House Shopping

Well, my heads about to burst.

We went on tours of 7 homes, all throughout the south of Amsterdam. Technically, most of them were in Amstelveen, which is said to be made up of 11% ex pats, of which 50% are American. Honestly, we did feel a little like we were pushed that direction. But it's a very nice place half way between work and the big city, so we don't mind. They say it takes 12 minutes to Amsterdam Central Station by train from Amstelveen (pronounced more like Ahmstelvfhain), Matt should be able to get to work by bus in 20-30 minutes, and I should also be able to get to the Hall in under 20 minutes. So that makes it attractive.

We saw every possible level of housing here. From a $2900 (euros but I can't find a euro sign) a month gorgeous 3 story house overlooking the Amsterdam woods, with 4 rooms, a huge garden backyard and state of the art kitchen, complete with original 1930's deco tiles, to a rather dumpy 2 room mezzanine brownstone for $1600 (euros) a month, to a one room ($2000 a month) flat spitting distance from the town square hub-bub.

After 7 viewings, and 5 or 6 hours sustained by 1 cup of coffee and a shared granola bar, deciding between houses and apartments was easy. We don't need 4 bedrooms, or even three. We did decide we needed 2 (since you are ALL going to come visit us :) no pressure...). But deciding between the 3 apartments we saw was tough. They were all very nice and all had lots to offer. The one we liked best, however, had a tanning bed instead of a sleeping bed, and just didn't seem big enough to fit many friends. The one that had the nicest amenities (fabulous bathroom, huge kitchen and storage) had blue carpet, and a bit of a walk or ride to town where we'd need to get public transportation.

So we settled on the third option. A two bedroom flat at the top of a high rise, the 10th floor. It will be about a 2 minute walk to the main transportation center, and has the best view of any place I've ever lived. You see for miles and miles. The Netherlands are completely flat. We decided that it might be fun to live dead center in the heart of things, since we're not likely to do it again. If the 6 month contract were a 2 year thing, I might have chosen a house instead, but as it is, I'll like walking to the cafe for a morning coffee and baguette ;). Indeed, I think I'm gonna like it here (hum song from Annie here).

It was easy to envision living here and thriving because we happened to show up on market day. The town square becomes a huge farmers/flea market every Friday, and it was bustling. One of the agents showing us around, Hella, says that there is also an "organic" market on Tuesdays. Perfect... She also says that she used to live in Amsterdam, and now lives in Amstelveen, and much prefers the atmosphere, the air itself, and that it has all the same shops and conveniences, for less cost of living. It even has a museum.

We actually had two tour guides for the day. Frans is the representative from the company Matt's HR department is working with, and he picked us up at 9:30 this morning at the hotel. He was quite a contrast to the other two ex pat assistants that we've ridden with. The other two obviously had children. Crumbs, sticker covered windows, and greasy fingerprints label these vehicles kid carriers. Frans; he had a gold bracelet and a gold watch and I tried not to let a hair drop off my head in his Peugeot. If all goes well with the deposit and paper work, then we should be moving into 399 Meander, Amstelveen, the Netherlands, by Monday. Hella will pick us up at the hotel and help us transfer the baggage, which is a blessing. I don't want to lug 4 suitcases, 2 backpacks, and 2 briefcases by bus, thank you.

In case you hadn't already tried it, the sideshow on the top right of the blog does link to Flickr if you want to browse more of the pictures we've taken. Okay, I've taken. Frans called me crazy because of how many shots I took in each potential home... I say, the more the merrier, and the more the memories :)

Can't Sleep

It's 5:30 am and that means it's time to be awake for a while. Our sleeping pattern is getting progressively better. Once we really started trying to sleep solidly, we still woke up, 2 am one night, 3am the next, last night 4am, and so tonight it follows that 5 am finds me thrashing about and trying to stay asleep. Seems to work out best if we just get up, do something productive for a half our or so, and try to sleep again. It's nice that we don't have to get up early and catch the shuttle for the train for the bus today. The housing people aren't picking us up at the hotel until 9:30 this morning. So here are some oddities and funny bits:

McDonald's serves a chicken satay sandwich: The McKip Sate

We were talking about the ancient spice trade (Dutch East India Company stuff) and learned that if you want to say something is exorbitantly expensive in Dutch, you say it's "Pepper Expensive".

We eat like barbarians. Everyone here eats everything with knife and fork, from home fries and hamburgers to individual sushi rolls that I would pop into my mouth whole.

From meeting on Wednesday: A 9 or 10 year old boy used 2 Timothy 4:12, about not letting anyone look down on your youth, as justification to not let anyone "disrespect" him.

