Cheese, bikes & coffee - but no public health system

Warning: it's another long one


Hello everyone! It's been a long time since I've been able to post (THANKS A LOT, COMMUNIST CHINESE GOV'T) but here I am. I'm now in Holland, beginning the next chapter of my excursion outside Aotearoa. I've been here for a week, am finding it horrendously cold, but enjoying the comforts of home, family and CHEESE :D I'll write back-dated posts on Vietnam & China shortly, but in a nutshell here's what I did there:

After Halong Bay I went to Sapa with a couple of guys from the Hanoi Backpackers, spent 2 awesome days in the mountains trekking through rice terraces and getting to know some Hmong villagers. My China visa finally came through, after much nail-biting and loss of sleep, 3 days before my flight, so everything came together in the end.

China was AWESOME - spent the first day getting lost on the way to the hotel then walking for miles around Tiananmen Square & Forbidden City before joining Ewen's tour on day 2. I am so glad the tour came at the end, it was soooooooooo nice to stay in 5-star hotels and be driven everywhere for 2 weeks!! Not having to forage for breakfast every day is a huge plus as well. By this stage my traveller's depression had taken firm root in my mind and I was ready to go home, so every little bit of comfort helps. It was a fantastic group plus Ewen and Yi Ran (my adopted Chinese sister from another mother) We climbed the Great Wall, ate at the best Peking Duck restaurant in Beijing, marvelled at the Terracotta Warriors, climbed up (more) rice terraces, enjoyed the touristy kitchness of Yangshuo and got dazzled by the bright lights of Shanghai. Oh, and we learned a ton about photography, and had plenty of laughs along the way. Definitely glad I decided to do the photo tour! Here's a quick plug for Ewen's work and tours:
www.ewenbell.com
www.photographyfortravellers.com
Will write chapters about China complete with photos very soon!

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So now I'm in the land of bikes, windmills, tulips and (insert Dutch stereotype here). I was picked up at Schiphol airport last Tue night by my uncle and aunty who promptly bought me a cheese sandwich from an airport supermarket - awesome moment #1 :) (of which there are many, too many to name)

After 6 months of eating udon, ramen, donburi, pad thai, banh hoy, pho bo and mee (in other words, LOTS of noodles and rice), I was well and truly ready for some bread, cheese and peanut butter. I've been making my way through the Dutch stereotype foods that we all love so much:

• Broodje kaas (cheese sandwich)
• Hema worst (sausage from Hema supermarket)
• Calve Pindakaas (peanut butter)
• Senseo coffee ('instant' espresso coffee that comes from a special coffee maker that every single Dutch household has - more about this later)
• Kroketten (Dutch croquettes)
• Fristi/Yogi/Taksi (kids fruit & yoghurt drinks)
  
• Speculaas (cinnamon spiced biscuits)
• Appel gebak (traditional Dutch apple pie)
• and of course patat (fries/chips/hot chips) with MAYONNAISE - none of this tomato ketchup or vinegar nonsense!
  

CHEEEEEEEEEEEEEEESE!

Broodje kroket

Once all the mandatory eating and drinking was out of the way, first order of business was "inschrijfen" - officially registering myself as living here in Netherlands, specifically the district of Langedijk. Easy with a passport, right? Wrong. Because I was born in NZ, I had to fill out a moving form (i.e. moving from NZ to NL), but also had to show a copy of my birth certificate with the round seal of Births, Deaths and Marriages NZ and an official stamp from the Apostille in Wellington to verify the copy. Muuuuuuuuuuuuuuum! (this wouldn't be the first time I called mum for help)

So without being officially registered I couldn't get a BSN number (IRD number). Without a BSN number you can't get a bank account, or health insurance, which is mandatory by the way.

aside - HOLLAND HAS NO PUBLIC HEALTH SYSTEM - WTF?!?!

Anyway, on top of those things you also can't apply for any jobs without a BSN number, so it's sit tight for now, eat some cheese, be a tourist, enjoy the cold weather (ha!) and go visit Dad's family in the East. 24 Euros, 2 train changes and 3 hours later (that's 24 Euros one way - daylight robbery!) I'm in Hengelo on Sunday afternoon. Tante Annie, my Dad's oldest sister, had organised a family get-together at a local restaurant that has outside seating so we can enjoy the brisk autumn air. Twente is a beautiful part of Holland, lots of historic farms and farmhouses, open fields, forests and wildlife. It's a part of Holland that tourists don't really see - Denekamp isn't even in the Lonely Planet!

During the next few days we went for a good 40km bike ride through Hengelo & surrounds, visited IKEA which was a truly mind-blowingly awesome experience for me, went to Enschede & local Twense Welle museum, and went to Tante Agnes' birthday drinks. It's autumn here in NL and the Dutch are very enthusiastic about their herfstkleuren (autumn colours); it's quite justified, there are a lot of beautiful forests full of golden leaves and lots of piles of fallen leaves for kids to play in. Anyone who's been to the South Island around Easter can appreciate this.

herfstkleuren

IKEA! You can get free coffee if you have a loyalty card (applied last night!) and appeltaart is only 95c!

Lunch with Tante Annie in the museum cafe, a modern. funky restored old industrial area (we're not sitting in a warehouse)

We even got to set foot on that hallowed ground, stadium FC Twente! We were biking past and saw that the gate was open so we just rocked up and walked out onto the turf. Nobody told us off so we ran around for a bit, did a mock throw-in, took some photos and went on our merry way.

Trots da'w veur Twente bint!

I even ticked one more very important Dutch stereotype off my list on my visit to the East - I got myself a bike!! It's a pretty nice one, inherited from an aunt who didn't need it any more (and hardly used it by the looks of it). For 6 Euros you can schlep it with you in the train - quite an adventure in itself - so I loaded it up with my luggage and headed back West.

Taking my new Gazelle in the train

Polishing her up, good as new!

So - coffee. I've been harping on for years about how much I love the coffee from those Philips Senseo coffee machines that every Dutch person seems to have in the kitchen. It's a mini automatic espresso machine that takes special coffee pads (1 pad per cup), a bit like a tea bag, that fit into the top, and at the push of a button 1 or 2 cups of perfectly measured, deliciously strong and frothy coffee come out the bottom. The prescribed coffee pads were originally made by Douwe Egberts, the official partner of Philips Senseo, but nowadays you can get them everywhere including IKEA and Hema, for as little as 1 Euro per bag of 20-odd coffee pads (I really need to find the SHIFT + key for the Euro symbol) and in as many flavours as your imagination can dream up. I don't even know if you can get regular instant here.
Laura & Stacy had left me a surprise house-warming/welcome to Holland present: my very own Senseo coffee machine! :D Thanks so much guys, I will have endless hours of enjoyment with it :)

Making coffee with my very own Senseo

(Just quietly, well done Philips for getting your product in every household, for making the required coffee pads universal across all models of Senseo and for making sure every Dutch person in the country is dependent on your consumables!)

Well folks, that's quite enough for tonight. It's 1:49am, just spoken to Laura in Canada (extremely inconvenient time differences) and it's well and truly bedtime. I'll write about China & Vietnam in the coming days, stay tuned!

Love
ML