Ik heb een fiets...

As I’m writing this I am on the way back from Eindhoven. I just passed through Utrecht. A lot of stuff has happened over the last weeks: Anna came to visit and got a job at Sygnific/KLM, I realized that the Holloways “is heel goed”, found out what the Dutch mystery spice is, went to a Dutch wedding, started looking for health insurance, went to the beach, bought a bike and started taking Dutch classes last week.

Johan and Jonas at the beach

Maartje getting married in Leiden

It turned out that the Dutch mystery spice is something called Koriander. It tastes like soap and few people actually like it but yet it is in almost every salad. It is not the spice typically found in Indian dishes.

I could live here - a tyical dutch house

Finding an apartment turned out to be a nightmare. I have scoured the city and looked at quite a number of dwellings, ranging from crack house to hip cool bachelor pad. Today I got confirmation that I got an apartment in a really nice area. One of the hardest parts was figuring out which areas were suitable and which best to avoid. Like every major city, Amsterdam has some areas where you really don’t want to live.

Tax in this county is comparable to Sweden. I think that tax is generally a good thing as long as you are guaranteed food, housing and health care if Fortuna should decide to turn a cold shoulder. But on one of these factors the Netherlands differs very much from us: same tax, but no health care. So after being left with some 70 percent of your salary you have to buy additional insurance for doctor visits and the like. That means that you need to cough up another 90 € just for basic care. A Socialistic country? I think not.

Dutch lessons at Vrije Universiteit

Dutch is dubious, it is very hard and at the same time it is a quite simple language. Since words and sentences quite often resemble German and Swedish you start out by thinking that it’s going to be a piece of cake. Then after a few futile attempts to speak you realize that written Dutch and spoken Dutch have very little to do with one another. In spoken Dutch whole sentences can be concatenated into a long gibberish word and pieces of words fall out for no apparent reason. There are a number of small words, such as “er and “maar” that change meaning depending on context and quite often these small words alone carry no meaning.

Let’s give a little example of concatenation:

“Is het” is spoken like [iset]

“Dat wat het” is spoken like [dat waset]

Another example featuring meaningless dutch words:

Er – a small meaningless word

Er wonen 15 miljoen mensen in Nederland. – Introductory er

Ik woon in Amsterdam. Ik woon er al 10 jaar – Place er

Programming is going well and I am currently exploring the world of jsf, beans and javascript. I just ordered a book on Spring and I hope start adopting it soon. Thanks to the good folks at University of Lund I have a very poor understanding of UML (they chose to use their own standard) and I will start taking UML classes next week.

I will start with a series of updates on Dutch usability. Swedes will be amazed…

Ik heb een fiets gekocht, een het is heel goed!

Deep Fry Country

Today I almost bought a bike, I even went to look at it, but it was 26 inch and therefore to small. So I'll keep watchin marktplaats.nl for something suitable for tall people.

Johan enjoying his gehaktballen

I and Johan went to IKEA last Friday, after a long walk from Bijlmer to Bullewijk we had "Köttbullar och lingonsylt" i.e. Swedish meatballs with lingonberry jam, or as the dutch say "gehaktballen met vossenbesjam". Taking advantage of the country's lax alcohol laws we drank Spendrups Gold. Drinking beer at IKEA felt quite wierd.

Unfortunately the Dutch like their food fried and subsequently served the dish with french fries instead of just potatoes (I am sure the deep fried Mars bars served at the chippies in UK would have been a hit here, if they arn't already). It was still worth the trek but I couldn't help feeling that some potatoes would have made the dish so much better.

On saturday we went to Club Rascal at Club Eight. I had a massive headache but still managed to play some table tennis before I took I cab home.

Dutch spice

Over my two weeks in my new country I've noticed that some meals are so horrible that eating them is impossible. The food tastes like it's been out in the sun or like something fried in butter way past it's best before date. Some of my Swedish collegues have noticed this to. The question is what is it that makes the food taste so horrible?

The taste is hard to describe, it's neither sour nor sweet. "Härsket" is my best shot.

I'll post more on the subject when I have tracked down the cause.

Soft weekend, Hama and Ikea

On friday I went out with some people from work. We had a really nice dinner at De Kroon at Rembrandtplein and then when to Pijp and had a couple of beers. On saturday I went to town and bought a ten euro iron at Hema.

Hotdog with mayonaise

Today I went to IKEA in Bullewijk and bought an ironing board. IKEA was basically the same except that the hotdogs came with mayonaise. It was a weird feeling to walk around among the Swedish product names, feeling a misguided sense of national pride and thinking about whether there was someone else there who knew what the names ment.

