London Weekend

After a pretty unproductive week work-wise (including 3 days where I had to be in meetings for clients who I wasn’t supposed to be working on this week) I managed to slip away early on Friday and make it to my flight to LONDON - my first big trip to the big smoke!

It was a whirlwind trip, and out of all the London mates I only managed to catch up with Vanessa. (Sorry guys!)

Here's my backpack making its maiden voyage-

So on Friday night I was quite proud of myself for getting all the way to Schiphol on the bus without being on the wrong side of the road for the bus, getting the wrong bus, or getting off at the wrong stop. I grabbed a quick Starbucks coffee (the only place in Amsterdam they have it!) and then milled around in duty free. Unfortunately the duty free was off the cards once again because my payment had not gone through from KPMG over here yet…

Nonetheless, after a successful arrival in Merry Old England, I even stumbled my way onto the correct bus to go to Vanessa’s house! With a minor detail being the fact that I asked to get off at a stop a tube ride from Vanessa’s rather than the stop just around the corner!

After a long catchup covering all the gossip, and a good sleep on an air mattress (sadly this is likely to be considered more comfortable than my little bed in Amstelveen) it was time to hit London.

Vanessa’s neighbourhood is where Madonna and Kate Moss live. So we walked around a bit, but didn’t see anyone famous. Although we did see a big fancy car. No one of note inside it though. A couple of streets over is Lord’s cricket ground, so we walked around it and took a few snaps.

The next item on the agenda was some serious shopping. We headed off to TOPSHOP to meet up with Amanda and Milli, who were running seriously late. Milli had some emergency shopping to do (shoes and a handbag) and the rest of us were happy to browse.

I wanted to get a real ‘pub meal’ for dinner, but the pub was full by the time we got there! We went to some Thai restaurant with Vanessa’s friends Chanel and Helen, before a few drinks at the pub and a relatively early night.

Sunday morning was brunch and the ‘Langley Lightning London Tour’, which consisted of sightseeing: London Eye, Parliament, Big Ben, Westminster Abbey, and Buckingham Palace.

By this stage I was pretty much exhausted and we headed back to Vanessa’s to grab my stuff for the flight home.

Now my smooth journey into London left me with high hopes about the transport system back towards the airport. Unfortunately, a major debacle ensued. While waiting for my prepaid bus, all the buses that come past are full! Luckily Vanessa was waiting with me, so she helped me to RUN (yes run) to the tube station, jump on and go up one stop, then RUN (yes run) to the train station, buy a ticket, and jump on a train which then connected to a shuttle bus in order to make my flight. Which I did. So good work on that front from Vanessa!

A couple more pics -

If you click on this one and make it bigger, you can see that I'm pointing at an advert for NZ!

This very flattering picture is of me saying 'I'm on the tuuuuuuuube'. It's gold.

Weekend of fun in Amsterdam

Milli and Emma and Emma’s boyfriend Ollie came from Brussels, and Willy and Cat came from Luxembourg for the weekend. I was very impressed with Milli’s navigational ability – armed with just a map and some printed directions, she managed to arrive not too long after the expected arrival time!

After a well-deserved sleep-in on Saturday morning, we headed into town and went to the Albert Cuyp markets. In the rain they weren’t so enjoyable, but we still managed to have fun. A warm waffle with chocolate helped a little. The markets were a long line of stalls selling luggage, then fruit and veggies, then clothes, then toiletries, then luggage, then flowers, then fruit and veggies, then socks, and so on and so forth. By the second block everything is looking a little similar (including the prices). Because of the bad weather we didn’t take any photos. I will hopefully head back there on a day when it isn’t raining, to peruse further (and possibly get another suitcase or something to ship back all the extra stuff I’ve bought here!).

A whole crew of Kiwis (and some South Africans) went out for dinner – 24 people in all. We invaded an Argentinian Steakhouse. There seem to be more of them here than I would expect to see in Argentina! One day I had lunch at one Argentinian Steakhouse, and dinner at another! (ok, ok, gimme a break, there was hardly anything else open, it was a public holiday)

It’s a dead giveaway that it’s an Argentinian Steakhouse when the directions state “It’s the third ‘El Rancho’ restaurant on this street”. They’re just seriously everywhere. The same thing is with the ‘Bulldog Bar’. There’s about a million of them in Amsterdam, too. Sometimes all on the same street.

Here's Willy, Milli, Kinga and Cat at El Rancho:

And here's Milli, Kinga and I:

So after our unique steakhouse experience (complete with some fantastic sangria), we moved onto the more ‘typical’ Amsterdam experiences, and a number of the group enjoyed the local take on ‘muffins’ before attending an ‘adult’ show. The initial plan was to head to a club after the show, but the ‘muffins’ proved to be particularly potent, and that combined with the rain saw a sorry bunch of us head back to Amstelveen in taxis pretty much straight after the show!

