The Old New Home at Amstelveen
Tomorrow we complete a week in our new home. This is the fifth roof we are sleeping under in less than a month. Six, if you count the flight to Amsterdam. It is only natural that I sometimes wake up at night wondering where I am.
Our first stop at Amsterdam was the company-provided accomodation at Amstelveen. The area - though considered suburban - is barely 7KM away from the city center and is well connected by trams, metro and buses. Most metro/tram stations were hardly bigger than bus stops and there was one within walking distance of every major residential block.
Oudekerkerlaan - my metro station for a fortnight
Amstelveen is one of the most beautiful localities I’ve stayed in. Almost every housing complex was surronded by open green spaces, trees, parks and canals (complete with tiny bridges over them).
We happened to be here at that time of the year when the flowers outnumber the leaves.
Ducks and swans merrily gliding about in the numerous canals is a common sight even in the center of Amsterdam and Amstelveen was no different. What was different was that if you would step out for a walk around 4:00 in the evening, you’d see a lot of ducks blissfully asleep near the canals.
A few hours later and they’d be perky again.
There were other colourful species of birds that we knew nothing about except that their presence amidst an urban human settlement was quite remarkable.
There were times when the mornings or evenings would be so beautiful and the touch of the cool spring breeze on our skin so gentle that we’d wonder if we if were walking through a plantation in Coorg or Ooty. Except that we never stayed in an 8th floor apartment there.
The view from our (last) 8th floor apartment
While our new place is practically in the middle of the city, it can easily boast of a view every bit as picturesque. More about the new place in the coming days…
Koninginnedag (Queen’s Day) in Amsterdam
Koninginnedag (Queen’s Day) must easily be the biggest party anywhere in the world. Practically all of Amsterdam dresses or accessorizes in orange, grabs a beer (or whatever intoxicant is at hand) and pours out into the streets to party. Other smaller parties go on all day in hundreds of boats of varying sizes that keep going around in the numerous canals that crisscross through the city.
Queen’s Day in Amsterdam
Queen’s Day in Amsterdam
Queen’s Day in Amsterdam
Queen’s Day in Amsterdam
Queen’s Day in Amsterdam
Many families set up impromptu garage sales where they sell all sorts of things from old books, LPs, CDs to toys, clothes, boots, crockery, jewellery and household appliances.
We even had a brush with evangelists (perhaps they were hoping that drinks will somehow make people more receptive to Jesus and friends), and charity workers raising money for children in Guatemala (pay 1€, climb on this overturned crate of Heineken beer and we’ll loudly cheer for you - given the cause, I gladly parted with a €). And oh, Kate and William were here too.
Queen’s Day in Amsterdam
We had stepped out without a map or a plan so we just kept walking with the crowd and found ourselves at Dam Square. A fair was on here with food stalls (selling food that’d supply your Recommended Yearly Allowance of cholesterol) and joy rides. I always have an appetite for the former but never the stomach for the latter. Being hurled around in random directions in dodgily assembled contraptions till the centrifugal force tries to force your brain out from your nose brings me no joy.
Queen’s Day in Amsterdam
For a lot of people there though this seemed like a perfect way to spend a pleasant, sunny afternoon.
Queen’s Day in Amsterdam
Queen’s Day in Amsterdam
Queen’s Day in Amsterdam
I’ve never quite seen revelry at this scale. The most remarkable part about today for me was that despite so much public drinking, people more or less conducted themselves rather admirably. Perhaps Holi in some parts of North India will come close (if you are willing to overlook the bit about people conducting themselves civilly).
Rough Draft: Spring/Summer etc.
Those first three days in Amsterdam are about to become three weeks. Here are some more rants and observations - this time with pictures from my phone’s camera:
The chauffer waiting for us at the airport almost laughed when we took out our thick jackets to tackle the cold weather outside. We were acting the way we had in January. The weather in Amsterdam, meanwhile, had moved on. As we stepped out we realized that the air only had the sort of pleasant nippiness that makes you feel more alive.
A fortnight later and not only has spring stopped knocking, it has kicked the doors down, barged in, and is now threatening to call its friend summer over for a long stay.
Sunset near Rijks museum
Already our room is sometimes a little too warm for comfort on some evenings. Though overall, the advantages of spring/summer more than offset this incovenience. For instance, the sun sets around 8:50 at night which means that there’s plenty of life left in the day after I finish work and my wife can often join me for a small impromptu picnic.
