Saturday, October 13, 2012

New year in the Netherlands

My friend is pondering over coming to Amsterdam for New Year’s Eve. I just received a question of how the Dutch people celebrate New Year’s Eve. While my experiences of the Dutch New Year are limited to one, I came up with two main ingredients and the Dutch guy added the third

  1. Oliebollen. Lots of oliebollen, with or without raisins.
  2. Fireworks. With a healthy disregard of any safety instructions. It’s completely OK to set fireworks on your small street and then take few steps back.
  3. Going to a bar before/just around New Year and kiss everyone there. And pay a lot of money for the ticket.

The theory is now there, I will spend my next New Year’s Eve gathering empirical evidence for these hypotheses.

Tuesday, August 7, 2012

Road racing

I got a chance to borrow a bicycle for few weeks. And not just any bicycle, but a real road racing bike (sounds even cooler than what it really is :-). Besides hockey, biking really fast through the streets of the Netherlands with very tight outfits is one of the national sports here. I have so far only experienced the slow rolling with my hippie bike. Putting on full biking gear including click-to pedals was somewhat scary. The first time we practiced in our front yard multiple times clicking off-clicking on-clicking off and me getting more scared by the minute. 

The one racing bike that lives with us
It took quite some persuasion to make the next step and get out to our street. And I definitely did not want to go there while the neighbors' kids were playing out. Probably all the dutch kids here spend 50% of their waking up time on bike, so I was  planning not to go there to humiliate myself, or even worse, get instructions from 7-year-olds :) In the late hours of the day I did some circles on the street and actually the faster I went, the easier it got!

After that, we did few biking trips around ~40 kms in the surroundings of Utrecht. It was nice to see the country from a different perspective, while going through country side, forests and hills (yes, we found even those in these flat lands..!). I was convinced that I need to get me a bike also and add it as not only exercising routine but also a way to see enjoy the outdoors and maybe improve my navigation skills.

My goal is to train enough so that I could participate on a bike riding event for girls, one being mid-September in Den Bosch the distance being either 35 or 69 km. First step is then to shop a bike for me. Next week we are going to visit the Bianchi store to see what kind of bike would be good one. My selection is at the moment based solely on color & looks, but somehow my selection of the nicest bike also seems to be the most expensive one..

Sunday, August 5, 2012

Gardening

Today while the Dutch guy went to enjoy a biking race called "Hell of Heuvelrug" (which would be enough to keep me away at least), I decided to continue with some gardening work since the weather was also perfect.

Our garden is somewhere between Babylon's hanging gardens and a wild meadow, to which we every now and then try to do something to keep it completely taking over the house. Since every Dutch home seems to have a perfectly maintained garden, we are a happy exception of that. The amazing thing with the other gardens is, that you rarely see anyone actually doing garden work. I've yet to find out the secrets of Dutch gardening. Netherlands is also the only place where I've seen those geometrical shapes in trees, that I thought were mainly only in Donal Duck.



The stones ARE actually there! (notice the big pile of green stuff in the lower left corner)
After some time I was able to get our patio visible again and create my own blogging corner there. As a result of this heavy gardening during past days we've got few regulars hanging out here as well. One brown and one black bird, who are enjoying the nice and fresh worms that we have exposed while turning everything upside down and a cat that looks exactly like Garfield. He definitely enjoys chilling out in our relatively relaxed and wild garden. Maybe it is the only place where he can dream of being a lion in the savannah, following the prey while being half hidden in the lawn/meadow.

Is there any way to save these..?
Garfield


Tomatoes!! 


This looked really nice in the garden store. We try to keep it looking nice.













Apparently it is really bad apple year throughout the country, not just in our tree. However there's at least three apples!

Saturday, July 28, 2012

Watching TV

One of the great helps in learning a language is TV. There are lot of channels which enable subtitles for dutch programs. It's like killing two birds with one stone, you can both hear the language and  actually understand something when seeing the text as well. Sometimes in real-time things (such as the news) the timing is slightly off which makes it more confusing than actually helping.

(http://www.flickr.com/photos/sarahreido/3245498261/)
It seems in the Netherlands there are really no social boundaries in what you can say / show on TV. Many times I've sat on the couch and thought that if that would've been in Finland, it would be such an faux pas. But here it seems to be completely OK to bring people on TV (even against their will) and ask very personal questions and find ways of making people look just simply bad/sad/strange or weird.

Few interesting shows either for language learning or spotting akward social situations are

  • Lingo - a great program for learning language, as it is about guessing dutch words with different amount of letters. Everything is also spelled out very c-l-e-a-r-l-y.
  • Spuiten en slikken (Shoot and swallow) - the few episodes I've seen were either about people using drugs in the most sadest places or then something to do with prostituion.
  • any program with Mart Smeets - He is the icon of dutch sports (who looks like it's been few years since he has been actively sporting), and most probably you will spot him during Tour de France sitting in a beautiful French chateau drinking some nice red wine and talking to the lucky ones, who have gotten the honor to appear by his side on TV.
  • De wereld draait door - discussion program that seems to be on EVERY DAY. And EVERY DAY there is the same guy with his strange hair. I heard that once the program was cancelled as he got sick during, but otherwise he must be the most seen face on TV.
  • Interviews of famous people - these are always good, especially for spotting akward social situations. Latest example was an interview of a family of a famous dutch woman cyclist. Her brother had some issues with mental health, and the interviewer, tactful as always, asked: "So how did it make you feel that while your sister was winning the world championship, you were sitting inside a room and staring at the wall and having a nervous breakdown?" Like, did I miss that this was a contest of how low can you go with your questions..
  • Talkshows - One talkshow decided it was a good idea to have a surgeon cut out a piece of flesh from both hosts, and then they would eat a piece of each other while the one who was "being eaten" watched. How gezellig! Another one arranged a debate between a association for pedophiles and on the other side the parents of the victims of pedophiles. You can imagine the atmosphere in that room..
  • Reality shows - shows such as "will you go out with me" where 20+ girls say either yes/no to a guy who walks on stage, can be also quite brutal. Or how about a show, where a teenage boy comes out of the closed in front of his classmates - would not work in Finland :-) Also one nice one is Marry my son, where moms are trying to find wives for their sons.
  • Boer zoekt vrouw - my favorite! People from dutch countryside are looking for husbands/wives. Only worry there is (or the Dutch guy has), is that I get this countryside "boer" accent :-)
  • Grenzeloos verliefd - stories of people who move abroad to be with their loved ones. This one I can relate to!

