Pure sky

It's incredible how pure the sky is here in Holland. On a good day the intensity of the colors is just amazing. The sky is bluer than blue, and the grass is greener than green. Unlike Japan, where the sky is always hazy, Holland has a lot of pure days.

But there's also a lot of rainy days...

Posted in Dutch , Photography

Health insurance in the Netherlands

Well, I got another nice surprise this morning, while researching health insurance in the Netherlands. Personally I think insurance companies are the biggest scam of the 21st century, but health insurance is mandatory in the Netherlands and you're doing something illegal if you're in the country without health insurance. It disgusts me that I have no choice in the matter.

The nice surprise is this: since I never unregistered myself as a Dutch citizen, as far as the government is concerned I've been living here in the Netherlands for the past 4 years. Uninsured. Wondering if this was going to pose a problem when applying for health insurance I searched a bit and scared myself with the result: if you've been uninsured for any period of time, you have to pay back the monthly insurance costs plus a 30% fine. For my 50+ months of staying in Japan that amounts to thousands and thousands of euros...

Oh dear. Sounds pretty bad. If only I had unregistered when I left Holland... I called up an insurance company to ask about my situation, and fortunately they were very understanding. They told me that I could send a copy of my job contract as proof that I had been working in Japan as an alternative to citizen registration, and then I could just start afresh without paying any money for the four years that I've been gone. Whew!

On a side note, my natural aversion to insurance has led me to research the possibility of not having insurance at all. This page (in Dutch) tells me that it is indeed possible to escape the mandatory health insurance in the Netherlands if you claim that because of your personal convictions you disagree with the concept of insurance in general. The page further describes that, if, because of your personal convictions, you are not paying money for insurance, you still must 'pay a part of your income' instead, which happens to be the exact same amount as the  insurance policy would have cost. This whole insurance business is just too silly for words.

Posted in Dutch

Holland

The clear blue skies of a couple of days ago are over, and everything is back to the way I remember it.

Still adjusting to life here, not feeling quite comfortable. These feelings will help me define my future goals.

Posted in Dutch

Nostalgia

[googlemaps http://maps.google.nl/maps/sv?ll=53.143887,6.71196&sspn=0.049629,0.132093&layer=c&cbll=53.163846,6.779853&panoid=-qjcp3dYpb-T1aaMtHhe2w&cbp=13,218.95,,0,-5.22&ll=53.163842,6.779699&spn=0,359.835205&z=14]

That big warehouse-like building is where I grew up. For twenty and one years I lived there with my parents and my little sister. The building may not look like much right now, and even when we still lived there it didn't look very cozy, but the inside was a whole different world. Large, spacious and warm. That's how I remember it. Well, only some rooms were warm because there was no central heating and there were only heaters in some of the rooms, but we were young and we didn't know any better! Thanks to Google Street View I spent the last two hours looking around the area where I used to live. Call me old but I am still very impressed that I'm able to do a thing like this from the other side of the world.

I really enjoy walking, cycling or driving around the area I live in. It's something that I've learned from my father, who used to go out driving with me when I was little. He would always show me a new road that I hadn't seen before. After I got my drivers license I did the same thing by myself for a while, before I moved to Japan. I never owned a car here in Japan, but as you can see from this blog I do go around on foot and by bicycle a lot.

I used street view to follow the route from my parents' home to work, to my old house, my old school, and so on. On the way I saw a lot of people. Young people, who were probably not even born when I went to school there. Yup, I'm getting older, but I'm still young enough to make enthousiastic "vroom vroom" noises while following the road in street view :D

I do miss Holland. I miss my family of course, and the scenery, and I miss how relaxed I used to feel when I lived there. I realized that it's not impossible to go back, if I wanted to. I have two homes to choose from. It's a luxury not many people have.

Thank you Google! This is a service I would gladly pay for, and you're offering it for free. Google will save the world one day, mark my words.

Posted in Dutch , Thoughts

Mensen...

Bakboter smeert niet!!!

Posted in Dutch , One-liners

More windmills

IMG_5461_59_60

Whenever I'm back in Holland to visit my parents I go to this place. It's a natural area with at the end a bird-watching tower that has a great view over the lake that my parents live next to. On the way to the birdwatching tower there's this strange 'American-style' windmill that I like to take pictures of. This time I gave the hand-held HDR trick a try. As you can see it's quite tricky, even with 1/4000s shutter time, to take three pictures of the same thing. Oh well.

I remember this particular excursion very well because I hurt my head while climbing the tower. The top area of the tower is shut off by a wooden hatch that you need to flip open to enter. I flipped it open, climbed up the ladder a bit more, and the very heavy hatch suddenly decided to come crashing down on my head :( Fortunately there was no serious damage, but my psychopath level has risen slightly since the incident. Here's a pic of the path to the tower (clickable):

IMG_5357

Posted in Dutch , Photography

Obligatory

IMG_5601

My neighbor is back. The cockroach is back too. I wonder if there's a connection..

On an unrelated note, it's happened to me four times in the last week that I was surfing wikipedia for some random thing, clicking on links, and ended up on this page: Ego Death. It's almost like a compass that's becoming more and more consistent..

Posted in Daily Life , Dutch , Japan , Photography , Thoughts

Old home

IMG_5421

Posted in Dutch , Photography

Sister help!

Help a sister in need! Go see my sisters website here. She takes photos of animals.

Also, she's selling her car. Go click on this and buy it. Thank you.

Posted in Dutch

Allemamachies!

I think this is a good example of why it's better to stick to a language that everyone understands (English) instead of translating it horribly to several different languages...

130428

(Meaning in English: "Please connect data lumberjack and curve on the switch for reading tree trunk data on.")

WTF

Posted in Dutch