Later, the brother conducting the last KM part was taking his time to call on someone because there were a lot of hands up, and he was trying to be fair and call on people in even distribution. The brother running the mic (which is on a huge long pole with massive head knocking potential) stood where he only saw one sister raising her hand. So, he gave her the mic to help the brother along. The brother called on her, saying, "well I guess my decision has been made for me, Sis oawheeiofnweo" (that's nothing like the actual name, but it was something African I can't begin to spell yet; so hopefully, no offense).

Accents are a funny thing... We have to listen a lot harder. Especially true at the Kingdom Hall, where you want to understand what the last person said, in part so that if you comment, you don't say the same thing. I told the people taking me out in service yesterday that I had no problem understanding their English, but I'm still having to listen extra hard to attune my ear to so many different accents here. For instance on brother from Nigeria speaks so rapidly that it's all I can do to process what he said before he says the next thing. They told me not to worry about that, no one can understand him. I wonder if they can understand me....or if they are just polite and good at guessing :)

Can someone tell me what this add is trying to say? The motto "Trust the Suit" is plain enough, but what is he about to do to that puppy?? We see this add a few times a day. In revolving doorways, which makes it hard to photograph.

Matt got a belly laugh from Rico (the guy helping us with immigration) by saying "if it ain't Dutch, it ain't much". He'd never heard that one before.

Okay, it's after 6am now, that means I can try to go back to sleep again.

Proost (cheers in Dutch)

In the ghetto

The roughly triangular building on the left is the Kingdom Hall I got to meet at for field service this morning. When we met with them on Wednesday evening we found that only one other person there is actually from the States, which surprised me. The congregation seems to be made up of 98% Ghanaians (people from Ghana). They have a separate group for part of the meeting held in one of their mother tongues, Twe (pronounced somewhere between three with no "h" sound and tree with no hard "r" sound, and lots of wind). Then they have the random Hollander, Nigerian, and (at least) one Japanese sister. I'm sure I'm leaving someone out. I did expect a multi cultural congregation, based on our experience in Ireland (Russian, Romanian, and Nigerian friends met with us there), and on some friends expertise (I'm looking at you Christi), but I expected more British and American people. But the program was a great, the comments and participation wide spread, and the faces all warm, friendly and welcoming. They even announced us as visitors from California :)

I met with them for service at 9:30 and thought I'd be too late for anyone to still be there. I got to the door around 9:45 I think because the train from Schiphol was 7 minutes late. I didn't remember the name of the bus stop I was supposed to get off at (Geinwijk) and it took me a while to convince the bus driver that it was 2 zones away and that I really did know where I wanted to go. Turn out, I wasn't the last one to arrive, and everyone blames tardiness on the cold. And it was COLD. One sister didn't think I'd make it at all because I was under dressed. I did really really wish I had my boots and thick socks, but it wasn't so terrible. We walked from the Hall to the territory and kept warm by keeping moving.
The first gentleman I spoke with made an appointment with Maka Fui ( I have no idea how to spell his name...I'll ask later) and I for Saturday to demonstrate a Bible study, so that was a great kick off to my service adventure here.

We walked back to the train station via an open air market where Maka Fui treated me to his favorite, and I hear it's a Dutch specialty. Fish. I said I didn't want to try any of the slimy salt cured herring that Holland is famous for just yet. He promised it wasn't that, but, it was Kibbeling, which basically tastes like most typical fish and chips, but more firm and less greasy. It was perfect for warming up.
I took the metro back to my train stop, and the train back to the airport, and the shuttle back to the hotel. Really makes me look forward to tomorrow, when we can figure out where we're gonna live, so, hopefully we can stop at least a few legs of this shuffling back and forth that takes forever...hopefully :)

Hey! I can post too!

Greetings. This is Matt.

I saw one of Sabrina's earlier posts and realized that she put in a link to a video and didn't use the nifty 'add a link to text' feature and decided I needed to do something about that.

Next, I determined that if I went to that trouble and didn't actually post anything myself, I would be quite lame, so, here are a few things about the past few days that have stuck out to me.

Being extremely tired and jet-lagged and seeing things such as a gigantic three-story hand holding a remote control out in a field really messes with your mind.

Having a coffee machine where you press a button and 10 seconds later you have cappuccino or espresso or some other combination of milk, coffee, chocolate, sugar or whatever is so very great.

I saw with my own eyes a Dutch colleague butter two slices of bread, cover them in chocolate sprinkles (the kind that would go on a donut) and eat it. So that's totally true that they do that here. Also, if you order anything that has fries, they bring you a big ol' side of mayonnaise to dip them in, so that's totally true too.

I realize that pretty much everything that sticks out to me right now relates to traveling to work or eating, but I hope that will change as I get more acclimated to this time zone.