Monday, June 25, 2012

Language studying update and other things

It's been a long time since last blog post. Our time has been spent on getting back to normal every day life after our reeeeeeallly amazing holiday. Sadly we missed the nice part of the Dutch summer, which usually takes place in April & May. Now we are enjoying the real Dutch summer, which means rain, thunderstorms, wind and some more rain and occasionally sun coming through the clouds on unpredicted times.

We landed to the Netherlands on Friday morning at the end of May, and on Saturday morning I had my final Dutch exam for the course I was doing in the Volksuniversiteit. The timing was far from perfect, sspecially since the last 6 weeks was practically spent talking English in the US except for the rare occasions of communicating in Dutch when we didn't want others to understand us. I then spent a-not-so-efficient Friday trying to pickup again on the grammar and the vocabulary while trying to stay awake despite of the jetlag. I thought at least I can give it a try and go and see if I can make any sense of the final exam. And against the odds, I actually passed it! So now I'm officially eligible to write in my CV that guys, I can do dutch in level A2! The question is, how many people really can decipher what it means :-)

After being really annoyed in making stupid mistakes in the test (like forgetting basic verb forms) I decided I will pick up my self studying again. I also wanted to check for how to continue the language studies and after some googling I decided to enroll for a class in Utrecht University. I hope it is going to be bit more fast paced then the one in Volksuniversiteit, and this should get me close to a level where I could take the NT2 test. The NT2 test basically qualifies one to e.g study in a university in the Netherlands in Dutch etc. As a goal oriented person, I've set the goal for myself to take the test somewhere in first quarter of next year (I'm a project manager at work, hard to guess, right? :-)

In the mean time, my self-study program consists of eg. good TV programs, such as Boer zoekt vrouw (farmer seeks a wife) and intelligent reading. The Dutch guy warns that I should not start learning how to speak from the farm people, as that might severely affect my future in the whole country. I should find out what he is referring to...





This group of magazines was available only for ~8 euros. It is meant for all those women who have nothing to do while their men are watching football. The Dutch guy had bought me these during my last work trip and they were waiting for me on our kitchen table. These are such good practice for language, and I learn things that I certainly cannot pick from the language books such as names of all kinds of royal family members and words that teenagers use when they are having a crush on somebody. And btw. it is really cool when you can actually read an whole article and really understand what it is about!



On our Sunday walk we spotted this sign saying "Koe zoekt stier" which means cow seeking a bull. I don't know though whether on the sleepy sideroads of Bunnik this message is really delivering a result..

The tricky part of studying Dutch with a group of beginners is also that most of your speaking exercises are with people who cannot really correct you when you say something wrong, and on the other hand you have the possibility to enjoy the most interesting pronunciations of other beginners. Therefore I found this blog post as a consolation when somebody else has noticed that too :)

I also try more and more to use Dutch at my work even though that is still one big struggle, mainly because of my inability of allowing me making mistakes. Somehow I end up in a situation where I think it is better not to say anything at all then to say something with the possibility that there might be some wrong format or wrong choice of de/het not to even mention the impossible word order of Dutch language. It is difficult to put yourself in the position where you really feel that everything you say basically sounds like you are in the level of 3-year-old. But getting there.. slowly.. :-)

Saturday, April 7, 2012

Vacation \o/

Last weeks have been spent wrapping up everything at work, getting the garden ready to face the summer (which included for example getting rid of a bike, that was hanging besides the house and gets grown in by the plants every summer) and in general making sure we are ready to leave everything for over a month. Few neighbors also saw our activation on the gardening front (we are not the green thumbs of this street) and offered all kinds of help from borrowing tools and trash cans to explaining what could be completely removed away.

The preparations combined with frequent traveling in work has left this blog to be left in the shadows for a while. But no worries! I will return refreshed after our vacation, and I already have a long list of weird dutch things to write about :-) In the mean time, you can follow our vacation here.

Tot ziens!

Tuesday, March 20, 2012

Giant frogs and alcohol

Did you know, that carnival is celebrated also in the Netherlands? Before living here, I thought carnival is mainly celebrated in Rio and Venice. How wrong was I! As partly Catholic country, Netherlands also celebrates the carnival time. The celebrations are mainly centered on the "south side of the river" in Noord-Brabant and Limburg.

Our little village on the "wrong side of the river" is however an oddity amongst others (strongly catholic?), and also celebrates the carnival. Therefore I got a chance to see the mini-carnival few weeks ago. We went to get groceries one Saturday in February, and suddenly there was a huge frog on the road. The frog was the undisputed centre-of-attention of the carnival leading the way. I learned, that Bunnik's name changes into "Kikkerloo" at the time of the carnival. So, for few days I lived in place that is named after a big green frog. Kind of cool.

Since it is quite impossible to describe precisely the parade itself, here are few pictures to illustrate the things encountered. My all time favorite was the sauna-like jacuzzi where people kept jumping out when it became too hot. Please add also a max volume 90's disco music as a background music to the pictures, so you can really tune yourself in to the same wavelength.

I have to say, this is quite nice way of also making it socially acceptable to drink in the middle of the day - for three days. In any other time it is only sad. One of the carnival caravans was handing out beer with a fish net. If it would have been cider, I would have definitely opted for one :)






Needless to say, in Finland some official authority would probably prohibit these kind of motorised undefinable moving things in a record time ;)

P.S. Based on stories heard from the "real carnival" cities, I think ours was interesting curiosity, but probably a a bit pale representation of the real thing. Maybe next year I will drag the Dutch guy to the other side of the river to see how the carnival is really celebrated ;)

Wednesday, March 7, 2012

Dutch courage

I recently heard a term used in english language called "Dutch courage". I did not have an idea where this is referring to, so with a quick googling I found the following from Wikipedia ()

"Dutch courage or liquid courage refers to courage gained from intoxication by alcohol. Originally the phrase 'Dutch courage' referred to the courage that results from indulgence in Dutch gin (jenever), but 'Dutch courage' can also refer to the gin itself.

