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.
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.
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 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!
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