Team Claire - Victorious yet Humble

Last night we went out for a Global Mobility dinner (with all the short term secondees and some of the Dutchies who had recently returned from long term secondments).

The food was really tiny and posh, and the boys all complained that it wasn’t really a meal. We had a course of bread, a course of mostly raw tuna steak, a course of fish with a pasta noodle (yes just one), a course of onion soup (weird) and then a course of some sort of steak (tiny of course). Dessert was a course of some custard-type thing with ice cream on it followed by little chocolates/sweets.

There was a game of ‘human bingo’ where the characteristics were like ‘someone from NZ’ or ‘has more than three kids’ and you had to get a different person to sign off each box on the bingo. Claire (from South Africa) and I teamed up and were the first to complete the challenge.

Later in the evening all the entries were drawn and we won!!! The prize was two free entrances to Keukenhof, this cute little tulip park where you can cycle through and look at all the flowers (LINK). Plus, we get a free poster each when we go. Which is brilliant, because we were already planning on going for my birthday weekend! Very nice indeed.

Here's some of the others enjoying the food (not) -

Gebak

On the first Thursday of every month, the Financial Services team put on some Gebak (cakes) and pastries to celebrate all the birthdays of that month. A list goes up on the door of the names of those who are turning a year older with ages and pictures! I am curious to see whether us short-termers get included in the picture thing (given that my birthday will happen while I’m still over here!

The cakes and pastries were amazing, even better than Melody’s leaving morning tea (Sorry Mel!). They’re these huge cakes that are kind of like cheesecake, and little sugar pastries. Everything is also smothered in whipped cream. So good and yet so glad it’s only once a month!

(No piccies as I’m still missing a camera – hoping to purchase soon!)

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)

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.