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.. ;)