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I Amsterdam

Expats coming to the Netherlands, beware!

The city of Amsterdam recently launched a new ‘brand’, called I Amsterdam.

This is a registered trademark of the city, and is supposedly used for companies or other organizations that present the city in a good light.  In particular an important part of the marketing efforts are to attract so-called knowledge workers to the city, and help with their relocation by promoting businesses that can assist them with things like housing, banking and the like.

Beware of Racism!

An important part of the history of the Netherlands is after WWII a large number of migrants came here to help with the reconstruction of the country.  These migrants kept coming, and in recent times turned into more educated knowledge workers.  In fact, in light of the fact there were large numbers of knowledge workers the governments has significantly cut back on educational spending and let immigrants fill the gaps, causing other problems I won’t get into here.

The view has always been maintained that those coming to the country are doing so to serve the native Dutch and their descendants.  In other words, knowledge workers come here to create jobs, and these jobs are for ethnic Dutch.

The demographics are now such that about half the city’s population is not ethnic Dutch, and if you move here you will also not be ethnic Dutch.

There’s a long running custom for ethnic Dutch to only hire or offer promotions to other ethnic Dutch.  In fact, to hire or promote someone who is not ethnic Dutch is considered to be taking a risk.  This might create discontent in the workplace, a clash of cultures or attract complaints from customers — much in the same way it used to be with black workers in America.

There is no such thing as affirmative action or reverse discrimination here, and certainly not in the city government!  The vast majority of city workers are ethnic Dutch, and nearly all of those in positions of importance are.  Most city contracts go to companies who only hire ethnic Dutch.  Certainly for the purposes of this new marketing logo, if you do business with the companies involved, you will see they are almost all exclusively staffed with ethnic Dutch.

If you do business with them, you will be leaving out the half of the city that is not ethnic Dutch.

Housing

This is a good example, and since I am not ethnic Dutch and am offering an apartment for rent, let me explain a little bit how this works.

Largely speaking, there are three kinds of housing in Amsterdam.  There’s social housing, where you have to meet certain income, employment and pre-existing residence requirements.  There’s free sector housing, which is more expensive and easier to find.  Now there’s this new category called Short-Stay housing, especially intended for expats.

There’s lots of grey areas in housing, for example people who have social housing illegally subletting it to expats for a huge profit, or landlords illegally renting out social housing as free sector.  Lots of people will warn expats about ‘illegal’ housing, but actually there’s nothing to worry about.  There are no penalties for you to rent and live in illegal housing.  The risks are almost exclusively for property owners.  If you find yourself in the wrong kind of accommodation, you may have to move out eventually or pay a higher than expected rent, you might find yourself swamped with a bit of red tape, but there are no other risks.

The one issue for some is if you are non-EU and living here on a residence permit renewed on an annual basis, you will need to register your residence with the city and be allowed to live wherever that is.  This is easy.  If you fall into this situation, ask your potential landlord if you’re allowed to register?  If the answer is no, you have to look elsewhere.  Your landlord will not want you to try to register if you’re not allowed to, and it will create a lot of problems for them if you do.  If you aren’t required to register because of a residence permit, it’s no problem to come to an agreement that you won’t register, if this is what you want to do.

There is nothing illegal about renting an apartment from me or any other private party!  Most places are okay to register with the city.  If you rent from me, you can certainly register if you want, no problem.

Short Stay housing was created because there are a lot of empty apartments in the city now that don’t meet the requirements of free sector rental housing, and can’t be sold because the real estate market is too depressed.  Licenses were granted to large housing corporations to use this excess housing as ‘Short Stay’ housing, in limited numbers so the market would not fill up with expat rentals, bringing prices down.  These licenses were granted ‘per unit’, with entire apartment blocks considered as a single unit, meaning the cost for someone like me with a single apartment was unrealistic, and only pre-existing housing corporations would qualify.

If you move into an official ‘Short Stay’ rental, you will get housing licensed by a city government dominated by ethnic Dutch, with the intention of keeping it in short supply in an otherwise flooded real estate market with artificially high rents, as well as with the intention of benefiting ethnic Dutch owners running a company who only hires ethnic Dutch workers.

This isn’t the right kind of housing for expats!

Whatever you do, and however you find housing, the best thing to do is avoid official Short Stay housing and official housing companies.  If you’re looking for housing, leave a comment on this post and I’ll try to offer the most current advice I have at the moment.

Work Ethic

One of the things that happens with the active promotion of ethnic Dutch is one of the most atrocious work ethics I have ever seen.  Nothing is a better example than when the city was licensing taxis in a similar way as the new Short Stay housing!  By searching on TCA or Taxi Centrale Amsterdam, there are probably lots of stories on the Internet, but basically the city turned all of their taxi drivers into thugs.

The taxi drivers all knew they had a right to drive their taxi, pretty much charge whatever they wanted and could do what they wanted because the city had given them a permanent license and weren’t issuing new licenses to others.  This basically meant they were ripping off any tourist who entered their cabs, charging whatever they wanted, and many became involved in organized crime.  For a time it was known if you wanted pirated software, you could buy a CD from most taxi drivers.  Many would transport drugs on request.  It was a real mess, and it took a long time to sort out.  Nowadays, the taxis aren’t nearly as bad, certainly nothing to be afraid of, but there are still a few bad drivers floating around and taxis are still best avoided if possible.

Later I’m going to do a post on my recent house renovations, and the story is similar with this.

Any time you do business with a completely ethnic Dutch company, you risk the same sort of work ethic and desire to charge the highest price for the least amount of work.  By the way, this is often the case with ethnic Dutch people trying to buy goods and services too.  Since employment is harder to come by for non-ethnic Dutch, as a rule they are much more motivated and honest.