Picnic at the park outside Concertgebouw
This has also been a good time to look around for a place to stay. We’ll hopefully be moving out of the company provided accommodation into a rented apartment of our own next week.
It all still feels a little unreal. While working, I often forget that I am in Amsterdam. Only a look outside the window brings some sense of time and place back.
The view from one of the office windows
Keukenhof
The Dutch pronounce V like “Fa” and so for the longest time we didn’t know if the Indian chap gallantly manning the reception on Sundays was Faisal or Vishal. But that’s not important. What’s important is that he agreed to print our “combi-ticket” to Keukenhof.
Armed with the printouts we landed at the designated bus stop outside Schiphol to board our bus. This being the peak season, the bus only had standing room and in a short while, not even that. We were making this trip exactly the day after we had landed in Amsterdam. The fact that Netherlands has left hand drive hadn’t sunk in yet. Each time a car would overtake us, the passenger next to the driver would inadvertently be looking at the colourful spectacle of jam-packed tourists that was our bus. “Why isn’t he/she looking at the road!” my heart would whisper to me and skip a beat.
Well, one doesn’t visit Keukenhof for stories. One goes there for the pictures. And here they are:
Postcard from Keukenhof
Matrix trilogy of the flowery kind
Tulips
From the swan pond
Rough Draft: The first three days in Amsterdam
A new job has recently brought me to Amsterdam. More posts like these; some with pictures, will follow shortly.
It’s been a wonderful experience in Amsterdam so far. We arrived early in the morning without any hassles with flight or immigration. Our serviced apartment is somewhere between a hotel room and a studio. It’ll do nicely till we find a place to stay.
I still have uneasy dreams about my old apartment. Most of them involve us still having a lot of our stuff remaining in the house and having less than a day to vacate. In others I run into our neighbors - especially the old couple who we were very fond of (and who helped us till the very last day).
We’re still working on our immigration paperwork and hopefully we’ll at least have a bank account by the end of this week. But this part of being neither quite here and definitely not there is what scares me off. It’s a very temporary situation, but one I’ve never ever been in before. That I have no identity, no credit history, no bank account should be liberating except that it is not.
Navigating the maze of mobile plans has been a tiring exercise. You are trying to strike a balance between your talk minutes, SMSes and your internet download quota, while wanting to buy a phone you’ve always wanted. The prices (at least for the bundled phone) are fickle so while the salespersons have been remarkably patient with us, they also find it a waste of their time as we don’t have any of the documentation (see last paragraph) that they need to allow us to buy a post-paid plan. At the moment we are both on pre-paid t-mobile - we purchased a 20€ credit today and by some stroke of good luck happened to do so at a time when t-mobile was doling out free credit worth the top-up amount. At a time when I am yet to earn a single penny while we burn into our reserves at the same rate as a Hummer drinking gasoline, it feels like a small victory.
On Sunday we took some time off to visit the tulip festival at Keukenhof. This weekend has probably been the sunniest weekend in a very long time. As you’d expect, the place was crowded with tourists (oh the snobbery - we are no longer tourists now, are we?). This is probably the first instance where I’ve had to travel in a bus standing. We didn’t get to go to those vast, endless fields of Tulips which we see in the postcards, but we did spend a few hours roaming around in the park soaking in the beautiful displays of not just tulips but of tens of other species of flowers, some of which we had never seen in our life.
The public transport in Amsterdam is probably the most mind-boggling facet of the city. There are buses, trams, metro trains and trains. We are presently a few kilometers away from the Amsterdam city center in an area called Amstelveen. The metro-stations here - and theres one practically every 4-5 block, are really tiny. They seem more like glorified bus-stops than a metro-station. At some of these stations you can board both a tram or a metro train. It is also very common to see trams and metro trains share a common traffic signal with cars and buses. My first brush with well organized public transport was more than 10 years ago in Hong Kong (MTR), followed by UK (London Underground) a few years down the road. Just like HK has Octopus, London, Oyster, Amsterdam has (the non-aquatically named) OV-chipkaart (ironical considering what a huge role the sea, rivers and dykes play in the life here - I used to think that OV must be the initials for some sea-dwelling creature, but Wikipedia put such doubts to rest: OV from Dutch openbaar ‘public’ + vervoer ‘transport’).