In 1650 Franciscus Sylvius, a Dutch doctor, created Dutch gin in an attempt create a diuretic medicine. This was then used by soldiers in the Thirty Years' War by English troops and was an instant success for its believed warming properties on the body in cold weather[citation needed] and its calming effects before battle. Because of the effects of Dutch gin English soldiers fighting in the Dutch Republic in the 17th century apparently called the drink 'Dutch Courage'."

The context I heard it was referring to a situation, that you need to "get some Dutch courage" before doing something. I was puzzled by what was meant, was it suggesting that you need to be Dutch before doing something? Or do you need to have extra portion of cheese & mustard in order to be really courageous? But in essence it actually means, get some alcohol in to your system! As I have not bumped into significant amount of people being very drunk or taking sips of alcohol from a small bottle hidden in their sleeves, it is bid misleading nowadays I would say. I think there is plenty of courage in Dutch people even without alcohol - at least they have no problems being very direct! ;) I think though the Dutch courage could be useful saying in Finland, where it probably happens more nowadays as well. Sometimes a bit of alcohol is needed to get the bit more reserved/quieter Finns to talk ;)

In order to get some Dutch courage on me, I decided to emphasize it with some nice kaasblokjes and dill mustard. Please note also, the liquid in the Hoegaarden glass is not really beer, but cider. I just like the glass so much :)

Sunday, March 4, 2012

Dutch cities - Middelburg

I am starting to gradually believe the sentence I have heard multiple times - that there's much more than Amsterdam in the Netherlands. Last weekend I was taken to a surprise visit to Zeeland (bte New Zealand's name comes from this province, so I guess it is the Old Zealand). It was amazingly beautiful there. We stayed the night in Middelburg, which is a very old city and the capital of province Zeeland. We were also lucky with extremely beautiful spring weather. Below few pictures from our one night getaway.

Houseboats on the river
Bakery in the shopping street, and next to that cheese/winestore. The trio is made complete by a chocolate store.
Central square of Middelburg
Lots of ships ready to set their sails to the ocean
Windmills on the coast
On our way back to Bunnik we stopped on many islands and beaches
Travellers
Our hotel was small and symphatetic near the railway station
In the summer these beaches are going to be bit more crowded...
.. But there were still few others, like this woman riding with a horse in the ocean.
During the getaway we also enjoyed the Dutch cuisine as well as neverending beer selection.. ;)

 

Thursday, March 1, 2012

Relocating to a new place

What a week.. tomorrow is (hopefully) Friday and I can spend the weekend recovering and charging batteries. This week has been mainly about work, work, and again work.

When reading other expats' blogs describing the first months of relocating to a new country, it makes me feel sometimes a teeny-tiny jealous. There are stories of settling in, getting to know your surroundings by making long walks during the day, going to museums and slowly adapting to the new country around you. While I have this dream picture, the reality can be somewhat different. There are also moments of loneliness, dependency of the other person who might be the only social contact in the beginning and a sense of general lack of purpose.

Therefore in moments of exhaustion, I try also to look on the bright side and think, that I'm actually quite lucky being able to relocate to a country where I have almost everything ready. House was provided by the Dutch guy, work I arranged myself by relocating from our Finland office to the one in Den Bosch and language course is in progress. Slowly, but steadily.. :-)

I believe work is also one of the things that has made it easy for me to start building the normal, every day life so quickly here. But I can't help it to sometimes dream of this careless museum-wandering period..

The next step in the adaption process is to start getting to know people here, also those outside work. Currently my family and friends are back in Finland (except for the Dutch guy of course), and while I wish I could just export them here to the Netherlands, that is unlikely to happen. Therefore making connections in my new home country is essential for future. I wish I'd be one of those "I can network even with a cactus" type of persons. As an introvert Finnish person this takes some time though.. ;)

P.S. A nice curiosity for this week is a http://www.nationalecomplimentendag.nl/ - a national compliment day, never heard of such a thing before!

Sunday, February 26, 2012

Advertising works (sometimes)

Today I fell as a victim of a commercial, in other words the commercial worked as it is supposed to. Few days back I happened to see an ad of a new McDonald's milk shake. In normal life these type of commercials would go totally unnoticed, but this time it was different. They had managed to create a dream combination - speculaas milk shake! For all those who are not familiar with this pearl of Dutch cuisine - speculaas is a spicemix made of several spices creating an addictive combination. In other words, it is really good. I first got familiar to it while eating an apple pie made by the Dutch guy and immediately went on sniffing the jar of koek en speculaaskruiden. I don't know though whether there is a difference with the pure speculaaskruiden and the koek en speculaaskruiden, but that remains to be seen. Even though the milk shake was good, I had maybe just a bit too high expectations for it.



Then to a more serious topic, commercials can be affecting also in other ways. On our way to work the Dutch guy asked did I see the picture on the bus stop with a text "Ik ben inmiddels overleden". It is a campaign to promote the awareness of ALS disease, and the pictures represent people who have it. However the twist is, that the pictures are only published once the person has passed away, thus the text "In the mean time I have died". Quite powerful I'd say. There was one guy interviewed who has/had the disease, and he said he refused the campaign because he did not want his under-aged kids to see big posters of him throughout the city afterwards, which is also quite understandable.

Wednesday, February 22, 2012

Mushroom buns

Learning and adapting to new things also makes you think more about where you come from. In certain moments, when for example lunching with Dutch colleagues and feeling really frustrated when your Dutch conversation skills are matching to a level of 3-year old, it is sometimes good to just do things you are familiar with. Or so I thought...

Finland is by no means a catholic country, but we do have our own carnival type of celebration this time of year. It is called 'Laskiainen' which means something like counting down but also freely interpreted as sledding downhill. It usually is around the skiing holidays in week 8, and as well as going outside and playing in the snow and doing lots of sledding, we also eat a special kind of sweet pastry, 'Laskiaispulla'.