I'm Matt and I've approved this message.

Beauty

Here's the view from our patio door two days ago. After the rain cleared, I happened to glance out the window and see this nearly vertical rainbow framing the garden. The shaggy ponies are usually in the field to the right between the hotel and the red roof in the background. I guess the rain sent them into hiding. The bunnies came out shortly after, though. I got a picture of a gray one, but the black and white one escaped me.

I will be linking a photo page with more of what's going on around here as soon as I have the time. In the meantime, if you want to see a pic larger, just click it and it will grow :)

Feels Like Home

We just got home from our first meeting, and it was just what we needed.

This is what Matt says he thinks of when he sees me

Annie when she first moves in and sings "I think I'm gonna like it here".

He is correct.

Meetings!!!

I'm very excited right now because I finally got the info I needed in order to get to a meeting tonight, and hopefully that will mean service this week too. Some kind of privacy issues surround giving out the phone numbers to local congregations here, so after calling the local Branch office, a very helpful brother there was able to play operator for me. I got a return call from another brother who not only gave us the meeting time for an English congregation tonight, and told us which train to take to get to that part of town, but he is going to meet us there at the train station in person to escort us the rest of the way. If it's an easy way for him to judge our character, then so be it. I'm excited! He said we take a bus from the Duivendrecth train stop to the hall on Sophie Redmondplein, and for that I'm glad he'll be with us. Who knows what the neighborhood will be like, and it will be after dark by the time we get there. With the overcast we've had, it's practically after dark most of the afternoons :) There was actually a brief covering of snow at the airport last night when I met Matt there for dinner.

The brother said it's only about a 10 minute train ride from the airport train station, but Matt and I will have to catch a shuttle from the hotel first to get to the airport. The one thing people complained about this hotel for when I was reading reviews and trying to find suitable lodging for this week, was that the hotel shuttle doesn't run often enough. I don't know if I thought they were ALL just being overly critical, or what, but they were quite right. The shuttle only comes round once every 40 minutes. You miss the one you want, and you'll sit around for almost another hour. So, to get to the meeting at 7:30 tonight, we will have to leave the hotel at 6 pm.

Also, the meeting with the immigration people seemed to go well. We got our temporary residence permit. We will still have to register again with the local municipality where ever we end up living, but until then, we are legal. Then, we got our Dutch social security numbers, which basically seems to only be there in case we want to open a bank account here. The people holding our hands to show us what to do were all very friendly and helpful. It seems their entire job is to help people like ourselves acclimate and not make waves. Again, something I'm thankful for. They gave us a book that looks a bit like a school book designed for ex pats to normalize into Dutch society. I checked for quizes in the back...I hope we got the teacher's edition...

Matt teaches a class at work tomorrow, and Friday is still the house shopping day. Time to get ready for meeting now! Yeah! Or as Matt would say, w00t!

Hotel Mornings

So, to avoid paying 22 Euro a meal per person for breakfast, we hit the local market in the airport and brought home some things. Dutch rooms don't typically have coffee makers or fridges, so since it gets freezing cold outside, we closed the top end of our grocery bag in the patio door and left fruit and yogurt and cheese outside to keep cool. And we were pleasantly surprised to find the powdered coffee of Cafe Mocca by Nescafe to be a pretty good cup of coffee when mixed with super hot tap water. Ah, luxury.

Time to go meet the person taking us to the immigration office this morning.

Pretend it's Yesterday

Okay, so here’s what I was supposed to post yesterday...or the day before.Pretend it’s the 27^th when you read it :)

Greetings all!

Matt and I landed yesterday morning, at 9:10 am local time. I have already been lax about logging on. We’ve been busy, as expected. But mostly, it has been the jet lag keeping us from communicating.

The flight was long (direct from SFO to AMS) and cramped, but uneventful, which is a plus. It took us a little while to figure out the baggage claim area, since there were 23 carousels. But once we did, our bags came out one right after the next and we hardly had to wait at all. Customs breezed us through even when we told them we were here for the long haul.

One nice surprise (to me) was that Matt’s first hire to the customer support group, Jean Philippe, came and picked us up with welcome gifts in hand. I came out first, and spotted a guy wearing an i365 t-shirt complete with a flashing company pin on it, carrying flowers and a welcome balloon. I smiled and waved, and he looked confused and a little uncomfortable, because he obviously wasn’t looking for me, but for Matt. This total stranger smiling threw him off a bit until Matt came out from behind me. I can’t say enough how nice it was, how calming it was, to have someone there that we could just follow blindly out to the hotel shuttle bus. Schiphol is a pretty nice airport, but being up for as long as we had been, and having had to cram so much into the last few days before we left, it was a real relief to be able to leave the chaos of airport navigation on auto pilot, and just follow someone who knew what they are about. The shuttle pulled up without much wait, J.P. bid us rest well, and we drove off through pretty farm country dotted with short shaggy ponies and white birds eating the farmer’s seeds… The hotel was a surprise to see, since the first thing you see is what you think at first is an overpass. Upon closer inspection, it becomes an overpass built entirely for a mini mall. A 2-minute walk across the parking lot of the hotel takes you to the A4 freeway, where a long skinny building populated with fast food joints, quick stop markets, and a suit shop holds court above 8 lanes of the fast and the furious.

