Tag Archives: holland

A foreigner in The Netherlands (3): Moving to a new apartment

I recently – 1 week ago – changed apartment.

I moved from a noisy shared big apartment in the center (Den Haag, near Het Plein) to a smaller studio just 10 minutes by bike from the center. This is the first time I move and I hope it will be the last.

I didn’t pay a moving company as I have only few furnitures, but the few things I have were enough to get me crazy. I live in the third floor and there is no elevator.

The good thing is that I heavily use my bike to carry stuffs, sometimes in a weird way 🙂

Moving by bike

I cannot imagine the poor guys that are going to deliver the washing machine.

Update 23/06/2011@14:20: I’ve added just a couple of pictures more

Moving by bike (2)

Moving by bike (3)

A foreigner in The Netherlands (1)

This post is the first of a series where I will describe and comment the lifestyle, the culture up here in The Netherlands.

Now is the right moment to start writing.

Why now and not anytime before?

Living¹ in a foreign country is always harder than living in your own country. The whole period is composed by alternate phases: positive and negative. In the initial phase the enthusiasm, the discover of “the new” (place, culture) can be fascinating and show everything in a positive and amazing way. Afterwards is coming an opposite phase, where you don’t feel at home, you don’t feel accepted and you miss your own country, sometimes after bad days or bad experiences.

These phases are like sinusoidal, with a parabolic semi-circle up and down; while at the beginning the parabolic is higher and long in time; with years it becomes lower and stabilize in a way that the average point is located above or below the zero, depending of your feeling about the country.

Right now I feel I can write good, bad and funny things about The Netherlands with a decent fair point of view. I cannot assure to make everybody happy but as always I won’t mind to change or adjust my ideas 😉

¹ excluding Erasmus

Haarlem

A couple of days ago I decided that this blog has to survive.

Today I went to Haarlem, a small city near Amsterdam, where live a lot of people that works in Amsterdam. Haarlem is like a suburb. Beautiful suburb.

I got the train from Den Haag Centraal station and it’s curious the direct train take 15 minutes more than a train with 1 change (the train I got).

I went there only few hours, I had a walk in the city center, I visited the Teylers museum but I couldn’t visit the Frans Hals museum as well because was too late.
One of the symbol of this city is the Molen de Adriaan, really dutch! 😀

Really nice city! 🙂

Here now a couple of photos I took. The light wasn’t nice. Too cloudy, but fortunately in a couple of photos there was a light sunshine.

canals

statues

skyline

moles