First posted October 14, 2005
A Day in Hen Haag from Kathy's Perspective
Unlike Kevin's day, my day starts quite early. I am up by 6:30 am, not too unreasonable. I am showered and dressed by 7:00 and rouse Kenny at that time. Thirty minutes later he and I make the adventurous trek to his school. His school is located in a little village called Wassenar. Wassenar is about a 12 minute drive in the middle of the day, but in the morning the drive can range from 25 - 50 minutes long, one way. Eventually Kenny will bike in decent weather. We still have to get his bike assembled and "dutched" up. He should be able to bike to school in about 30 minutes.
On days that I don't have to be somewhere right away at 9:00, I come home and have breakfast and a cup of tea before starting my day. Every day has a different set of tasks to be done. Today the first 90 minutes were spent on the phone (the first 60 minutes I was on hold) with the internet company. We hear that everyone has a difficult time getting their internet service hooked up, and it looks as though we are not escaping this common plight.
After this accomplishing this phone call, I went to our house and took a stack of mail to a neighbor to translate for me, which then prompted another set of
business to take care of. After taking care of that business, I successfully found a "house doctor, or hoisart" to register with. Next I went to the store to buy bedding for our newly assembled beds from Ikea. After 6 hours of shopping, working at the house, and phone details - I head back to Wassenar to pick Kenny up from school.
Tonight was spent getting together with some friends and a nice dinner, and as they would say here: "we had a lovely time".
That was today, and most days are quite full with tasks helping us to move closer to living in our home. Moving into a rental property here is somewhat like being in the final stages of building your own home. You acquire the keys to your place that will have cement walls and cement floor, kitchen sink and
cupboards, and wires hanging from the ceiling for light fixtures. That is it, nothing else. We were lucky and able to purchase the carpeting from the
former renter. We did put in a kitchen floor and did some remodeling in the kitchen - projects which are still in process.
We need to buy what they call "kaasts" of various sizes and shapes in which to store our things. There are no closets here, so you need to buy your closet
space. So much of my time is spent taking measurments and shopping.
Every day also entails a daily trip to the market. I walk to the market, carrying my own shopping bag or pull cart, and buy groceries for the evening meal and whatever else we need. I must say that I enjoy being able to leave the house for the store and have dinner on the table 40 minutes later, if I choose an easy meal to fix. The small stores without so many choices are nice. No Cub Foods grocery lines to battle, though a lot of guess work goes on in the grocery
store aisles trying to figure out what products are. I look at the pictures and try and figure out the words based on the few I have learned so far. I have
learned that you need to always have 50 cents with you so you can get a shopping cart, and that you return all your bottles to the back of the grocery store and
get a slip of paper giving you $ off of your purchase.
Every day I learn new things. At the dinner table we all can ask one another: "what did you learn today"? I love to learn new things and daily life is always a learning experience, whether it is dutch customs, language, banking, trams, customer service issues, the metric system, or finding my way to a new place.
I am learning to take care of most of our "business". All the banking is on-line here, it is a paperless system. You have a little thing that looks like a toy
palm pilot that you use to interact with the computer and move your money from your own account to whoever you may owe money to. You pay all your bills on-line and all other banking business. As soon as you use your pin card (like a debit card), your balance changes on-line. The entire site is in Dutch, so a
woman from the church sat with me and taught me how to navigate the web site and I have made myself an extensive dictionary to help me each time I work with our finances.
I haven't done as much biking, busses, trams, and trains as the others, because I usually have the car. I have learned to never turn right on red (a very
strict law here), always look over my right shoulder for bikes when turning on a green, and looking 360 degrees anytime I switch lanes to make sure there are
no bikers in my path. I have played chicken with the trams, accidentally driven on a tram only street, and been lost on numerous occasions.
Directions are very interesting. No one uses street names to tell you how to get somewhere, which is because streets change their names about every 3
blocks or so. Plus the street names are typically 15 - 25 letters long. So I find my way around by looking for landmarks and signs that point me in the direction of a general area. There are no square blocks. If you miss a turn you can not simply go "around the block". Instead you weave in different directions and may or may not ever land back where you started from.
I also find time every week to schedule some fun activities. Lunch or tea out with a friend (yes, I am beginning to make some friends), a weekly prayer group
with some women from Kenny's school, and a weekly meeting for international people to teach things one needs to know about while living in this country. The other thing that has been wonderful is staying with our most gracious hosts, Charlie and Lisa. Charlie and Lisa have been putting up with our crazy family of five since we have arrived. We have become one big happy family, and I'm afraid we will all go through a bit of separation anxiety when we move out, hopefully in just a day or two now. We enjoy relaxing in the evening, many times over a meal, then in the living room. It has been wonderful to have them as we transition into life here before being all on our own.
The biggest stretch for me is probably the "urban-ness" of
I hope this gives you a little taste of daily life for me, here in
Kathy
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