I had the recipe, I had my imported baking bowls and cardamom, accompanied with yeast, flour, butter, milk and sugar from the Albert Heijn. Yes, the Dutch guy thought I was a bit loosing it when I came back from my last Finland trip with three pipes of cardamom, but it is different here! Really! :)



I was ready to go and amaze the Dutch guy with some nice pulla from Finland. As a modern day expat, instead of calling home to mom I googled the recipe and followed it very precisely. I was thinking, that I didn't realise they are so healthy as I needed really small amount of sugar and butter for the baking. The dough felt good, and I left it to rise. The pulla's went to the oven and everything was still fairly OK. During the 8 crucial minutes they were in there, something strange happened. I took out from the oven 8 mushroom looking little pulla's, which had a very hard outer shell, almost like bread. This is of course not at all how they are supposed to be.


I felt kind of sad, and said to the Dutch guy that basically these are now totally disastrous and maybe I just need to hand in my "I'm Finnish" card because even this goes wrong. We ate few with whipped cream, and indeed the looks can deceive, as they were not completely bad. Somehow they just didn't taste really sweet, but the Dutch guy claimed they are very nice. (He is a well raised Dutch person).

Today I called mom and complained also to her about failing miserably when making the pulla. When I told about the recipe I used, she said it sounds really strange and it turned out, it had 50 % too little butter and sugar. That sort of explains! Now I got a new real recipe to my email, and I will try with better luck in the coming weekend. Learning point, even though being separated by few thousand km's, call mom when in doubt :-)

Sunday, February 19, 2012

Legendary ice-skating

I knew the Dutch are extremely enthusiastic about cycling, but what came as a surprise that during winter time the enthusiasm stays the same but the target shifts. Elfstedentocht. Ice skating. The world's largest and longest speed skating competition, and probably the most irregularly and unexpectedly held sporting competition ever, takes place in the Netherlands. Since end of January I have learned many new and most probably very useful Dutch words, that I just needed to share here a few.

Elfstedentocht is a legendary 200 km ice skating tour that is held every year in the Netherlands - if the weather allows. I believe it is legendary for two reasons; skating 200 km in one day is amazing, and you never know when this competition takes place. Last time the race through the canals of northern Netherlands took place in 1997. This does not stop the yearly speculation though, and this year it was my first chance to fully see the Elfstedentochtkoorts (Elfstedentocht fever) in action. Lukily (?) I was few days also sick at home having a regular koorts, and this gave me chance to extensively dive in to the skating excitement. Around the same time a Dutch movie "De hel van '63" was shown on TV, which was a story of Elfstedentocht in a nice winter weather (-18 c). Combining my media research through non-stop news, discussions and talk shows as well as this movie, I learned at least the following important Dutch words.

It giet oan!
This is actually not ducth, but Frisian. However, since the tocht takes place in the Friesland, it is good to learn as well. In Dutch it is "Het gaat door" which very freely translated means "It's going to happen!". When already the waiting and speculating of the Tocht gets the media completely excited, I think hearing these three words would be enough to make the whole country go upside down. Since 1909, it has taken place only 15 times. Interestingly three of them took place during the Second World War.

Rayonhoofd
These guys are extremely important for the Elfstedentocht. The tocht takes place in total of 22 regions, and each region has it's own rayonhoofd. This guy (probably there are no women involved) is responsible of the ice thickness of his region. The gathering of the rayonhoofden is extremely big news, that means of course that there is a bigger chance to hear the magic words announcing the Elfstedentocht will happen this year! Only thing missing is live coverage within these meetings, as well as the black or white smoke indicating the outcome. These guys are so important every January and February here. I wonder what they do the rest of the year. Maybe just gather some stamina for the upcoming media circus..

Ijstransplantatie
In the 200 km route, the ice must be at all places at least 15 cm thick. Otherwise the rayonhoofd will state, that the ice in their region is not good enough. Of course you would not want to be the only black sheep. Besides, it is good money! What to do then? The good old ice transplantation! There is plenty of ice in all kinds of places, let's just take it and move it to where it is really needed, in the Elfstedentocht route. This activity must be invented by the Dutch people. One poor milk factory got almost expedited out of the Netherlands for accidentally dumping some warm cooling water to the Elfstedentocht route, outrageous!

And the prize goes to.. Schaatshistoricus!
Schaatshistoricus means ice skating historian. This person was interviewed several times in all kinds of talk shows as an expert of all things skating. Netherlands must be the only country with such a profession.

Unfortunately, year 2012 the tocht did not take place (It giet nog net oan). Hotels were booked and Friesland was expecting 1,5 - 2 milion visitors, Elfstedentochtbarometer showed good percentages and the rayonhoofd was having their meeting. TV was showing documentaries from the past tochts, analysts telling facts and figures about ice, competitors and the weather and of course eager reporters going around in Friesland trying to find news about the tocht taking place. But unfortunately somebody decided to turn the heating on, and that was the end of the Elfstedentocht dreams for 2012. Apparently there is another nation who are ready to pitch in and arrange the Alternative Elfstedentocht. Of course - the even more crazier Finns! It is quite easy to see who the alternative tocht is aimed for, when going to the website - the information is available in Finnish, English and of course.. in Dutch :)

Tuesday, February 14, 2012

Washing the dishes

I noticed a new topic in the Expat Blog Hop and decided now it is my time to make a contribution. When it came apparent that I would move to the Netherlands, I started googling for information. I was happy to find several expat blogs describing the adventures of relocating to the Netherlands - besides information it also proved that people have survived here without going completely crazy :) One of the blogs I stumbled on also had a weekly topic for other blog writer's called the Expat Blog Hop. I decided that on some beautiful day I will also start participating, and now that day is finally here, although rather rainy and grey.

The topic for this week is to describe an object in your new expat country, that you now use daily but before had no idea such a wonder even existed. It wasn't too difficult to identify this, it is of course my magical refillable dishwashing brush! Yes.. I like things to be clean and tidy around the house :) To get to the essence of this magical device there are two paths

Path 1 - Crazy dutch dishwashing people!

