Dutch Adventure: Week Two, Part 2

Week Two of our Dutch Adventure

I covered the first day of the week (Monday the 20th of August) in which we rented bicycles and the adventure of that in a previous post. Here’s most of the rest of the week. 🙂

Tuesday 21 August 2018

I learned an important lesson about electricity. We brought with us plugs for our phones and converters which we used last trip. This time, we brought more things to plug in than before, so we’re switching from one thing to another, and occasionally mistakes happen.

In the left picture is what it should look like when everything is plugged in correctly. I’m holding a US plug, not plugged in for reference, so you can see that there’s an extra part beyond that, which is plugged into the wall.

In the right picture you can see where I was trying to pull out the US plug, but the converter stayed stuck in the wall.

What happened on Tuesday is that it was in this position, and then the converter also started to come out, but neither was coming out completely. I reached in between the two to push the converter in and push the US plug out. DO NOT DO THIS. It’s still live! I touched the US plug in the middle and got a nice ZAP! on my fingers that stung for a good hour afterward.

Lesson learned. Billy changes the plugs now. 😀

The rest of the day we worked from home, and eventually went out to the grocery around 7 pm, riding the bicycles we rented the day before. We have been taking our large Rick Steves backpacks with us to carry the groceries, balancing the weight somewhat, which has turned into me putting the heavy things in Billy’s bag and lighter things in mine until I get stronger. I may never be as strong as him, but I’m hopeful that I’ll be stronger in the future than I am now.

Wednesday 22 Aug

It was a hotter day, with a high in the upper 20’s (Celsius, so mid 80’s F). Given that it’s been in the mid 30’s (90’s F) in Colorado, I’m happier with the 20’s, but it still wears me out some, especially if I’m doing something physically exerting.

Late in the morning, we rode over to our friend’s house to play boardgames and then rode home. That was our third day of having the bicycles and I had a sore butt from the previous two days! I’ve also been having shortness of breath issues from trying to push up these hills. (Spoiler for later – I’ve learned to just walk the bike when I run out of breath rather than push myself into asthma territory.)

Thursday 23 August

I rested my sore butt and worn out lungs.

Friday 24 August – Gemeente Appointment!

Also, When We Learn About Apostilles, Find A Color Copier, And Play Boardgames

Another step in the residency acquisition dance. Currently we have 2 major goals: get the IND process for DAFT going and get a BSN (national identification number). The appointment with the Gemeente was to help with the second one.

The Gemeente is basically city hall. They handle the legal and logistical things that happen in their city or area. When you move into an area, you are supposed to register with  the Gemeente so they are able to track who lives where, provide appropriate services to the populace, and so on.

As a foreigner, once you register with the Gemeente, they will set you up with a BSN if you don’t have one already, so getting this process going was our goal of the day.

We rode our bicycles down to the central area of town, and I was nervous about being on time, so we were about 15 minutes early. The bicycling trip went well; Billy seems to have a good eye for seeing where the bicycle lanes are, whereas I’m still getting my “bike lane eyes” so I followed him most of the way. We parked and locked the bikes (most bikes are set up with locks – more on that another time), walked past the Friday market to inside the city hall building, checked in via the electronic check in machine, and waited until we were called.

I can say this. At least it was a short appointment.

The fellow we met with didn’t actually speak a lot of English, so I don’t know if we would have made more progress if we had met with someone who did, but the end result is that he wanted something like a verblijfsdocument (residence letter or card) from the IND before he would process us at all. We told him that the IND told us to go to KvK, who told us to go to Gemeente, but he would not budge. Le sigh.

The dance continues with two steps to the side and one step back.

He also said he wanted to see our birth certificates when we come back, but they need Apostille certifications on them. Huh? I had read something about this before, but it didn’t quite click. Basically, it’s above US notary stamps, an even higher level of official certification. Given how easy it was for me to obtain notary certification in the US, I can understand, but it is another (annoying) set of steps. For a US birth certificate, it appears that you have to get a copy of your birth certificate into the hands of the Apostille at the Secretary of State in the state where you were born. I don’t have any plans to head back to North Carolina anytime soon! Good news is that I have family on the ground in that area of the country who are already working on this for me, and it looks like we have some time before the Gemeente needs it.

Friday, post-Gemeente

After we left the Gemeente appointment, we did a little bit of shopping before heading home. We wanted to get side bags (fietstas) for the bicycles, so we went back to a store we had found called Blokker, which seemed to have an assortment of household goods, including a small area of bicycle items. We picked up our first fietstas, or bicycle side bags, hurray! We’ve put them on Billy’s bicycle for now, as he seems the one more able to deal with changes in weight and balance.

Once we got home, we got started on the next step in the IND dance; contact IND again and find out how we get an appointment with them!

Billy got on the phone. I had heard a tip that IND is really good at responding to their twitter, so I posted a tweet. They got back to me very quickly and gave us a link to a form to fill out and send in. The phone call didn’t give us much info, so we followed the IND’s tweet instructions. Billy got the form done and put in PDF format onto a thumb drive; we bicycled to a shop called Vonk (on a rather steep street), where they have a color printer, and they were able to print out the form and make copies of pages in my passport (per the IND form). Then we bicycled to the post office, sent off the whole packet, and stopped off at the Albert Heijn for groceries on our way home.

That was a lot of bicycling for me!

Later that evening we went to Vendetta Spellencentrum, a boardgame store in Arnhem, that hosts gaming at the store on Friday nights; we took the bus. 😀

Since this post is getting rather long, I think I will pick up with Saturday in the next one.

Tot ziens!