Here's Kinga, Milli and I at the coffee shop:

One really strange thing is that in the centre of Amsterdam there are all these plastic things, which are basically open air urinals. Guys just walk up to them and, uh, relieve themselves...

So of course our boys had to try it.

Sunday was pretty slow, with a bit of shopping (Milli got new shoes) and some food (mmm, hotdog).

A little calmer in the Netherlands

I did manage to get a laptop bag with wheels. Which is nice.

Frustration in the Netherlands

A lot of things here seem to be hard to organize. For starters, work was supposed to organize us to get bank accounts open, but when I was at the bank they started asking for all this extra documentation which our employees don’t usually need, like proof of address etc (uh, no I don’t have a phone bill with my name and address on it, I don’t even have a phone!). So the coordinator at work says she will sort it out for me, but I never hear back from her. So eventually she then emails me and asks me for my bank account number. I’m all like ‘uh, well I wasn’t able to open the account, and you said you’d sort it out’ to which I get no reply (of course).

Another thing that’s hard to organize is the contents of our apartment. We were told we’d be supplied with everything that is standard. So we get here, and there’s no toaster, and hardly any towels, and only one tiny frypan, and no internet connection at home, and no cable tv, all of which they said ‘came standard’. So we say to a different coordinator at work, what’s the process for buying them and getting reimbursed? So she says that she has to talk to our landlord about it because our firm doesn’t want to pay for these things themselves, they’d rather get it from the landlord (fair enough). But then two weeks later, lo and behold, we’ve heard nothing still.

Then I get told that I can’t get a laptop bag with wheels because I’m here for such a short time (despite the recent back injury not being completely healed yet), and an email comes through that our work mobile phones may or may not arrive before we leave the country at the end of April. A couple of hours later, another email comes through saying that the phones have arrived and we can pick them up. Cherilyn and I (since we are in Eindhoven) send an email requesting that one of the other girls pick up our phones, only to get a reply saying that the phones aren’t actually quite ready yet!

I MEAN SERIOUSLY…

And then to top it off, my internet banking from BNZ is completely bung – every time I log in it tells me that I can’t access my information ‘at the moment’ and that I should try again ‘later’. And it’s been telling me this for a month. So I call them and they tell me it’s just because every night at 9pm the credit card payment system rolls over (for approx half an hour). So I say, ok but what about when I logged in at 5am and it said the same thing? They were all ‘oh, um, yeah I dunno’. So I’m on hold for like an hour before they tell me that not only can they not fix it (“I’ve never heard of this happening before and I don’t really know anything about internet banking” the guy says), they also can’t even pass on a message to the internet banking team to get them to look into it! They say they only take phone calls, so I have to call between 9pm and 8am our time! Which is the only time I’m not at the office working, basically. And since we have no work mobile phones, and I’m living in a hotel, I have no way of making any phone calls like that.

Drives me insane. Considering unleashing the rage.

(trying to think calm thoughts, and feeling much better after my rant)

Dutch Food

The food in the Netherlands is kind of similar to home, but some things are quite different. There are pastries everywhere, and it seems like every day at Philips it is someone’s birthday, and there are boxes and boxes of pastries being shared around the staff. They hardly ever offer them to the auditors though….. mean, huh.

There’s this new year’s pastry called Oliebollen, which we ate already. It is only around at the beginning of the year, and then they disappear for a few months.

Another Dutch specialty is the Kroket (plural is Kroketten). Kroketten look like they’ll have mashed potato inside them, and are long and skinny and deep fried. When you bite into it, it’s a meat/gravy combination. I ate one at the tenpin bowling alley, and I don’t think I’ll have it again.

One thing I will have again is Bossche Bol (think I spelled it right?). It’s basically a big creamy donut, but if I can get away with saying I’m eating it for cultural reasons then bring it on!

The breakfast at our hotel in Eindhoven is fantastic though! There’s bacon, sausages, meatballs, potato/cheese gratin, grilled tomatoes,four different juices, four different milks, cold meats, cheese, breads, bread rolls, muffins, croissants, pain au chocolat, cereals, three types of muesli, strawberry jam, raspberry jam, honey, peanut butter, chocolate spread, four types of yoghurt, rice, Chinese food like dumplings, sweet and sour chicken on a stick, pancakes, French toast, and you can also ask the chef to make you any eggs you like, such as an omelette or fried eggs or whatever. Then waitresses come around and fill up your coffee as often as you like.

There are also little handmade chocolates with nuts in them, and mini glasses of some port or something at the front desk of the hotel in the evenings. It’s great. Cherilyn and I have been making up excuses for going to the front desk and asking questions so that we can get more little chocolates!!!