I've also come to realize that you need a separate travellingcard for the trains to Schipol and antoher one for the trams, busses and metro in Amsterdam. This is because they are run by different companies. Overall it's been an exciting weekend.

Belastingdienst, Eindhoven and luggage

Belastingdienst


Working at Eindhoven


Pata Negra

I just came back home from eating dinner with Björn, Johan, Jonas and some of their friends. The food was good but the service was horrible. It was a tapas bar and it took ages for the next course to get served. Maybe it's a plot to get people to order more drinks. Anyhow, I'm still feeling very full.

Today I got my burgersevicesnumber (preciously known as sofi-number) from the belastingdienst. I called them a few days ago and they called back again and set up an appointment. I went to a large brown building near Sloterdijk station and got a queue number, sat down and waited. A very unfriendly woman took my details and ten minutes letter gave me a paper in Dutch with my very own burgerservice number. Smooth...

Other than that things are going well. A guy from DHL dropped the luggage of yesterday. I became technical manager for a project. It might be interesting to see how that turns out. And getting up at 5 to go to Eindhoven is not as fun as it sounds but I guess I'll get used to going there every wednesday.

Tomorrow is casual friday.

Tomorrow im off to Eindhoven

Tomorrow I have to wake up at 5.00 to travel to the south of the Netherlands to attend a meeting in Eindhoven. The trip will take to hours. Except from waking up so early i'm looking forward to meeting the Eindhoven development team.

On another note. Still no luggage but fortunately my insurance pays for some of the necessities I need to buy in order to be presentable at work.

The taxoffice called, in order to get a burgerservice number (which I in turn need for getting a pay check) I have to meet with some official and apply. The Amsterdam office couldn't meet with me for a forthnight so they asked me to go somewhere else in the Netherlands and apply there instead. I think not.

And tomorrow it's casual dresscode!

First day as an expat

I've arrived in Amsterdam and tomorrow I'm of to Schipol for my first day as a Technical Consultant.

The trip was a mess. Somehow the competent crew at Kastrup Airport failed to load my luggage on to the connecting flight to Amsterdam. So arriving half an hour late I was finding myself in line to report my missing luggage with the other passengers from Stockholm. I don't know if it was the ground personel's or SAS's fault but it makes you think about whether or not choosing KLM would have provided a more comfortable journey.

Therefore the first thing I did when I came here was to go and buy soap, toothpaste and a toothbrush.

The day before departure

Doing my thesis for a major swedish broadcasting comapny



Sending the dog home



Moving into small student corridor temporarily


So it's come to this. Tomorrow I leave Uppsala behind and depart for Amsterdam to begin my new life as a Technical Consultant at Knowledge Values.

The last couple of weeks has been a mess since I've been finishing up my Bachelor's Thesis in HCI. I conducted a study for a major Swedish TV channel and been up to my neck in work. But now we're done with the move, driving to Hälsningland with a lorry full of stuff and the dog has left for it's parental home.

It amazing how much stuff one accumulates...

Working and Sittning at Wermlands

My girlfriends friend Jenny and her boyfriend Torsk was in town over the weekend. She is a big shot at Wermlands nation in Lund and she and her boyfriend was in town to attend the spring prom hulabaloo. Lacking a tail suit I couldn't attend the main event much to my girlfriend's grief. Instead we went to the warm up party the night before. I feared it was going to be a really internal affair but much to my surprise I really enjoyed myself.

Bum life weekend

This weekend my girlfriend and the dog left for her mom's. Which means that I had the house to myself between Thursday and Saturday. Since I've got an insane amount of work in school right now I've spent the weekend in front of my computer writing. To keep me company Simpsons, American Dad and Family Guy was running most of the time from my girlfriends computer hooked up to the television set. Busy trying to figure out how the Gabor function applies to Gestalt law's I didn't bother much with the dishes and more and more plates started to pile up in the kitchen.

Around 12ish Saturday the doorbell rang. It was the new tenants (the ones who are going to move in after I leave for Amsterdam) and they wanted to look around to see what the apartment was like. Unfortunately this was at the height of my bum life weekend. I greeted them and showed them around but they seemed pretty eager to go when they saw the kitchen, the geek nest in the living room (3 laptops running at once) and the fact that I was only wearing one sock probably didn't help either.

Must start somewhere

Inspired by my friend MK I've decided to start my own blog.

Since I'm moving to Amsterdam to begin life as an Expat I've decided to blog about my shenanigans and hijinxes abroad.

Until I have a place to put my server, blogger will do. This is my first post