I was few weeks ago in a place with relatively many Finnish women who live in the Netherlands. As it happened, I ended up helping in doing the dishes after we were ending the gathering. I did the dishwashing according to the hygienic and following the health standards like any good, well-raised and overly hygienic Finn would do: first wet the item you are washing, then apply soap, rinse the soap, dry the thing and voila, you are ready. One of the Finnish women commented that if we would have Dutch people here, they would be upset by the amount of water we are wasting, which led us to an interesting discussion. I learned, that apparently the step called "rinsing-the-unhealthy-and-toxic-soap-from-the-thing-you-are-eating-your-food-from" -step is not an universal step in the art of washing dishes. There are people who - believe it or not - actually dry the item immediately after applying the soap.

After I got home I confronted the Dutch and asked him to give a detailed process explaation on the dishwashing topic, without giving a hint first why I am asking this. When he got to the point where he mentioned that after applying the soap, he gets a towel and dry the item and put it on to the shelf I thought, these people have really lost it. Like, where were they when the information of rinsing potentially toxic dishwashing stuff from the plates, cutlery and glasses was given! And no, the drying with a towel is not enough. I felt a great sense of starting my own personal crusade on enlightening Dutch people from the hazardous toxics that all the dishwashing soap must consist of. I also made it clear, what is now the standard of handwashing dishes in this house. This of course provided an easy escape to the Dutch for not doing any dishes anymore - but hey, at least we are not dying of terrible dishwasher soap cancer! And luckily we have a dishwasher also :)

Path 2 - Smart dutch dishwashing people!

One of the most brilliant things since sliced bread is this - refillable dish brush! I was asked to bring some of those "fillable dish brushes" to Finland once, and after doing some binary search (which included e.g flying to Finland with two refillable barbeque grill iron wire things) I found the right one from Albert Heijn.

Of course I had to make an investment and get one for myself. And it is absolutely brilliant! Whenever washing something by hand, you can get the perfect dose of the soap by just squeezing the thing on the top. No need to deal with those half-sticky washing mashine bottles and use way too much soap. OK, not using this daily but multiple times a week anyway.



I got some more orders from Finland for this, and I think the local AH cashier's must've thought, that the girl has some severe pile of dishes to wash when I bought 10+ dishwasher brushes when shopping there, although in two consecutive days. Of course I didn't dare to empty the shelves in one go.. :)

Sunday, February 5, 2012

Winter is here

Roughly a week ago the winter arrived here in the Netherlands! I was already bit sceptic whether that would happen because we had few weeks ago still crocus' growing outside. On Friday it started to snow which meant also interesting trip from getting back home from work. Especially after reading the news from Helsinki where there had been a real snow chaos. The ride home went without problems although I started to doubt severely whether the "winter tires" are in reality some kind of "let's skid in the snow" tires.

Luckily this country also knows a bit about winter sports! Without any mountains or open wide areas skiing and long-distance skiing are not really options, but skating is very popular. Some weeks ago I noticed that somebody had flooded the field close to us. That of course meant that there is soon going to be a skating rink! Today we went out to test it, with a nice sunny and -5c weather.

Sometimes - like today - I miss a country which is 8 times as big in geographical size but has 1/3 of the population of the Netherlands. It was quite busy! However, the ice was very nice despite being on a grass field and it was also very cheap (15 eur for a family season card).

After few slightly chaotic events for getting the ticket and getting the skates on we were finally on the ice. The way it works here is that people skate counter-clockwise around the area. I've mainly used to the big round skating rinks where you can basically skate to where ever you want. I soon understood that would not work here at all. In practise the ice was full of people, some with skates, some without. First of all we needed to get through a wall of people and then choose one of the three lanes.

In the inner lane there was already a woman reposing while the others were waiting for an ambulance. Apparently she had slipped while walking in the ice with her shoes. There were also tens of approximately 3 - 10 year old mini-rockets going around, with high speend and totally unpredictable turns, stops and directions in general. Few times of course they fell over and ended up sliding in an horizontal position just in front of your skates. I also spotted a dad pushing a chair while his daughter was sitting on it, many many sledges being pulled by all kinsd of combinations (e.g. a small kid who had put the rope around her knees while pulling even smaller kid in a sleigh) as well as a woman with a dog on the ice. Not to mention all kinsd of other activities taking place there. The skating was really really nice, but I have to say my stress level was just few notches higher than normally :)

I know the problem is just tussen mijn oren (between my ears), but I was still amazed that one guy managed to pass us while saying to another person "it is so nice and quiet here today". Say what?!?

Sunday, January 29, 2012

This weekend we needed to wake up early on both days (before 09:00!!). On Saturdays I have my Dutch language course at 10:00 (this was the second worse option, the others were on normal working day evenings from 19.00 - 22.30.. That did not seem like a good choice). On every other Sunday, we also go to the Finnish school which is very near to us. It is mainly intended for small kids and the groups are named nicely after different berries like "strawberries" or "lingon berries". The adults group where the Dutch guy goes is named after a Finnish beer (Lapin Kullat). Makes you wonder though where does that come from.. like there would be any association between Finnish people and beer ;)

I also added another Dutch city to my list of places I've visited. We went again to Den Haag for the 2nd round of voting, and this time decided to stay for a bit longer to see the city. Den Haag is a nice Dutch city (haven't seen a non-nice city yet!), which is relatively different to other big Dutch cities. It has more a big city vibe to it and especially the place where the embassy is located is filled with beautiful well kept town houses. There is also a really big, beautiful castle-like building when entering the embassy area. I of course asked what that is, but the native Dutch person did not have his tour guide knowledge up-to-date so it remained to be a mystery. We went to visit the Queen at her palace, and it seemed to be very nice, cozy-looking place. Must be a nice place to ponder about the state of the kingdom.

The Prime Minister had an amazing place for an office. It was a small tower by the water, which reminded me very much of the Moomin House, although it was not blue. Finally I wanted to see where all the bad guys are brought to justice, and we spent some time looking for the International Court of Justice is. Soon we ended up back to where our car was parked without seeing it and thought that let's put it on the navigator and maybe it's close so we can just do a drive-by-sightseeing.



And of course, we were led exactly to that beautiful castle-like building which you cannot really miss when going to Den Haag.. Mystery solved.