We were exhausted beyond description, but tried to do as the locals do since that’s supposed to be the best way to beat the jet lag. Instead of crawling into bed at 11 am here when we wanted to (since in our heads it was 3 am or so), we stayed up and tried too settle in. We walked around our hotel, the Van Der Valk, in the Hoofddoorp, south of Amsterdam and 10 minutes from the Schiphol airport. And we wandered over to our hotel’s strangest of strip malls. After weighing our choices, we dined at an Argentinean restaurant, the Rancho BBQ and Grill. It was disconcerting to be ordering off a menu with descriptions in Spanish, and translations in Dutch (ie: Sopa Ranchera = Rijk gevulde Argentijnse goulshsoep). Somehow, that state of fatigue made accessing the foreign language part of our brains easier, and the language started making sense. Too bad it didn’t last until today :)

Today was Matt’s first day of work. After dinner, we stopped in at the lounge to watch some snooker and have a pint of Bavarian ale, followed by a brief net café stop. We got to dinner at a reasonable hour, but still didn’t sleep, as we should. Matt in particular, who of course, had to work the next day, couldn’t sleep after 3 am local time. So, once he did fall asleep, it lasted. I was up and moving around by 9 am here. I sat on our patio overlooking a lovely garden, with fields and ponies in the distance, warming my face in the unexpectedly warm sun, eating my leftover zucchini bread from the flight. By 11 am, as a team, we were on our way to work. I wanted to see where Matt was going to work, and I was planning on turning around again and coming back after I met the team. Turns out, we showed up just in time for the team lunch. Since they only have a short break, and in the business park there are no café’s to jet out to, the company finds it more cost effective to provide sandwich fixings and fruit for lunch, along with juice and coffee. So, we scored :).

Instead of heading out again by myself, I took advantage (or rather, they let me take advantage) of a free notebook that is set up awaiting Matt’s next hire, Fredericka, who doesn’t start until the beginning of November. I did get to email a few people but I didn’t blog because I had 13 pages of house inventory to finish. I still didn’t get it done enough to email out to our property manager. The i365 crew were turning off the lights on me and I was still typing. The VP of Western Europe was kind enough to give us a lift back to the freeway overpass mall, and we grabbed a quick dinner at the hotel restaurant. Excellent “Grandma’s Tomato Soup”, a nice red wine, and it’s off to bed. Or to blog :)

My computer says it’s 1:59 pm at home right now. It’s 9:59 pm here in Holland. My computer is running a low battery, and we left the adapter plug at the office….

So, until tomorrow.

First Things First

Hey kids :)

I just had to figure out what to click to sign in just now because even though I chose English for this page, it still has the commands in Dutch...It is surprisingly similar to English in a lot of ways, though, so I guessed right on my second try. Then it figured out that I really truly did want English, and switched for me.

I jotted a whole long post about our entry to the country and our first couple of days on my laptop last night, expecting to finally be able to post, and then... I promptly ran my laptop battery down to nothing, and realized that we left the plug adapter at Matt's office yesterday. So, until he gets home this evening with the plug adapter so I can recharge, you'll have to be happy with a "to be continued" post. By the way, the quotation mark key is on the shift button of the 2 key, and the "@" is on the key where the quotation marks should be. This is gonna take some getting used to in all kinds of ways...

It's pouring a lovely rain that the ducks are enjoying outside the hotel in the only canal I've seen yet. We're supposed to go to the actual city this evening. Jet lag has kept us close to the nest so far. Tomorrow we present ourselves to the local immigration authority to let them know we're here, and legal, not criminal types or anything. The housing tour got pushed to Friday. We're still a little wobbly on our preference of where to live. Everyone says the City Center is the place to be, especially if it's only for 6 months. So far, we've enjoyed being a little off the beaten track, and public transport has been fine for getting Matt to work. We'll see how that goes now that it's raining...

Back to work for me too. I need to make contact with the hall here still so I can see about service this week. I still don't know where we'll live, so I don't exactly know what Hall we'll be in, but I still want to get some service going. More later,

Cheers. (I don't know how to say that in Dutch yet)