IND SchmIND

I wish I could wittily (Is that REALLY a word? Mr. Gates tells me it is.) describe the state of the Immigration and Naturalization Department here in the land of polders, canals, dikes, and red tape. Alas, I fail to have the sarcasm today, and I fail to have a deep knowledge of the topic as well (but – I CAN tell you all about the differences between American and Dutch pack ‘n’ plays and strollers…). But I will share with you my experiences and point you to a few recent news events that might give you an idea.

February 2005 – apply for residence status

August 2005 – temporary status expires. Get temporary status extended.

December 2005 – write a letter of complaint – it’s been 10 months!!

January 2006 – receive notice Dan is now a resident. Find out I need to prove I’m actually married to the man. Have 10 days to prove. Receive letter with 2 days left.

February 2006 – receive notice I am a resident as well. Anxiously await our phone call from town hall so we can pick up our much coveted residence cards.

March 2006 – pick up resident cards. Apply for renewals. The residence cards are valid for a whopping 6 weeks. Wait 13 months to be “legal” for 6 weeks???

April 2006 – residence cards expire. Dan applies for special worker status. Temporary resident sticker affixed to his passport. “What about my wife?” he asks. They don’t know. Nobody knows. Head back to town hall to get myself a temporary sticker based on earlier renewal application. No luck. They cannot issue it for renewals. “But you have a renewal in process. You will be OK,” the lady says.

May 2006 – register in our new town, a little worried since I still don’t have a current sticker in my passport. The very nice man just laughs. “Sometimes it takes awhile, doesn’t it?” he asks.

Last week – receive certified letter from IND. Entire ORIGINAL worker status application returned. IND says it was, essentially, “a mistake. Send it back, please.” Still no word about the renewals or how a wife can apply jointly for the worker status.

But why am I kidding myself? Although we are trying to do everything on the up and up, if a Member of Parliament gets kicked out of the country based on her original status, do we have a chance at this being easy? If I’m not supposed to speak English in public, does the IND really want us foreigners here?

Black Beans, Too

We also feasted on black beans in Spain. And for the first time in a few weeks, my zwanger body actually felt satisfied!

Black beans disappeared from Holland (or at least where I've lived in Holland) sometime while we were in Moldova - shame, shame.

What These Expats Do While on Vacation in a More (Gastronomically) Americanized Country than The Netherlands

Why doesn’t Holland have Oreos? And more than 4 kinds of cereal (not counting the 27 different kinds of muesli)? And should one have to go to Spain to find condensed Cream of Chicken soup (Campbell’s nonetheless!)?

Dan and I made 4 trips to the grocery store and 1 trip to Wal-Mart-esque Carre-Four while we were in Spain. We indulged on Golden Grahams (one box in two days), Oreos, Mt. Dew (it was still the gross Spanish kind, but worth a try), “normal” bacon, decently priced romaine lettuce (instead of sponge-like sla), and cheddar cheese. Dan even found a lunch meat that wasn’t of the pork variety and Chinese noodles directly from his childhood.

We ate at restaurants, too, that didn’t charge us EUR2.50 for 200 milliliters of water. Breakfasts were served with hot food, not just bread and cheese and chocolate-hazelnut spread. I ate 2.4 kilos of strawberries fresh from the market (and it’s only May).

In our suitcase, we stashed 2 cans of cream of chicken soup (Dan’s fam – you know what it’s for), 4 boxes of Oreos, and 4 bags of Chinese noodles. I would have had to leave some clothes behind to make them fit, but I did entertain the thought of including Cheerios. Since I could only find Honey-Nut and Multi-Grain, I opted for the clothes.

P.S. In my continuing struggle to sort out my bits and pieces of English, French, Chinese, Dutch, Romanian, Russian, and Finnish, I resorted to Romanian while in the Spanish market. Where did THAT come from? Right now, sitting at my docking station, I can barely remember how to count to two in Romanian. Yet, there in the Spanish market, I was struggling NOT to speak Romanian.

Spring

Spring is finally here! We had three glorious weeks of sun and little rain. The tulip patch had a late bloom, but what a bloom they had! Here are some photos. I have my favorite - which is yours?

 

 

 

 

 

 

Follow-Up to “The American Couple” Newspaper Ads

Sometimes, Dan and I questioned whether or not we were being too picky about our parameters of where to live. In the end, it was pretty amazing how many people were gracious to open up their homes and extra apartments to us. Yet, there were several non-negotiables that made us say, “No thank you.” Based on our experiences, here is our suggested advertisement for our next house hunt to help us avoid some of the agony again.

“The American Couple is looking for a house – again. Please do not bother to call
1) If you will not allow small mammals, particularly cats and children
2) If you do not allow daily bathing and weekly washing of clothes
3) If you do not have a freezer in operating condition
4) If there is not a refrigerator larger than 1 cubic meter for us to use
5) If using the bathroom requires using 40 stairs in a spiral staircase and traversing a large, public hall
6) If the home’s floors are currently concrete and you require The American Couple to tile or carpet them prior to moving in
7) If the bedroom cannot accommodate a 6-foot man standing up
8) If the bed cannot accommodate him lying down
9) If you are not near public transportation or within bicycling distance to their place of work (according the AMERICAN standard)
10) If the living quarters will be shared with people undergoing psychological evaluations
11) If they are required to be roommates to 8-legged creatures.