Next time we need to also go to Scheveningen and enjoy some beach scenery.

Thursday, January 26, 2012

Everything's for sale

During my relatively short time of interacting with Dutch people one thing has become quite clear - they are excellent sales people. Well, signing the treaty of Breda where they agreed to exchange New York for some sugar fields in Suriname was not maybe the winner deal of the 17th century, but besides that I think it must be somehow in their blood. Combined with persistence and creativeness they are probably really the one nation that can sell sand to the Saharan's and ice for building igloo's in Greenland. I also get the feeling it is not about getting the money, but about the whole process itself. Maybe the chase is better than the catch?

One great example where the salesmanship and creativity is combined is news from 2009. Belgium was struggling with its prison capacity. Apparently there are either not many prisons or then the Belgians have just had it and are now on a crime committing spree. Whichever is the case, they were thinking of how to solve this. The Dutch immediately saw a possibility to make some extra money. By conincidence, there was some free capacity in the prisons of the Netherlands. Since the Netherlands and Belgium are neighboring countries (and relatively small in geographical size) why not provide the supply for the others demand?

The Dutch and the Belgians formed a deal, where the Netherlands would rent out their free cell capacity to the Belgians. This brings nice 30 million a year more to the Dutch government plus secures the jobs of the Dutch prison workers. Everybody wins! There were also few practicalities to solve, such as in Belgium you can visit an inmate three times a week and in the Netherlands only once a week. Of course, you want to keep some standards and with 30 million euros a year I'm sure they ended up having a nice deal where the achieved benefits of Belgian prisoners would not be lowered. What is weird though, that before the Belgians started flocking to the Netherlands, all the Dutch prisoners were moved to other prisons. Maybe it's like between Finland and Sweden, it is too risky to have Dutch and Belgians together in confined spaces for too long..

Sunday, January 22, 2012

Exciting elections

Today was the first round of the Finnish president election. For me this meant a visit to the Finnish Embassy in Den Hague in order to fulfill my civic duty.

For some reason (maybe the people were exhausted for the additional day of working?) the service was, well.. very Finnish. I also made the mistake of doing some chitchat, which was not very welcomed :) However I got the answer I was looking for - the tiny piece of paper I scribbled my number to was sent to Finland (maybe some special mail, not PostNL?) and added to the voting area where I previously lived (Helsinki).

As the voting result just was published, it seems that I get to visit Den Hague for the second time next weekend. The two candidates who made it to the second round are from the Right Party and the Green Party, so historical result for the previously social-democrat Finland.

Thursday, January 19, 2012

Frogs and apes

As soon as I knew I'd be moving to the Netherlands it was obvious that I'd also learn Dutch. There was no doubt about it, even though it might mean a temporary throat disease (with all those g's and r's). Integrating to another country is practically impossible if you cannot speak the language of those around you. The Netherlands is quite easy country for foreigners, as practically everybody speaks English. So the motivation to learn has to be there, otherwise it is easy to end up in this "I've been living 5 years in the Netherlands but I can't say good morning in Dutch" type of state.

One of the things I like are proverbs. They are also explaining something about the culture itself. One of the first ones I stumbled on was "aap uit de mouw" which is translated to something along the lines "ape coming out of the sleeve". It was said in a discussion in the parliament between the prime minister and one other member of the parliament. Prime minister was questioning whether someone from the other party had called a person "Islamic monkey", even though he had tried to say that the "Islamic monkey comes out of the sleeve". This conversation about whether it was meant as a proverb or to be taken literally got quite some media publicity.

I thought that it must mean something similar as the Finnish proverb "frog out of the mouth". When you are "letting a frog out of your mouth" it means, that you are saying something you really should not say (even though it might be true). However, the apes coming out of the sleeves of Dutch people actually indicate, that then they reveal their true nature! (In Finnish we would say "reveal your true fur/hair").

But why would somebody hide an ape in their sleeve? Isn't it anyway quite obvious already that there is something, even if it does not come out? Or maybe that is the point, all the people with bumps on their sleeve should be treated with reasonable amount of suspicion. I've also been wondering, what other things the Dutch are hiding in their sleeves. The mystery remains still unsolved...

Friday, January 13, 2012

The connecting factor between Dutch homes and outdoor shoes

I like shoes. I also master the useful skill of finding good reasons to buy yet another pair of shoes. One of my colleagues even asked whether I have already booked a shipping container for my shoes, when I was arranging the moving.

However, shoes belong to the outside and they are to be taken off when entering the house. Period. Or so I thought. These funny people in the Netherlands also wear them inside. And yes, they are the same shoes that you are wearing outside. First I thought it must be a weather thing, maybe here it isn't tons of gravel and snowy mash that is coming with your shoes to the indoors. But as a matter of fact, the weather can be quite muddy sometimes. Then I thought that well maybe people have some exceptions like winter shoes - you wouldn't want to wear those big sheep wool boots inside, right? But apparently, also those kind of shoes are perfectly fine wearing indoors when going to a party.

I still find it a bit weird, when the Dutch guy comes home and sits down to the sofa with a cup of tea - while wearing his shoes! He can also cook with his shoes. Amazing skills :) Of course, it works the other way around too. We were visiting a birthday party in Finland, and of course with all the entrance hassle I forgot to remind that in Finnish homes you are supposed to take the shoes off. Luckily the I spotted this early, and I sent him downstairs before anyone noticed this grande etiquette mistake :)

I also feel a bit uncomfortable and non-relaxed with wearing my shoes all the time. Visiting somebody's home I feel like I am half way out of the door all the time if having my shoes on. It would be like wearing a outdoor jacket at a party, all the time ready to go. I also am not quite sure what would happen if I would just take my shoes off when entering somebody's house. Would people think that it's just the weird Finnish girl, trying to ignore my unusual habits? At the Dutch Guy's parents I have luckily gotten to a point, where I am offered a pair of slippers when going there. Then I can sit on the sofa with my legs bent up without having to think whether the shoes from the outdoor are making stains everywhere. Funniest thing happened few weeks ago, when we had some people over. We were making preparations, and suddenly the Dutch Guy started putting his shoes on and I thought he is going to the supermarket to get something that we forgot. But no, he was of course putting his shoes on.. without even the intention of going outside.


