Resident Hamilton

Big day today. Exhausting day, but very good.

We were scheduled to visit the kids soon-to-be new school, De Startbaan, Meerhoven, at 9am this morning. We would meet the teacher responsible for new starts and get a tour.

As we are deciding to try life without a car for as long as is feasible, we needed to take a bus to get there. We used the bus service last Tuesday when we went to collect the keys for the house (which is outrageously close to the school as it happens)

The Netherlands has very strong workers unions, and this week the bus drivers are striking, leaving a very sketchy bus service running. This was not ideal. El, prepared as always, suggested that we left early doors to make sure we left sufficient time to get to the school for 0900. We left the house at 0730, arriving in the town centre bus stops at ~0745. We finally got on a bus at ~0845. The kids did well but it was quite cold, they were getting restless and hungry and El and I were quite highly strung. So the busses are fantastic, except when striking. C’est la vie.

We arrived late, but had let the teacher known via email that we’d been caught by the strikes. When we arrived she talked us through how the school operates and took us on a tour of all the classes and areas. It.. is… a… gorgeous school. Every classroom for the younger years has little treehouses build into the rooms for the kids to play in. The playground is well equipped with bikes and toys. There is 750 kids aged between 4 – 12 y/o. The gym hall is amazing – Reuben was keen for a shot. It’s just a really nice warm environment. The kids all looked very very happy.

All going well with the application (which the teacher seemed to suggest would be nothing more than a formality) Ariana will go into Group One, where she will more or less get no special language work. She’ll just learn to speak Dutch with the other kids. By Group Three they start reading and writing and they say she’ll be ready by then. For Reuben (who was in Primary Three in Scotland) he will go into either Group Three or Group Four (depending on how good his maths is). He will start with Ten weeks in a language class along side other kids in a similar situation, and then depending on how well he’s progressed he will just start in normal classes with the other kids of Group Three / Four! Felix is baby, so he’ll just do baby things in Dutch.

Reuben and Ariana are scheduled to start on Monday! 17 days after arrival. Amazing, right.

We finished the school tour at about 1015, after which we hotfooted it along to the bus stop over the road. This is because I needed to be back in town for 1115 for my appointment with the Town Hall to get my Residents Permit and BSN (which is like a NI number).

Note: This appointment was initially scheduled on our behalf by a 3rd party of my employer for the 20th Feb. On that date all 5 of us would get BSN’s and the four non-dutch would get Residents Permits. However with a BSN you can’t do anything administratively like getting a bank account, getting health insurance, getting a phone contract, getting utilities set up, hiring bikes or a car etc. Most notably though, until either El or I have a BSN, we can’t release our belongings from their hold in customs. So in light of this, the 20th is painfully far away! El and I managed to wangle an earlier appointment for me only, which was todays 1115… so missing this would be inviting a further two weeks of suitcase living in temp accomodation with no bank account.

Alas, the bus strikes hadn’t gone away in the course of an hour, so now, for a second time this morning, we were hostage to whether or not a bus would come.

A bus did not come….So we had to go via taxi, which was still ended up cutting it nailbiteingly fine. We did however make it, and Reuben joined me in the Burgemeester office to get my official documents done.

I’m glad to say that I am now both a Resident of NL and a Burger (Burg means city / town, so i’m like a town dweller essentially, ha!)

And with this we have now cleared Import Customs so all of our household belongings have been released and will be delivered to our rented house on Wednesday! We also now have a Dutch Bank Account and tomorrow i’ll start arranging all our utilities.

As of the 20th all five of us will be Burgers, so to celebrate, Eliane and I thought it only appropriate that we eat burgers. The Burgemeesters office also suggested we just go right ahead and request dutch passports for the kids, meaning they’d have dual citizenship. We will absolutely be doing this if we can.