The Dunes

The Dunes are on the coast of the North Sea by The Hague. It is a beautiful area. We enjoyed a Sunday afternoon here with some new friends

Gone to the Dogs

First posted October 25, 2005

Have you ever sat in a room at the veterinarian clinic and looked at one of those posters of all the different dog breeds? I have. And I have wondered, in a world of Golden Retrievers, Black Labs and an occasional poodle where are all these other types of dogs? I mean the weird ones like the wiener dog with long, coarse boar bristle type hair. Or the goofy looking white thing with black spots that doesn’t really have a head. On the end of its neck is a big snout with two eyes on the side and a mouth underneath. I don’t know the breed names. I couldn’t tell you what to call the big polar bear fur rescue dog (not the Saint Bernard). Wouldn’t know what to call the midsized long haired thing with no visible eyes that the old lady walks late at night. But I have found them all. And they are doing quite well in the Netherlands.

Cats must have it rough here. Since I do not like cats don’t take that for sympathy. In fact my favorite bumper sticker over here so far is “I like cats - they taste like chicken.” But this place is pooch central. Big dogs, little dogs. Skinny little sticks and massive things held back by a cable. Hairy Chewbacca types and dainty fluff balls. If you want to make friends here, walk a dog. The Dutch love their doggies. And they will like yours too.

But, typical for Dutch culture, we’ll have no dogs out of line. When walking in The Hague Forest one notices dogs everywhere. Almost all of them off leash being well behaved. I have always been a dog lover. And I have always enjoyed that dogs can sense who likes them and that they immediately warm up to me. But here when a pooch is on the trail in the forest twenty paces ahead of its master even if we look eye to eye and I tap my leg in an invite to a rub on the head they just saunter right by like I don’t exist. They are so well behaved they don’t even chase the ducks. That’s a little disappointing. The ducks and geese here are fat and lazy.

Our good friends, the Allmons, have a very American dog. Einstein is a poodle mix with a mind of his own. Ask him to come and he looks the other way. Ignore him and he’ll jump on your lap. Basically, he does what he wants when he wants. But he is so darn cute doing it that you can’t help but love him. In the forest one time, Einstein was on leash. He’d be dead in a minute if it were otherwise. A very Dutch woman watched him for a while. When the person walking him brought him near the lady quipped, “We have schools here for dogs like that one.”

We’re thinking of getting a pooch when things settle down. I am hoping for a Dutch-American breed, one that obeys when I want it to but is a fun rascal, too. Or maybe I’ll just train it to chase the ducks. Then when I get scolded for its misbehavior I can pretend to be appalled. But the next time your sitting at the vet’s staring at the chart, they are over here. All dogs go to Holland.

A Day in Den Haag

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 The Hague. I am more of a "country girl" than a "city girl". Thankfully, there are pockets of green spaces that I am able to find during the day for some "breathing" space and refreshment of my spirit.

I hope this gives you a little taste of daily life for me, here in The Hague.

Kathy

A Day in Den Haag

First Posted on Oct 12, 2005

A day in Den Haag (Dutch for The Hague) from the Perspective of Rev Kev

One of the things I like most about the start of a day here is it is later than in the States. Kenny would argue about that because he is off to school sometimes before I am even up. But I am usually the first one in the office at Crossroads. Being a night owl, that is unusual for me. I get in between 8 and 9 and no one else shows up until 9:30 or later. But I am ahead of myself.

Breakfast almost feels American. A bowl of cereal, usually a granola type thing, a piece of fruit, maybe a piece of toast and a glass of juice. I can't find my favorite cereal - Honey Bunches of Oats - but the granola is good. If we have run out of fruit, not to worry. I simply take a different route to the office. Instead of walking straight down Bezuidenhoutsweg (I won't even try to type the pronunciation), normally a five minute walk, I cruise one block over to Theresiastraat, walk by a fresh fruit stand and buy a peach, plum or banana with my pocket change and finish breakfast on the way to work.

I have to say I really enjoy the walking or biking most places. The distances are not long. The break is invigorating. And with the type of rain we have had here, you can just wait a bit and the sun pops out and then you can get to your next place.

The office is well, an office. But if we have a meeting tea or coffee is a must. One very small cup and a biscuit (cookie/cracker type thing - really more of a large crumb). And only one of those, even if you are starving because it would be rude to have two. At my last place of ministry, put a large platter of cookies out and they are gone in two minutes. Here you'd toss the leftovers after two weeks.

I get to work in a cool Dutchy building. I know nothing of its history, or whether it even has one. But it is of typical Dutch architecture. My office has a tall ceiling, one big window, another small one and a nice damp smell they can't get rid of. The big window is funky in that it opens two ways. Turn the handle half way and it swings wide open on two left hinges. Turn the handle all the way and it opens from the top about six inches as a vent. The Dutch are clever with a lot of things like that.

