Red, White and Tulips

One year ago today we landed in The Netherlands. Since then it has been a year of ups and downs. For me, I think not working has been a big part of an adjustment, whereas the husband and daughter have a place to be every day and get to interact with people, I don’t. So I think for them the transition has been easier. I know – first world problems. I am very blessed to be able to experience all of this and not have the pressure of integrating our family into a new place while still having to work full time. But I don’t want to sugarcoat it, this expat thing is not all sunshine and rainbows. Moving to a new place, without a support network is hard. It is lonely. We miss our friends and families and all of our comfort things – food, places, etc.

Here are some of the things I have noticed/learned over the past year.

• The calling your clothes dryer a “dryer” is a bit of a stretch. Instead it really just tumbles your clothes around and hopefully some of the water is shaken out of them.
• Don’t be early, don’t be late – be perfectly on time.
• Yes, there really are more bikes than people. And rail stations have huge bike parking locations, sometimes even multi-story.
• For a place that forbids plastic straws and makes you pay for shopping bags, they don’t hesitate to overpackage their food in the grocery store – think shrink wrapping a head of broccoli.
• This is not the place to speed. Everyone goes the speed limit and with good reason, there are cameras everywhere and they don’t hesitate to give you a ticket for going even a few kilometers an hour over the limit.
• When you go to the doctor, they are likely to “Google” your complaint on their official Dutch medical website before providing you with a diagnosis.
• There is virtually no air conditioning here, not even in public buildings or schools.
• Every building is required to have an energy rating A-G. We didn’t pay enough attention to this when we rented our “G” rated house and we suffered the consequences with gas bills of about €13,000 for the year. Yes, you read that correctly.
• I really love feeling safe walking the dog alone right before bed, even after 11 pm.
• So many things are done on the honor system here. Rather than parking meters, a lot of places use these parking disks. You turn it to the time you arrived and leave it on your dash.

Before we left I purchased this map so we could chronicle our travels.

My hope is that we can a lot of these countries covered over our three years here. With the war in Ukraine we might have to skip a few, but we will see. So far since we have arrived we have made it to (in no particular order) Denmark, Greece, Iceland, United Kingdom, Netherlands (obviously), Luxembourg, Germany, Belgium, Austria, France, and Italy. On top of that I also made it to Poland without the other two. Switzerland is planned for the summer. But then we still have a long list of places left. Time to get planning…

Other countries from the map: Albania, Andorra, Belarus, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Bulgaria, Corsica, Croatia, Czech Republic (Czechia), Estonia, Finland, Hungary, Ireland, Kosovo, Latvia, Liechtenstein, Lithuania, Macedonia, Malta, Moldova, Monaco, Montenegro, Norway, Portugal, Romania, Russia, Sardinia, Scotland, Serbia, Slovakia, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden, Turkey, Ukraine, and Wales.

Yesterday was the last day of exams at school, so our daughter is off to Amsterdam for the day on an adventure with girlfriends. European life…