Every morning, a stranger stops by.

We've been able to talk to many Dutch people, as they keep walking into our apartment.

The first day, it was the chimney cleaners. They go door-to-door, and offer their services. Before we had access to the apartment, I was standing on the sidewalk waiting for FedEx, when this man comes by, hands me a pamphlet (in Dutch) and proceeds to explain to me (in Dutch) the importance of keeping your chimney clean. I was like, "Uhh . . . I just moved from Canada."

On our first morning, Ross & I awoke to a knock on the door. This was a surprise. A voice on the other side was explaining who he was (in Dutch), but the only word I could make out was "survey." So, I called, "We're not interested." through the door. Well, as it turns out, it was the man who owns the company we rent from, showing an appraiser around. It was kind of embarrassing, cause Ross & I didn't have a bed that first night, and just slept on the floor with our duvet and pillows on a mattress of the dirty clothes we wore through Spain. We looked like squatters (or "kraakers" as they call them here).

Later on that day, a older man just walked in. He didn't speak any English, but we figured he was a carpenter (the saw in his tool belt, and his coating of sawdust tipped us off). He wanted to fix a hole in our door. We assembled our Ikea furniture while he banged away at our front door. I thought it was kind of ironic; here he was repairing our door by hand, as Ross & I took turns trading off on the included screwdriver to assemble our futon in four easy steps.

Yesterday, the contractor who is renovating the apartment next door just walked in. He didn't know anyone was living here, so it was a mistake. I ended up chatting with him for a long time, and he was really helpful and nice. When I told him I was from Canada, he was like "My car's from Canada!" He's really impressed by the paint job – it's 21 years old, and there's still no sign of rust. He also told me that only nice people live in this area, and the best butcher in town is at the end of our street. This made Ross very happy.

Later on, the chimney cleaner from the first day came by again. He needed access to the neighbor's roof through our building. He helped me figure out how to use the clothes dryer. Not only is it in Dutch, all the symbols are different, too. Doing laundry is like playing Russian Roulette. . . you just don't really know what you're in for. The first load took six hours.

Today, someone rang our buzzer early in the morning. I didn't answer, cause I was tired of everyone just stopping by. I wonder if this is normal.

At least we won't be lonely.

Buying a Bicycle Part I

Ross & I left the house this morning with one goal: to buy bicycles (fiets). No problem, right? I mean, there's bicycles everywhere. Outside of every house there's at least two chained up. Outside of every store there's at least ten. All this city has is bicycles! There must be thousands of bicycles for sale, right?

Wrong. For some reason, nobody sells used bikes. We went to 4 different stores, and discovered that in all of Den Haag, there are only 12 used bicycles for sale--two of which are for kids--and these start at 200 euros ($300).

This is baffling to us, after all, the bikes that the Dutch are riding are not nice. They're cool, cause they're old city cruising bikes, but most of them look like they belong in a history of cycling museum. Most bikes look like they're about to rust through. (When I asked a Dutch guy about this, he explained to me "Bicycles are not about fashion, they're about functionality.")

So, where do the Dutch get their bikes?! If anyone knows, please tell us.

We want bikes!

My first day

As you probably saw from Grace's post, today was my first day of school. We did not have an official class today (this will happen on Monday) but we had the chance to meet most of our teachers and see the school and the room we will be working in for the year. Everything was very exciting.

There are ten of us in total: 1 American, 2 Swiss, 3 Italian, 1 Columbian, 1 Brazilian, 1 Austrian, and myself, the only Canadian.

We got a first draft of our schedule today as well. For the first semester we will have an assortment of regular weekly classes, sporadic lectures by guests, and a selection of classes that run for only a portion of the semester, or else bleed into the second.

On Mondays we will take a programming class with Just Van Rossum, one half of Letterror. For those of you that know this studio, you can imagine how excited I am. Thursday's will be an entire day of calligraphy, with Erik Van Blokland (the other half of Letterror) teaching calligraphy with the pointed pen in the morning and Peter Verhuel teaching calligraphy with the broad nib pen in the afternoon. I won't say too much as to the distinction between these two except that the former produces letters much like Bodoni or Didot and the latter produces letters like Garamond. I am confident that after a few 8 hour sessions I will not be so enthusiastic. There is also more calligraphy on Friday if we want to join the undergrads.

A big surprise was how much we will be traveling to attend classes, which are often outside of the school and sometimes outside of the city. We will have a weekly class with Gerard Unger which will take place at Leiden University every second week and the library in the Hague on the weeks in between. We also have a sporadic class that will take place in Delft at one of our teachers' studios. Other places we visit for our regular classes are Rotterdam and Amsterdam.

This is one aspect of going to school in such a small and densely populated place that is very different than what I am used to. In Canada, you would have to travel hours to get to the next city/town. In Holland, it takes a mere 2.5 hours by car to travel from one end of the country to the next.

There will also be excursions to the Plantin-Moretus museum in Antwerp (Belgium) where we will have a guided tour through the museums archives that aren't usually available for public viewing. Part of their collection houses the original Garamond punches that form the basis of a good amount of the digital type we have today. Lastly, we will be spending a week in Berlin in the Spring to travel to studios and attend the yearly TypoBerlin conference.

You know it'll be a good year when, after a casual orientation, the program director brings out a case of 24 beers and the next two hours is spent drinking with your new professors.

That being said, it looks like the year will be a lot of hard work, and I am both eager and excited.

The Apartment

This is the street we live on, 2e Schuytstraat. (The 2e means Second Schuytstraat, as there's another Schuytstraat around the corner. It's not common to name streets like this, and it's proving to be confusing for everyone.)


We don't know how to say "Schuytstraat". We thought we did, but our Canadian neighbor below us told us we had to work on our pronunciation.