Last week I was sitting in my office with my associate, Jack. All of a sudden out the big window a SWAT team van pulls up and stops. Out pile a dozen decked out officers with helmets, shields, the whole nine yards. They run from the back of the van and spread across the sidewalk and street in combat ready position. Jack kinda freaked. I couldn't get him out from under my desk. And there wasn't room for both of us. Then they started walking out of view. Just then we notice several more SWAT vans pull up.

Turns out it was a training exercise. We went out the door in Jack's office and there were people everywhere. I so wanted to get a picture of me standing with my hands in the air right in front of a row of them but no camera was to be found. You'll just have to picture it in your mind's eye.

Across the street from our office is The Haagse Bos, or The Hague Forest. Think of it as Central Park. (The Queen, Beatrix, lives there which is why we speculate the SWAT training was on our side street.) It is full of trails for biking and walking. It even has a few horse trails. There are open spaces with little lakes, a canal/river or two and lots of woods. When I want to pray or clear the cobwebs from my brain, I will scoot across the street and walk for a while. Some days Kathy will join me for a walk. Then I'll take an hour or so. We are finding it very important to be intentional about our marriage. It takes more work to be a good spouse in a strange culture than in your own. So we are trying to keep it an every day priority.

For lunch I will bring in leftovers or a sandwich. Or head back to Theresiastraat for something to make a sandwich. This little shopping street has all you need - a cheese shop that wreaks of cheese we'll never eat, a butcher, several fruit and vegetable shops, flower shops of course, and a couple of small grocery stores. The groceries can be a challenge. Sometimes you have to guess what kind of meat you are getting. But it is always fresh and good quality. If the produce is being sold by weight and not unit you have to weigh it and put a ticket on before getting to the check out. I found this out the hard way. People were rather annoyed that I was holding up the line, but I was having trouble understanding that the checkout girl was telling me to go over there and weigh it and get a ticket. I had previously shopped at a big store that weighed the stuff right at the scanner, just like in the States. Fortunately, the guy behind me recognized me for the ignorant newbie that I was and helped me out. Outside the store afterward we had a nice little conversation and he gave me some more pointers. Back to lunch. If I am feeling particularly indulgent I walk to either the fish and chips stand or the loempia (Filipino egg rolls) stand.

Both are very much my grease quota for the month and very much worth it.

Back at the office I fill my days with sermon prep, digging into the details of what our team is working on and planning for the growth of this spiritual community. I love it.

These days, after work I hop on a bike and bike over to our house. Currently I am assembling a bunch of Ikea furniture. I had no idea a headboard for a bed could come in a bunch of pieces. But Kari, Kristi and I are getting good at slamming stuff together. We should be in our place by this weekend. But you have heard that before.

Biking is great. You basically rule the road. The law is simple. Hit a biker, you're at fault. The locals have gotten used to and take advantage of this policy. I question the logic. I mean, even if a car driver is at fault I see the biker as a bit more vulnerable. The one thing I have yet to see is a biker defiantly flying down the wrong side of the road. But just about anything else goes. Many streets have separate bike lanes next to the sidewalk. We about got run over several times the first days here by bikers who did not like us pedestrians being in their lane. The funny thing is all they give you is a little ding of their bell. I have come to understand, however, that it means a bit more than a quick tap of a car horn. The ding is more of a polite middle digit.

The other night Kristi and I did a very Dutch thing. After a night of assembling furniture I gave her a ride back to Allmon's (our unbelievably patient and gracious hosts) on the back of my bike. There she was sitting sideways on that little flat watchamacallit-for-hauling-stuff with her ankles crossed looking like a Dutch girl out for a ride. We were a scene.

Every Sunday I bike to the church services because I go in earlier than my family. I score big points with the locals who see me. I just find it refreshing. But then again the weather has been fabulous.

The evening meal here is much later than the States. For us back home 6:00 was late. Here 7:30 or 8:00 is more normal. We are eating well. We have figured out how to enjoy our favorites like fajitas, lasagna and even homemade kung pao chicken. TV is not really a draw. But we have enjoyed popping in a movie a few times.

I hope that gives you a snapshot of our life here. Stay tuned for more in the days ahead.

Cricket

First posted on Sept 9, 2005

Hey this is Kenny, today is Friday and I just got back from Hans and Frans a bakery that's like a 5-minute walk from the place we are staying. (And wish we were livivg there also) I don't have school today because I just got back from what they call project 6 which is like a 4 day field trip!!!!!! My arm is really sore from playing so much Cricket. what you've never heard of cricket!!! Well I'll tell you about it then. Cricket is the British version of baseball or maybe the other way around I'm not sure which one but one of them. Anyways there is a bowler, which is like a pitcher who will try to knock the wickets off of 3 poles sticking out of the ground by bouncing the ball off the ground before the batter from behind the other side of another set of wickets. There are also 2 batters, one at each set of wickets and to they'll try to hit the ball and score a run. You get 1 run for each time each batter get to the other set of wickets. To get an out you need to hit a wicket off the poles you need 3 outs to get your team up at bat. Cricket is a very, very high scoring game.

See Ya,
Kenny