Holland Handbook is a good publication to hold on to as an expat here in Holland that comes straight to the point explaining the hinges that can open doors or get you stuck in life in here. In its introduction, it explains a general path of an expat, entering a new country through a sort of phasing in psychological evolution: The tourist phase, the `'I love this country" phase, the "I hate this country phase" and finally the phase where your anxieties disappear and you become part of the system. Speaking of ourselves, we have not fully enjoyed the starter in the tourist phase, yet we are managing ourselves within "the I love this country phase" while sometimes lingering towards the one after.
We were kind of quick in getting new stuff for our apartment. Thanks to the huge IKEA concept center that is in the outskirt of the city of Delft, a train and a bus ride from The Hague. As a child, I used to hate assembling and disassembling things. I could read fictions and biographies over and over and over but opening the toys was not my thing...this was delegated to my little brother who had a real passion with the screw driver who in which had it after my father that as far as I remember, could fix broken thing (or it was very hard for him to give up and surrender if he couldn't). Now I thing after all these years, I kind of enjoyed a little assembling and you had better to anyway if you shop from IKEA. It is funny to consider this a big thing to do because there is a simple rule with IKEA furniture: "If you are trying too hard, you are doing something wrong" and to be honest, this was not a free lesson to learn hence you can see some screw holes in our bed where they don't belong, proving that I am in fact the same kid as I always was.
Now things are finally unpacked and assembled. My new job is showing the benefits of its nature very quickly. I used to work for a huge organization with thousands of employees, lots of initiatives and "stuff" hovering around my head. I am now enjoying the fact that I have only three things to do per working day, dive deep and stay focused. You wouldn't believe how much I enjoy the fact that I receive and reply to only 10 e-mails per day tops, five to ten times less than what I used to do.
There is a real luck that everyone speaks English very well in Holland but I still feel like an illiterate outsider being among the Dutch and the worst case is when we receive something by mail. I once asked one of the collegues for help but well, you can't do that forever...so I came with this temporary solution(yeah right!) of I re-typing the letter into google translator! If Google translator and GoogleEarth were not around, this could become a lousy start for us to get to the know how of the place. Now I am thinking of buying an OCR enabled scanner to convert the pages into text and then use Google to Translate. But anyway this Dutch illitracy is bothering me so much that I have signed up for a Dutch class and hopefully start in a while. This is a difficult language, those who make fun of Dutch language say like : "it is like eating a mouthfull of chips and speaking a mixture of English and German" :)
More coming up...