Usually at the house, we are not wearing shoes (maybe I have detoxed the Dutch Guy also?). And for Christmas, we got nice indoor shoes, the one and only Finnish Reino's. These can also in rare emergencies be worn outside.. but not preferred. Life would be absolutely perfect, if I could also take them to the office, but I think the Dutch society is not ready for that yet ;)


So, when visiting somebody in the Netherlands, please wear your shoes. It is perfectly OK. And when visiting someone in Finland, please don't wear shoes inside. It is weird.

Sunday, January 8, 2012

Fietsen

Bicycling in the Netherlands is not a national sport, it is a way of living. There are more bicycles here than people. No matter what time of the year it is, you can see people cycling everywhere. Also those autumn days, when there's freezing cold water coming down from the sky and it is pitch black, you can see kids biking to school and adults going off to work.

Since I was a kid, it has always been said that you should never ever ever even dream of cycling without a helmet as it basically means immediate death or at least a brain injury that will spoil the rest of your life. I think all kids of my generation got from our schools this really ugly styrofoam helmet, which did not make the wearing of the thing very easy. Last time I had a look at it, it was still as ugly as I remembered.

The Finnish Law states that you should "in general" use a helmet when cycling. This leaves some room for not getting fined when eg. you are riding a short distance (of course nothing happens then, right??) or that your hair gets messed up.

Apparently in the Netherlands they have own rules, which I've empirically interpreted to be something along the lines of "never wear a helmet unless you want to be on a racing bike and go 80km/h". One of the first times I visited my work place I took a taxi during the rush hour from the train station in Den Bosch to the office. I was amazed by the amount of people on bikes - and without helmets. The moment I still remember is seeing a mom with two really small kids (somewhere around 4 years old), all with bicycles and without helmets going through really narrow spaces between cars and buses. I was absolutely convinced that these people are going to die right in front of my eyes or at least end up with a severe head injury.

When I moved here, I learned that there are two kinds of cycling; the professional wearing-silly-tight-clothes type of thing where the essential point is, that you never do it for actually getting somewhere but just to start from point A, do a lap of x km and then return back to point A. This is probably because of the ridiculous riding bicycle clothes and the fact your bike is worth like 5000 euros, so you don't feel like parting from it, at all. The other cycling is the one which I'm more familiar with - getting-your-grandmas-bike-and-going-grocery-shopping. However, variations exists there also. Basic compilation is for example having two kids fitted to your bike, or having someone sitting in the back of your bike.

There are all kinds of bicycle things I stil need to learn such as how to have somebody sitting in the back of your bike, how to bike in busy Utrecht when the rush hour is actually consisting mainly of other bikes (I try to learn the advice I got: whatever you do, don't do anything unexpected). One thing I will probably never master is the skill of biking really close to someone (I need my own space) let alone talking to the cellphone while having an umbrella in the other hand and a christmas tree on the back of your bike. The Dutch Guy is also trying to convince me, that every Dutch person knows how to bike and kiss at the same time, but I don't really believe that is even possible..

And btw. the question I immediately started to wonder is whether there really are lot of people (and kids) getting injured each year because of not wearing helmets - the figures seem to be quite modest. According to this it is more probable die of drowning than while biking in the Netherlands. And there aren't many places to swim here (but maybe the mean the dikes..?)

Thursday, January 5, 2012

Trash

One of the things which must be different in every country is the waste logistics and recycling. When I visited the Netherlands office first time, my inner hippie was quite bothered when throwing empty cans to a normal garbage bin. When asking about it, people said "Don't worry, it will be sorted out at a later stage". However, I am not quite sure even to this day what this later stage actually is and who are the people handling this. And btw - we also throw our cans to the normal trash at home.. there's no such thing as returning them, only things you can return are certain beer bottles which are bought from the supermarket. Quite disturbing still, as I have been so brainwashed with the whole recycling of bottles and cans thing.

But where things get interesting is when handling your household waste. In Finland the way it works is that everyone has one or more containers in their yard, and you drop your waste bags there. With certain intervals the containers are emptied without having to think about it further. In the Netherlands the responsibility is put back to the people (or at least house owners).

We sort four things; normal, paper, garden&vegetables and plastics. Every self respecting Dutch person knows, what to put in each container. I thought also, until few weeks ago when throwing some egg shells to the garden&vegetables section, which I considered to be the same as bio waste. The Dutch Guy commented that maybe that shouldn't go there but instead to the normal grey bin. Which led to an interesting discussion, where I learned that indeed - the garden&vegetables -section means just that - either you put there leaves from your garden or the vegetable/fruit remains. But other things such as food leftovers and eggshells as well as tea bags should not probably go there. Oops....

The plastics are a great thing. You can get special bags from Albert Heijn for the plastic collection (btw. they are quite handy also for other things such as storing unused pillows and blankets etc). Then you just start collecting all the plastic stuff that you might have and wait for the plastics guy to come. However - again a thing that every Dutch person probably knows through mothers milk - you should not put plastics there which have been used for storing food. This is because they are collected to a central location, where they might be longer times. Learning point number 2.. Oops.. I feel sorry for the plastic collection center already.


How do you then get rid of the waste? The municipality offers a yearly calendar where the waste collection days are put in a funny order which is intended to make the interpretation extra confusing. For some days, there are squares of different colors (which is also quite handy for the color blind people). These squares indicate, that this day you should put out your bins to the street. Instead of each day panicking whether some of the colored squares fall to that day, we trust to the fact, that the neighbors do that. Once we are going to work we notice the street is full of brown/blue/grey containers or plastic bags and we just get ours out to the street as well. But - here's the downside. What if you happen to be away from home just on the one day a month when the plastic guy comes? Then you wait for 2 months. In the summer time, the cleaning of the garden is better to plan according to the schedule of the garbage guys :) Also to make sure that you are not mistakenly taking your neighbors grey/blue/brown container back, each container is numbered with your house number.