Over here, all large employers have their own cafeteria (which I think is subsidized?). All the employees buy their lunch there, and it’s social suicide to bring your own from home. There’s bread rolls, and soup, and salads, and deep fried stuff like kroketten and cheeses, there’s a selection of salad items, chocolate bars etc, and even an ice cream freezer (and its seriously 5 degrees celcius outside). Everyone drinks milk at lunchtime, which I doubt I will ever do.

Worst lunch incident yet happened yesterday, when the guy in front of me in the line managed to dip his sleeve into my salad without me noticing. So the counter lady explains to me (in rapid Dutch) that his sleeve was in my food and that I would probably want to get another plate. Of course I just looked at her blankly and said ‘pardon?’ So she had to tell the next person in line (luckily my manager, Marc) and he had to explain to me that some random man had totally assaulted my lunch. Some people, seriously!

Fun, Eindhoven style

Well there’s not much to do in Eindhoven (other than eat at one of the six million restaurants that seem to be nearby), so Jen organized a bowling tournament for the audit team. To even out the numbers, she invited her boyfriend Joep (he’s Dutch) and his friend Kevin (also Dutch).

Needless to say, the guys turned out to be secret good bowlers, and totally whipped our butts. Good fun though.

And… some things never change. Bowling shoes are ugly all over the world!

Working in Eindhoven

We had to leave early, so that we could get there on time (and everytime we go somewhere we're going to have to estimate the length of time it'll take and then add an hour of getting lost time)






And so, of course, we got lost. We were roughly an hour late to Eindhoven, but the incharge wasn’t too worried about it. Her name is Jen, she’s Australian, and she’s been working in Amstelveen for over a year. She told us that the first time she drove to Eindhoven from Amstelveen she got horribly, terribly lost and drove straight past Eindhoven and ended up in Maastricht, which is way further south.

We are working here in Eindhoven on a Philips Electronics special project, and staying in a hotel. When we arrived, it still had all its Christmas decorations on.

Starting work in Amstelveen

On the 2nd of January, we had to start work. Milli and Amanda played tourist in Amsterdam city again, and Kinga and I tried (and failed) to set up bank accounts.

In the Netherlands, everything takes four times as long as you’d expect. There is no urgency at all, everyone just runs their own timetable and shows up whenever they’re good and ready. After filling in bank forms, we were told to just wander around the nearby mall until our 2pm meeting. It was 10am. So for four hours, we were going to be just shopping and getting paid for it? Uh, hello dream job!

In the middle of this time, my flatmate Cherilyn finally showed up (straight off the plane from Las Vegas).

Our 2pm meeting basically involved three women with minimal English trying to explain to us how to find our cars. Each apartment has a lease car that the flatmates can share (except for Kinga’s house, they have 3 boys and 2 cars). Cherilyn and my car is an Audi Passat station wagon – excellent for road trips, not so excellent for parking in europe!

Cherilyn and I were supposed to be driving to Eindhoven (about an hour and a half south of Amstelveen) that evening, in order to start work on the 3rd of January. But, the incharge and the manager on the job were both still on holiday and we couldn’t get hold of anyone! We finally got a call from the incharge, who told us to drive up the next morning.

2008 commences…

New Year’s Day is a pretty quiet occasion in Amstelveen, with no shops open anywhere. We went into Amsterdam to see the sights in the daytime, get some food, and see if we could pick up another NZ secondee, Andrew, who was arriving on the train from France.

I ate a chocolate and nut covered waffle…

And Milli ate a giant hotdog…

We did actually manage to make our way to the train station, where the “Help” desk told us that Andrew’s train didn’t exist. We waited around a while, but didn’t manage to find him.

But we did see bikes. Many, many bikes. So we pretended these ones were ours.

There was a Burger King in the train station, and this was the first time we saw THIS sign…

Which of course we found hilarious. I guess it’s the Dutch version of our ‘Whoppertunities’ posters.

New Years’ Celebrations

On New Year’s Eve, another NZ workmate arrived – Milli! While Amanda and I managed to work out the tram system (well, enough to get into the centre of Amsterdam, anyway) Kinga went to meet her at the airport.

We all gathered at my apartment for a few beverages. Kinga managed to work out the timer on his digital camera (after a few false starts) and the result was this:

What we didn’t realize (when we were this happy) is that public transport doesn’t run in Amsterdam on New Year’s Eve. This is one of the weirdest things I have ever encountered. No shops are open on New Year’s Day, so it’s the perfect night to go out and celebrate. There’s music and fireworks in the squares in the central city, and yet there’s no way for all the people to get there! We started calling taxi numbers from the phone book in my apartment, and had made over 30 phone calls to no avail when Kinga decides that he’s going to miss New Years if this continues and that he is going to try to hitch hike to Amsterdam from Amstelveen! So he takes off outside and leaves us girls inside trying to get hold of someone (anyone!) to drive us into the city, preferably before midnight! We finally strike it lucky and off we go!