These two photos were from the first day we had the apartment. We were waiting for FedEx to arrive with our boxes.


The weather in the The Hague changes every 5 minutes. On our first day in the apartment, we had four thundershowers with hot sun in between. We saw a rainbow, so I think that's good luck. At the end of our street (under the rainbow) there's a canal. It's not a nice canal, though. It's just kind of like a ditch filled with water and grass on the sides. But it sounds romantic, eh?


All the houses in The Hague are brick row houses. The only houses that are detached are mansions. Our building was built in 1903, but this apartment was renovated quite recently (I don't think Ikea was doing kitchens back then.)

Like most Dutch rental properties, we don't have an oven. This means the only turkey we'll be eating over the holidays will be deli slices. It might seem like I'm okay with this, but I'm weeping on the inside.


This is our little fridge. We noticed that in the grocery stores here, everything (ie: milk, juice, pop, ketchup, etc.) is packaged very tall and skinny, just like the Dutch themselves. You can't buy 4 litres of milk, cause that would take up half of your fridge.


The door on the right is our front door. The room on the right is our dining/working room. And yes, that's a Marian Bantjes poster on the wall.




The living room is also the bedroom. This is our futon. And yes, that an Abi Huynh/Todd Takahashi poster on the wall.


Do you like how our toilet floats out of the wall?


And our shower looks like a time machine.


Having an actual "bathroom" is unusual, too. This was the only apartment that we looked at that didn't have a separate toilet and shower room.

When we were at Ikea, Ross & I wanted to buy only what we needed, but everything in that store is so tempting. As a way to distinguish our needs from our wants, we kept asking each other, "What would Alan Woo do?" (For those of you who don't know Alan, he is one of our friends from school was on exchange in Denmark for four months last year. He stayed in a studio apartment with nothing more than a mattress on the floor.)


The windows are stained glass, and the 12-foot ceilings have beautiful detailing. The windows are quite large, and there's a ton of light.


Home sweet home.

Just like Kindergarten

Today was Ross' first day of school. Here he is in front of our apartment.

Not that I'm complaining, but . . .

trying to get anything accomplished around here can be so frustrating!

You may or may not know that Ross & I each ran into our share of speed bumps trying to get things in line before we left home. No matter what we read, or how informed we thought we were, someone at the Dutch consulate would tell us some "essential" piece of information that would come from left field. We've actually laughed about it many times, because it's quite bizarre compared to what we're used to (ie: a handy pamphlet, or an informative human to talk to).

This morning was our meeting with the Aliens Police to apply for our residency permit. This was frightening for two reasons. First of all, they're called the "Aliens Police", and secondly, even though we had all the documents they requested we bring, we were fully prepared they were going to tell us we forgot something essential that we've never heard about.

If there's one thing that's consistent in Dutch policy it's this quote: "I can't help you. You have to call this number. . ." Once we call the number of the day, someone will answer. Unfortunately, this person can't help us, but they will immediately put us on hold for an indefinite amount of time. At this point, there's a pretty good chance that someone will hang up on you. Repeat.

Did we mention that using the phone here is incredibly expensive? In our few days here, Ross & I easily spent close to 100 Euros using the the phone. For most of that, we were on hold.

Everything is so bloody bureaucratic. Ross likens it to the movie Brazil where every issue has it's own department, and there's no communication between any of them. Our meeting with the Aliens Police went well, but afterwards we were sent on a wild goose chase to answer this one question: Can we apply for a SOFI number? (SOFI is like a SIN).

Anyone sitting behind a reception desk can sense when you're about to ask a question, and the second they hear that tone of voice, they send you off in another direction, building, or town, as it happened today. Or they reach to a stack of paper in front of them and say the famous line, "I can't help you. You need to call this number. . . "

Argh!

Guess what, folks. . .

I'm typing this on my own computer! That means that we're in our new apartment, and our belongings have arrived! This is like the best Christmas ever.

We knew that FedEx was to deliver our boxes anywhere between the hours of 9-6pm, but we didn't get the keys to the place until 10am. So, Ross & I trudged over here from the B&B we were staying at, and camped out on the sidewalk in front of the building at the stroke of nine.

This actually proved to be quite a good decision, as our downstairs neighbor came outside to watch her young daughter walk down the street, and noticed the Canadian flag on my backpack. She then introduced herself, and told us that she and her husband were also Canadian (Montreal), and have lived in Den Haag for the past four years. They have the one young daughter, and three month old twin boys. She was very nice, and let Ross use her Internet to check on FedEx, more than once. She is a great resource for how to settle in, and I imagine we will be asking her many questions in the future.

We waited all day for FedEx. Ross & I took turns leaving to run errands like buy cleaning supplies (the Dutch word for 'clean' is schoon, and this apartment was not. . . cat hair everywhere. Ick.), and getting keys cut. One of us stayed glued to the window all day.

We waited, and waited, and waited. Our furniture doesn't come until tomorrow, so Ross & I began figuring out how we were going to sleep on the hardwood floors with nothing but the clothes we took on our holiday. We waited and waited. Anytime a loud truck drove by, we ran to the windows. Anytime a white van pulled up our street, I got excited, but no. No FedEx.

Finally, after 6pm, Ross decided to call his dad to ensure the address was correct. As he was gone, I heard the sound of a large truck out the window, and even though I'd completely given up, there is was, a white Mercedes-Benz van, with the familiar purple and orange logo. It was so exciting!

I instantly tore open the boxes and sorted through the items I packed one month ago. . . I'm so happy to see my new – but old – clothes. When I came to my computer, I stopped, and ended up writing this. So, I'm going to finish with the rest of our things, and come back and post some pictures.