Now our challenge is that year 2011 has gone - and we are without a colored square calendar for year 2012! We also (not even the Dutch Guy) have no idea where to get it. I hope the neighbors do have it - so we can just continue following them :-)

Tuesday, January 3, 2012

Gelukkig Nieuwjaar / Hyvää Uutta Vuotta!

On Saturday I had the chance to experience the first year change in the Netherlands. On Friday people kept wishing "Have a nice Old Year's Evening", which is the way to say it in Dutch (Oudejaarsavond). One essential part of course when changing the year is to get some nice fireworks! I am not a big fan of those making a lot of sound and going high to the sky, but more into the colorful fountains and things which stay low and are not too dangerous. We pre-ordered the fireworks from the internet and it was quite handy. While picking them up I couldn't help but notice the HUGE bombs they have here, like the one in middle of the picture below.


Apparently you need to roll the whole round thing open, and then you get nice continuous explosions. The story goes, that somebody did not know that needed to be done and blew out the whole front door of his house.

In general, the safety precautions here are not that strict as in Finland, which makes me feel like 80-year-old grandma sometimes when being (over)cautious. Our street is quite narrow one-way-street. The fireworks were put in the middle of the street and then we'd stay on the curb side to look at them. This was only few meters away. I spent most of the time standing/hiding behind a car or somebody else ;) Fortunately everything went fine. It was amazing to see how much fireworks people were putting in the air! It started early in the morning and continued through the night with every now and then some really big bangs which would almost shatter the windows of our house.

Around New Year it is also essential to eat - a lot and unhealthy :) One of my favorite findings are the oliebollen, which are mainly deep fried doughnuts without a hole in the middle. This means, that there's a lot to eat even in a little thing. And yes, it is exactly the food which after eating makes you promise to go to the gym first thing after New Year. But they are amazingly good. I had the first one when coming from Finland after Christmas, as they were sold outside Schiphol airport. My only question is - why cannot they sell these things all year round?

Sunday, January 1, 2012

Grocery shopping

One of my first days in the Netherlands I was off from work as I was still following the Finnish public holidays. Therefore I decided it is good time to go and do some grocery shopping on my own. Shopping in the Netherlands is nice, especially when coming from a slightly more expensive country such as Finland. Groceries are relatively cheap (goedkoop), and the selection is ecological, produced near and fresh. I asked the Dutch Guy to prepare one of my favorite foods, spicy paprika soup. So I set out my adventure for getting the ingredients from the local Albert Heijn. There are over 800 AH's in the Netherlands making it the largest food retailer in the Netherlands. According to Wikipedia, the concept of AH is to provide good quality food products with market prices. Suits me!

So off I went, the nearest AH is only few minutes walk from our house. This makes it also easy to adapt to the dutch way of shopping which means basically "do not plan ahead - at all". It is not unusual to drop by at the store every day to get the ingredients you might need. Or even twice a day.. or seven times, which is the record of the Dutch Guy who I share the fridge with.

My first task was to get the paprikas and onions - that's easy, the names are quite the same and they are easy to recognise (paprika, ui). I also fancied some apples, so I grabbed a few and put them to a plastic bag and felt like this is going good, I'm on the roll here. However, then the troubles started. I was looking for the number which would tell me, which button to press when weighing the apples. Of course there was none. I stepped hesitantly to the scale to do the weighing, and luckily found a picture of the right apple there with a text. However, I thought, since there are dozen different apple types, it is quite time consuming to find just the apple type you are having from the pictures- especially as there seems to be no logical order whatsoever.

Would it not make sense to add some kind of identifier on the vegetables and fruit price tag, which would tell you immediately which button to press in the scale?

There was an older lady behind me waiting for her turn, and I thought that I will now get this weighing over with and continue to my next item on the shopping list. However after pushing the button with the apple picture nothing happened. Nothing. I pressed again, still nothing. The lady behind me gave a look of pity and ironic grin mixed together and moved on to the next scale. I thought that well, maybe that is her way of indicating that the scale is not working, and I moved on to the next one after her. And again same thing happened, I press the apple button, waited for the sticker to come out but nothing. I however just witnessed other people getting the sticker out so there must be something that I am missing. Actually, when looking more carefully, there are instructions with 5 step procedure on how to do the weighing.. ehm.. all in Dutch of course. From there I understood, that after pressing the Apple-button, you need to actually press ANOTHER button which will then give you the sticker.

While feeling stupid for myself, I quickly continued onwards with the shopping. The lady behind me must've thought that there are all kinds of helpless people who come from the outer boundaries civilization and cannot use even a simple machine like a fruit scale in the supermarket..

I continued my shopping and came to the milk department. I needed to get some cooking cream for the soup and I started to feel desperate. There were all kinds of cans, pots and jars of different kind of milk products. Everything was in dutch, and of course I had no idea what so ever what is cream or cooking cream. I decided to take 3 different bottles and thought that would increase my odds for having at least one thing right. Important nugget of information: cooking cream is kookroom.

I got to the cashier relieved of surviving the shopping after all, just to find out that of course my Debit-card would not be accepted. Only dutch cards. Or good old cash. Luckily I had that with me, and managed to get out of the store with all ingredients and still some self respect left.. During the grocery shopping I'd texted the Dutch Guy at least three times to ask all kinds of questions. When coming home, he laughed at my adventures in the supermarket and mentioned in the side note that he of course needed to quote my messages to his colleagues as an example on how things can be different in a new country. So after a while I got asked by one of them on my experiences while shopping in Albert Heijn.

So please, remember all of you who come from countries where only one button press is enough in the scale:

When buying fruits and vegetables, instead of pressing the picture of "komkommer" and waiting for nice komkommer sticker to come out, you need to actually press an "OK" type of button after that. And usually - you don't need to weigh komkommer as they are sold by piece.

The beginning

Moving to another country can be exciting, interesting, overwhelming, tiring, intriguing - and sometimes all of these feelings mixed together. Everyday you notice small things that are bit off and you compare constantly your new home country and its habits to the Right Way of Doing Things which has been internalised throughout your life in the country you were born in. This blog is about describing these everyday happenings from my point of view. I'm hoping someday I can look back and think that all the things I found different are actually now part of my normal way of life.. ;)