We made it into a pizza parlour around 11pm (after a 20min wait at the door) and found that we could order vodka with our pizza! Although the menu detailed it as Wodka…. and when it arrived the orange juice was in one glass and the Wodka was in the other. You had to pour it in together yourself.

We finished eating at 11.55 and made our way outside to the square so that we could see the fireworks. Now, Dutch people go MENTAL for fireworks. They’re only available around New Years (I think, I hope!) and the streets are absolutely littered with all the fireworks wrappers, and all day long you hear people letting them off (even when it isn’t dark – ummmm, hello?!?!).

After the countdown, and the fireworks, and the music (instead of Auld Lang Syne, here they play the ABBA song ‘Happy New Year’, for about the first 5 days of 2008 we heard it absolutely everywhere) we tried to find our way to a bar or something. We were in a total crush crowd-wise and so just followed the flow, and found ourselves on a canal somewhere, with people letting off fireworks left, right and centre, aiming at people, aiming across the canal, and right in the middle of the crowd. It all got a little too much so we ducked into a ‘Bulldog’ bar and got ourselves a few beverages.

The first thing we noticed is the smoke in the bars! The smoke-free bar rule doesn’t come in until later this year, so it was a big haze of tobacco (and other) smoke. Us poor kiwis weren’t really used to it and got sore eyes and went home feeling decidedly smelly.

When we decided to leave, we realized that we had no idea how we were going to find a taxi. We didn’t know where we were, and all the central city streets were closed off to be pedestrian malls for the celebrations. After following the crowd for a few blocks, we found ourselves in the red light district. A few minutes later, Milli and Amanda are being offered ‘a first class ticket to the moon’ which Amanda politely declined while Milli giggled into her boots.

We finally stumbled across a group of taxis, where a guy offered us a ride for 20 euro each for what should be a 30 euro taxi ride, and there were five of us! So he made a mint off of us. None of us cared (well after Milli got Kinga under control none of us cared) because all taxis quote more expensive prices than the meter for special occasions, and we really wanted to get home as soon as possible. Some of the other NZers (who we didn’t manage to catch up with in the city) took a cab back to Amstelveen but had to wait for a few hours before they could get one, so we count ourselves lucky. On the way home we did see this building on fire, though.

Arrival in the Netherlands

After arriving in the Netherlands (and being absolutely dwarfed by all the extremely tall Dutch people), we managed to find our luggage, the bathroom, and a taxi (in that order). Our taxi driver, of course, had minimal English (but seriously, that’s the same as at home anyway!). After a stop-off at a giant city map, we finally pulled up outside our apartment building.

It’s not exactly the Hilton, but it’s got two bedrooms and central heating and will do us just fine, thank you very much. Other than the fact that there was no toilet paper, and we had no idea of how to get to a supermarket to buy any, it seemed to have most of the things you’d need. Luckily, Kinga (a workmate from NZ) had arrived the day before us and had already staked out the local pub for a number of hours. We hightailed it down there for a hot meal and may have slightly raided their bathroom stash of TP.

The view from our apartment is a canal which is most frequently used as a duck-pond. In the background you can (vaguely) see the tram lines, and the tram stop.

This is my room…

The only major issue from this point was the issue of the invisible flatmate – Cherilyn was due to fly in on the 31st but missed her flight and got stuck in Vegas for New Years (bummer, huh).

In Transit – 29 and 30 Dec 2007

The trip to Amsterdam was largely uneventful, with all of our flights arriving and leaving on time, and our baggage accompanying us the whole way too.

Amanda created a challenge to eat McDonalds in as many countries as we can, and she started with a snack and a giant drink in Los Angeles…..

And then continued it in Frankfurt, where we also managed to order deep fried shrimp (?!?!?!!).

We flew Wellington/Auckland (an hour), Auckland/LA (12ish hours), LA/Frankfurt (13ish hours), Frankfurt/Amsterdam (an hour). The worst flight by far was LA/Frankfurt, where we had minimal legroom and no personal TV sets (it’s a hard life, huh) and had trouble sleeping for more than a couple of hours at a time. About halfway through I think we both wanted to jump out of the plane just to get away. The flight ended (finally) with us both vowing never EVER to travel all the way to Europe/UK in one continuous motion. Stopover on a tropical island next time, perhaps?

Considering that Frankfurt is a major hub airport, it didn’t have supreme duty free shopping (in my opinion). In fact, we were pretty disappointed with the duty free stores in our terminal at LA too. On arrival into the Netherlands you can’t buy duty free (just when you leave) so we got here minus a few key items which we had planned to get duty free… But never mind.