in- Amsterdam and the east are quite different) is that maybe you have something weird on your face, or your pants are on inside-out. Not immediately friendly, lets say. We've tried to get past this- its not a fair comparison to living in the sometimes overdone, outward friendliness in the American South, and I'll repeat that its not everyone but its just still weird. The expression here is that 'you have to watch the cat out of the tree', which confused us for quite a long time but means basically you can't go up to the locals and expect them to jump at the chance to meet a stranger; you have to be patient enough until they decide to trust you. The longer we are here, the more irritating this expression becomes to me- we may be leaving in six months- will we wave goodbye to the cat still in the tree?
We went to a party at a friend's house the other night (only the second time James has had a babysitter) and had a great time until exceptionally late. We talked to a Dutch man there who worked for Heineken and had lived in Africa for seven years and other places in the world. I though it was really interesting that he considerd it much more difficult to adapt to a culture that was seemingly similar to your own than one vastly different. He said in Africa there was no choice- you loved it or hated it; but that here where most people assume that differences are minor because of the apparent similarities (wealthy, mostly white, Western, Anglo Saxon based) there are more misunderstandings because the really fundamental differences are below the surface of society. What are they? We didn't quite work that out.
What prompted this whole entry though, was something hopeful that happened last week on our little block. Its taken a while here, but some of the neighbors are pretty interesting, if not wild about actual interaction. There is of course our neighbor to the left, an Indonesian man who cranks his moped up at 4am every morning to go to work. We often get Reader's Digest books to give to him from the mailman- we call him the Troll because he is always hiding in his backyard and he has a poster from the movie on his front door. There are also the people across the street whose dogs HATE our dogs, making random street conversations difficult. They also have two cats that the wife occasionally hangs out the top half of their 'Dutch' door for some fresh air. But the real cat man is down the street on the right. I often felt a little sorry for him- every time I walk the dogs by he is in there by himself, feeding the 15 cats that are always crowded around him.
Last week it rained really hard for a couple of days in a row; I'm always meaning to clean out our gutter but just haven't managed the time since the spring. Well, about the third day that it was pouring down, I came home from the gym to find the cat man, covered in filth, on a ladder leaning against our house. He had gone down the street cleaning gutters because, well because he apparantly has a heretofore unknown streak of niceness. When I thanked him profusely, he just said it was no problem and laughed when I told him of my best intentions for house maintenance. Does this mean the cat has been watched out of the tree?