I should have known the holiday was going to be interesting when I got my left and right confused somewhere between Amsterdam and Utrecht. There I was, smugly following the sat nav, congratulating myself on navigating Dutch motorways like a seasoned European, when I realised I'd been circling the same roundabout for ten minutes. Turns out I'd programmed "Bunschoten" but my brain had decided "Spakenburg" was where I actually needed to be. They're basically the same place, I told myself. They are not, as the very patient man at the petrol station explained, though he found it hilarious enough to tell his colleague, who then told a customer, who then waved at me for the rest of my stay.

The property itself was one of those proper Dutch holiday homes, all neat angles and surprisingly steep stairs that I would later learn to fear after one gin and tonic too many. But the arrival, the actual moment of pulling up and thinking "this is it, this is my week" - that belonged entirely to the neighbours.

Within four minutes of me opening the boot, a woman appeared from the house directly opposite. Not emerged. Appeared, like she'd been waiting behind her curtain since dawn. "You're the English," she announced, which wasn't a question. "I'm Truus. I speak English from the television." She then listed every British crime drama she'd ever watched, rating my likely personality against various detectives. Apparently I had "Midsomer Murders energy, the nervous one who finds the body." I chose to take this as friendly.

Truus had opinions about everything, delivered in a magnificent accent that made "bin day" sound like poetry. She informed me that the previous occupants had been "loud Germans, very nice, but they barbecued fish and the smell stays in the bricks." She tapped the wall of my holiday home for emphasis. I nodded seriously, as one does when being told about phantom fish.

The actual key handover happened with the owner's cousin, a man called Henk who arrived on a bicycle that looked older than my parents. He had one of those faces that crinkles entirely when he smiles, which was often, usually at my expense. I couldn't work the fancy Dutch lock, you see. It had some system involving lifting while turning while praying, and I stood there like a complete lemon until Henk gently removed the key from my hand and demonstrated. "You have soft hands," he observed, not critically, just as fact. "Office hands. We have farmer hands here." He held his up, proud as anything, and I found myself actually examining my palms with newfound shame.

That first evening, I took a wander down to the harbour area, because Spakenburg's fishing heritage is genuinely lovely and I needed to escape Truus's ongoing commentary about my parking technique. At a little cafe, I met two elderly gents playing cards with the intensity of international poker. They insisted I watch, then insisted I play, then insisted I drink something local that tasted of liquorice and regret. One of them, Klaas, had been a fisherman for forty years and told me stories about the old days with such vivid detail that I forgot I was meant to be eating dinner. His friend Piet mostly grunted, but when he did speak, it was to deliver devastating one-liners about Klaas's card-playing that had me actually snorting with laughter.

By the time I stumbled back to the holiday home, slightly licoriced and thoroughly charmed, Truus was waiting. "You found the fishermen," she said, satisfied. "Piet owes me five euros. I said you'd last two hours with them. You lasted three." She'd bet on my social stamina. I was oddly flattered.

That night, lying in the strange silence of a Dutch village where everyone apparently knows your business before you've even introduced yourself, I felt that lovely holiday feeling of being slightly outside your own life. I'd arrived confused, been adopted by a television-educated neighbourhood spy, humbled by a bicycle-riding lock expert, and adopted by competitive pensioners. The actual accommodation was comfortable, clean, perfectly pleasant. But the people, the glorious, nosy, generous, teasing people - they were what made arriving somewhere new feel like coming home, if home was a place where your every move was watched, judged, and warmly approved of from behind net curtains.