I have a thing for languages. Sadly my curiosity is only piqued sufficiently if the language concerned has a new script. Dutch uses the same script as English (with a few very occasional accented characters thrown in). Which means my motivation to learn it is a bit shaky at the moment. Then there is the question of identity. I’ve never found myself so far from India for so long (this stint should last a year), and therefore have never had to confront such questions. Does one embrace a new language with open arms or does one retreat into a cocoon of familiar mores and languages? Anyway, Dutch is considered half-way between English and German. From the snatches of both the languages I’ve heard so far, I have an analogy to present: Dutch is like a clay pot freshly off a potter’s wheel, while German is the same pot baked in a kiln.
I’ve been trying to tackle Dutch off the labels and signs in the supermarket along with some good old-fashioned intuition and I have found that I am on a slippery slope. At first you think that a lot of Dutch looks like badly spelled English. For example, Pepper is Peper, Chocolate is Chocolade, which should make it easy to amass a decent vocabulary fairly quickly. A little later you find out that some of these typos are quite peculiar and involve peppering an English word with vowels. For example new becomes nieuwe. Still, you are undeterred and think that you can reverse engineer a Dutch word back to English. This is where the trouble begins: while Suiker can be with some imagination inferred as Sugar, it takes superhuman effort to arrive at Salt from Zout. My most remarkable failure so far has been the word Snel. It is often seen at stations with Train - sneltrain. My typo theory inadvertently led me into believing that Snel was a corruption of Snail and therefore indicated a slow train - a train with a lot of stops. The urge to actually look it up on google translate struck me when I saw all the mobile operators actually charge more for snel-internet. Yup, the real the meaning of snel was quite the opposite - fast.
p.s. yes, the photos are coming soon. This is just a rough draft of all those varied thoughts that have been occupying (plaguing?) my mind.
Where have all the good ads gone?
The Cricket World Cup is no Superbowl as far as the quality of advertising is concerned but considering how many eyeballs the event attracts in India, one would think that we’d get at least a few attempts at creative brilliance. Sadly, ads-wise, this is probably the worst World Cup I can remember. Not only are the ads this time boring, they are often pedestrian and jarring. A lot of advertisers burnt their fingers (many their entire arms) when India crashed out of the world cup in 2007 early, and looks like they haven’t yet gathered the courage to jump back into the ring.
Indeed, cricket can be a double edged sword. Two recent anecdotes come to mind.
Almost the entire cast of the upcoming movie Dum Maro Dum was present for the South Africa vs India match in Nagpur last Saturday; purportedly to cheer India to a victory; but quite obviously to launch the audio and promote the movie. Not only was the match telecast across India, they also had a (literally) captive audience of 50,000 to market the life out of. All this would’ve been fine had India won, but India’s loss soured everyone’s mood and must’ve created a negative association with the movie.
Betting big bucks on individual cricketers can be risky too. Just a few days before the World Cup, huge billboards of Praveen Kumar promoting Nike, sprang up all over Bangalore.
Where have all the good ads gone? 1
The man promptly injures himself and consquentially has to sit out of World Cup. What do Nike do? They replace every single billboard of Praveen Kumar with that of Sreesanth. You’ll agree that it was a desperate change - not necessarily for the better:
Where have all the good ads gone? 2
But it gets worse. It so happens that in the 5 games that India has played so far, Sreesanth hasn’t been given a chance - not even as a substitue fielder. I am sure the marketing guns at Nike aren’t too chuffed.
Coke ads have usually been classy. I still remember this old campaign of theirs vividly:
Now compare this with the annoying tripe that has been played ad-nauseum during the World Cup this year (I’ll completely understand if you feel like plugging your ears):
Pepsi’s TV Spots have been border-line amusing this time, but their outdoor campaign involves plastering naked cricketers (their bodies painted) all over the city (and indeed all over their World Cup special edition bottles).
via ESNPNCricinfo
That leaves us with mostly ads for cheap mobile phones and, yes, seeds (ask any cricket lover these days about Krishidhan seeds). Those companies will neither have the budgets to hire the O&Ms, nor will they risk anything that doesn’t communicate about their product very literally.
Perhaps the big spenders are holding their purses tight for the quarter finals stage. Or perhaps it’s the IPL they are all waiting for. For no matter who wins that tournament, the Indian cricket team doesn’t lose.