Productive Day

I have done three loads of laundry today. And I don’t have undergarments, sheets, or towels hanging everywhere in the house. Nor are the laundered items stiff, scratchy, and in desperate need of ironing. The Basement has – drum roll, please – a dryer!

The American Couple

Maybe we didn’t quite make legendary status with our househunt, but we were on our way. The agency we have joined placed ads in at least one of the nation's Christian newspapers about an “Amerikaanse Echtpaar” who were looking for a place to live. The first ad got a few respondents, and that is how we found our first temporary home for the month of April.

The second ad got a slew of sympathy calls. There was the kind 70-something widower who had three rooms for us to use in an emergency, but he wasn’t too keen on letting us use the kitchen. (At least he was honest!) We need to eat, so we decided against it. There were others who didn’t allow cats. I need my kitty-love, so we decided against them. In a little village, there was the little home in the little garden of a BIG Dutch Reformed family. The house was a little too little – the bedroom was about the size of a double bed, and the other room wasn’t much bigger. Ik ben zwanger, so we decided against it. There was another man who had a little house in a little garden…you get the picture. So did we, so we didn’t even need to look. Even our housemate in our temporary home mentioned seeing the ad for us – “You are The American Couple,” she said, with a big smile on her face. In the end, however, the ad came through for us again – it is how we ended up in our new home – the one with the beautiful views of the Rhine, the steeple, and the garden. The one in the basement. The one with the family of spiders resurrecting themselves daily in our bathroom.

Abby Cat

On a scale of 1 to 10, how happy was Abby to move again?

The Netherlands Has Them, Too

I thought I left her in Taiwan 10 years ago, but no…Shelob still exists. And she exists in our bathroom.

The Greatest Public Transport Moments

This one ranks up there with getting tinkled on by a little boy while waiting for my train in Chicago several years ago.

I transported the microwave via bus from the office to The Basement. Somewhere along the way, while trying to hoist my expanding belly, a dolly/cart, the microwave on the cart, and a backpack with 2 laptops in it onto the bus, I lost a shoe. Wandering shoelessly around the bus station where I transfer, a women approaches me, “Mevrouw, your shoe.” Shoeless no more. Prideful no more.

The Basement

Interestingly enough, our last apartment was named “The Attic” because it was in…the attic. Our current home is in the basement…so it will be called “The Basement”.

Mooo-ving

I like life away from the Randstad. There are a whole lot more open spaces, complete with cows, horses, and sheep (and their babies!). My camera has been getting a workout trying to capture to the perfect lamb picture – but that’s another story.

What I don’t like is the househunting experience outside of the Randstad. It took a temporary move closer to where we’ll work in order to have the opportunity to look, then it took A LOT of patience and searching for the options to come forth. I suppose it has a lot to do with our circumstances – we rely on public transport and our finances are somewhat limited. Please, dollar, get stronger…please……

With one week to go in our temporary home, we had one very bad option. In that last week, however, we had 7 options AND an extension to our temporary situation. God’s provision is something to experience!

We did pick one of those options – not the nicest one, but the wisest choice. Hopefully, we’ll be here till the end of the year. I’m liking the view of the Rhine from the front, the horses and cows grazing the banks of the river, the elaborate garden in the back (that I don’t have to weed!), the old church steeple peeking through the trees to our left, and the short walk to almost anything I need.

And the best part – high-speed internet in only a few more days!! Watch out Expatriate-izing readers and Skype contacts.

Ik Ben Zwanger.

I suppose it’s time the blog readers know – ik ben zwanger!! When a women is zwanger in Nederland, it’s important to know at least three things:

1. To not delay any celebrations, read and translate the zwangerschaptest directions ahead of time. We thought we could figure it out, so we didn’t bother translating everything. I mean, it was just a simple + or -. But when it comes to something as important as zwangerschap, even the slightest difference in look from the picture to the actual test made us wonder. In our case, our test resembled Example A in the directions. Unfortunately, we couldn’t decipher the explanation under Example A (with 100% confidence). SO…since the zwangerschaptest looked like Example A and not the “normal” example, we weren’t quite sure what to think during the time it took to translate. Talk about anti-climatic! But indeed, Example A just meant we were REALLY zwanger – maybe it’s because I was zwanger for 6 weeks before we took it??

2. For proper zwangerschap care, know the word (both by reading and by hearing) “verloskundige”. I recommend also being able to say it, but I haven’t mastered it yet, at least in combination with other words.

3. When tired of not fitting into your pants, go shopping for “positiekleding”. In my case, I forget to look up this word before I went shopping. Then, in the department store, I couldn’t find any clerks to ask. So I just followed all the other zwanger women! (Not that it really helped. I left empty handed. From several stores. So I called a couple friends and family members in the States, and they sent a care package to me. Nice, huh?) It's also called "zwangerschapsmode" sometimes.

P.S. These are NOT the directions we had trouble with!!