Ariana has been doing a lot better at school the last two weeks. She hasn’t had any blackout-tantrums on the way in, she has some little friends who take care of her when she arrives in the morning, and has been very positive about her day when reporting back to us in the evening. I think we’ve turned a corner for now, thankfully.
Last Friday when I was getting the kids ready for school Ariana asked worriedly ‘What day is it, Daddy?’. Upbeat, I told her it was the last day of the week, Friday. She’d go to school today and then it was the weekend. She smiled broadly and said ‘So we all get to stay together!?’. Cutie.
Felix will start on Mondays and Thursdays with Anke the Gastouder [en:childminder] on the 3rd April. I went along to Anke’s with Felix today to sign the last of the paperwork and let him have a play around with her and the other three kids. He loosened off quickly and did great, I think it will be a really good thing for him.
When I picked Reuben up this afternoon his teacher told me that he’d been very tired all morning. This tracks. Ariana and Reuben share a room and they typically wake each other up at around 0545 / 0600. This morning they were awake at 0530. When I went upstairs to see what all the noise was about I found them both in Reubens bunk drawing 😂
I am now registered with a service called Trappers [en:pedals] for cycling to work rewards. It’s set up through my work to provide a tax free payment as a Government incentivised bonus for taking the healthy and environmentally friendly commute option. I have cycled around 350km since starting so have already racked up a decent amount of Trappers Points, which at some point I can elect to be paid out in my paycheque, or exchanged for items from various online shops.
I’ve been absolutely loving my cycle commute. It’s such a great way to start and finish the day. Yesterday on a slightly sleepy cycle into work, a guy rode up on my left to overtake. I don’t tend to get overtaken very much, so whenever it looks like it’s going to happen a part of me brain switches on which just cannot accept it. I also noticed that the guy was on an e-Bike, and I react to that more or less like a child who feels like the one they’re playing with has done something unfair. I’m willing to admit it. It’s not progressive, it’s not mature, but it doesn’t alter the fact that I am going to have to race him.
Most e-bikes will assist you up to 25km per hour, after which you need to add any extra juice yourself. However my top recorded speed on Strava so far has been 46km per hour, and I travel on average at about 35km per hour on my commutes. I let the guy ride up on my left until he was head and head with me, then I just locked in on his speed. Ha. So at this point his bike is probably doing max assisted speed. Naturally he wants to get passed me, so he starts to add some leg power. Like the child I am I chose to keep pace with him. These e-bikers aren’t used to having to push hard for any duration so I knew he wouldn’t last long. After 10 delightful seconds of him riding side by side with me I decided to put him out of his misery and I dusted him 🤣 … I do something similar to this quite often.
Just as in the UK, there are a number of phone Apps which are required in order to facilitate life etc here. Government ones, utility ones, banking ones, shopping ones etc. What you may not have known is that the results you see in your App store are filtered by your registered country of residence (perhaps android also but definitely Apple App Store). This is so that when you search for the Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS) app, you don’t get the Romanian Building Society (RBS) etc.
There were some apps which I needed when first arriving in NL which I was unable to get. I knew that the problem was location settings based but every time I changed the setting it instantly reverted to the UK. I tried but ultimately gave up because I was getting nowhere and there were a million other things to do. Very frustrating. By this time last week however there were now about 10 different Apps which I needed but did not have.
I spent the best part of an hour and a half trying to sort it. The problem I discovered is that Reuben has an account on the iPad, and as a junior, he is required to be attached to an adult’s apple account. These accounts cannot be joined across different nationalities for whatever reason. Probably a billing thing. So I couldn’t move location because it would leave Reuben an Orphan in the system.
Really my last port of call was to try and reach out to customer support because this has always been a painful process with US tech companies. However to my delight I was connected to someone within 30 seconds. They quickly understood the problem and fixed it for me within five minutes! Good result, well done Apple. Try harder on the next OS though please, and the Music app is a mess.
This is a good example of when I talk about the hefty amount of time spent on administrative tasks just in order to setup basic life things in a new country. If you’d asked me 8 weeks ago how long it takes to get a bank account setup for mobile banking I’d maybe have at a push guessed an hour. All said and done, i’d say it actually took around 12, when you consider complications like this one thrown into the mix.
We finally got our utilities sorted out though. A particular delay with getting our energy supplier set up was that I spelled our email address to the person on the phone using UK letters. The address starts with the first letter of all of our names ‘jeraf‘. I sounded this out as ;
Jay
Eee
Arrr
Aaa
Eff
In the Dutch spoken alphabet Eee is the sound for the letter i. Aaa is the sound for the letter e. You see the problem. Another thing which takes longer than it should for a completely unexpected reason.
On the topic of Utilities I was interested to discover that our central heating is not provided by means of gas or electricity or solar. We are provided our heating from the city supply. They literally pipe heat into our house, and all the houses in Meerhoven and other surrounding areas. I’m told that due to the high number of technology, manufacturing and engineering companies in Eindhoven, an Enterprise was created to capture the vast quantity of heat generated by industrial activities. The heat is then sold to residents as an alternative to on-premise generated heating. Fascinating.
Another interesting thing is me and El’s phone numbers. I did two online orders for Eliane’s and my own mobile contracts with the same provider, late one evening, within about a minute of each other. The result was that we have identical phone numbers save for the last digit. Her’s is like 06xxxxxxx17 mine is 06xxxxxxx18. The great thing about that is I really only need to remember one phone number! I only realised when I was reading her number out at the BSN office for some reason. Ha.
I always get a kick out of seeing the non UK branding on household items. Since we are still working through the remains of some of our UK products we get to see the side by side comparison.
I finally found an evening this week to go out to the pump track in the Outdoor Urban Sport area. I have seen these places before online, and once in person (but with no skateboard to hand). When I found out that we had a big, well maintained one so close to the house I knew I’d need to give it a shot. It was so much fun. It’s a delicious marriage of street skateboarding (rolling around on the flat area where you have to do all the pushing) and transition skateboarding (rolling around on ramps where gravity, momentum and moving your body weight creates movement). I felt like it had the best bits of both. Such a good leg workout too! The dusk set in pretty soon after I arrived so I didn’t get long to play but I managed to get a pretty decent hang of it in the 20 minutes I spent there. Definitely something to work on.
I like the idea of being paid to cycle to work. I could have done with Trappers points when I was biking into Dundee very day (a long time ago of course).
Good to hear that Ariana has turned the corner on attendance at school. Is she speaking Dutch now ? It sounds like Reuben is being worked hard at school. His learning curve on the language is no doubt taking a toll.
All the new systems and processes you describe just to be living in Holland makes me weary. You have no idea what people have to encounter when going to live in another country. Hope there aren’t too many more hurdles to overcome. Let us know how El is doing with progress towards a job.
Keep the blogs going
Love Dad.
Just finished reading your blog. As usual very-informative. So glad RAriana is settling at school and has made some friends. If Felix is starting childminder does that mean El is starting work. Always lots of questions to ask. Sounds like even though you have lots to do you still have time for fun. What does El do for fun? Love you all and missing you x.
Great reading as usual Joe.
I love the Fairy/Dreft pic. Dreft was a widely used washing powder in the UK when I was a child. We had it at home. Did it come from the Netherlands? Who knows. I’m sure it’s no longer available.
I’ll send you a 30-tabs pouch ;P See if the smell takes you back to your childhood
Dreft is still here! Pic. en route.