I’m not in anyway encouraging anyone to discriminate the other way, and refuse to do business with ethnic Dutch, but rather use common sense.

If you’re an expat coming to Amsterdam, beware half of the city is like you — from somewhere else.  Look out for and pay attention to them!  Look for colored skin, a funny accent or native English speaker.  The day will come where you expect the same from others.

If you come here and work for a foreign company, it may take a long time before you notice it, because you’ll be working in a pretty sheltered environment.  It’s also normal when you come here to look on everything with a positive light, and for example justify this kind of discrimination on the basis of a lack of appropriate language skills.  The truth is with something like language skills, the expectations are generally just so high, that no non-native speaker is good enough.  Almost no one learns to speak Dutch as a second language without an accent.  It can take a long time living here before you see just how undeniable the discrimination is, but you’ll see it eventually.

A desire to purchase goods and services from non-ethnic Dutch is really the most important first step to ending the discrimination that goes on here.

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Foundation work has begun

This has been going on for years now, and I’ve posted before about my house foundation.

http://bifurcatedcarrots.eu/2006/01/house-foundation/

http://bifurcatedcarrots.eu/2008/02/its-time-for-a-new-house-foundation/

http://bifurcatedcarrots.eu/2008/06/building-permits/

http://bifurcatedcarrots.eu/2009/03/foundation-trials-and-tribulations-and-a-bad-constructeur/

http://bifurcatedcarrots.eu/2010/03/big-projects-2010-house/

http://bifurcatedcarrots.eu/2010/03/approval/

In short, based on their experiences with other houses in the neighborhood many of which needed foundation repairs, and the outside appearance of my house, the city decided to do an inspection of my foundation in 2006 and discovered it was bad.

In 2008 I was ready to begin, but the project got bogged down with disputes with the neighbors and a technical architect (what the Dutch call a ‘constructeur’) who was trying to rip me off.  Above is a link where I talk about what happened with the constructeur, but in fact this is now in court and is an ongoing issue, so I’m not going to say a lot more about it now.  I’ll post more about it later.  The same is true with the neighbors, things need to be a little more settled before I post details on the Internet.

So now the work has finally begun, and we’ve run into the first technical problem!

My house is built with a load bearing wall in the middle.  This makes the foundation repair much more complicated, because as well as supporting the outside walls both during the work in with the new foundation, this inside wall has to be supported too.  My house is 330 years old now, and this wall is part of the original house.

The problem we discovered with this wall is it’s not strong or stable enough for the foundation repair.  Before we fix the foundation, we need to fix this wall.  The main problem you can see is visible on the right side of the picture.  Here’s a close up of that part of the wall.

You can see in this picture the wall is not straight.  The piece of wood running from the ceiling to the floor is perfectly vertical.  The load bearing wall however slants to the left.  The measurement difference between the bottom of the wall and the piece of wood, and the top of the wall and the piece of wood is about 15cm.  Literally, my house is in the process of toppling, and the stress of a foundation repair will likely just send it over if I don’t do something about it first.

Another less serious, but kind of humorous problem we uncovered was in connection with an old fireplace that used to be in this room.  I think it was used to burn coal.  One of the first things I did when I bought the house was remove the fireplace.

In the top picture, you can see a black stripe where the flu used to run.  The silly people who installed the fireplace and flu ran it alongside the wooden ceiling beam.  Below is a close up of the beam, and you can see they were starting to burn through it!  I wonder if they noticed any unusual smells?

The beams in this room were rotting anyway, and have since been replaced or reinforced, so it’s not an issue anymore.

The other problem at the moment is, independent from my foundation plans, the city has decided to dig up the entire street in front of my house and replace the water, electricity, gas and sewer.  Above is a picture of what the street looks like, and as you can see it’s now impossible to get any heavy equipment into the house or place a rubbish container on the street.

So the plan at the moment is to remove the troublesome load bearing wall, and replace it with a steel structure.  I’ve wanted to remove the wall for some time now, and just was trying to avoid the expense when I needed to pay for the foundation repair.

Unfortunately, this is going to involve completely redesigning the foundation because the weight will be distributed differently.  On the plus side, I will probably need fewer piles, because the weight of the wall won’t need to be supported in the middle, and this will save some money.  The current plans include 15 piles, 21 meters deep.  Hopefully, I will be able to go to 13 or 14 piles.  This all needs to be done and submitted to the city for approval, and since we need to wait for the city to finish the street work, we have some time to kill anyway.

After approval from the city, what we will do is cut holes in the existing cement floor for the new piles.  The way my existing foundation is built is it’s entirely under the outer walls and the inside load bearing wall.   In the middle of the house there are no piles, and this is where the new piles will go.  The reason for cutting holes in the existing floor instead of just removing it, is the equipment that drives the new piles needs a hard surface to work on.  The ceiling clearance is a little over 2 meters, and the new piles will be made with a hollow steel case that will be driven 2 meters at a time with the sections welded together as they are driven.  Then the hollow case will be filled with cement.

The piles will be driven starting with the most solid side of our house first, and as the piles go in a support structure will be built on top of the new piles, giving support to the house.  When we get to the load bearing wall, a special temporary support structure will be built, allowing the removal of the wall and installation of a new permanent steel structure to replace it.

As the first piles are driven, the ground will get compacted, meaning the later piles will have to be driven harder to get them in the ground.  It will be important at this point to have good support in place for the house.

After the piles are driven, the existing floor will be removed, and the ground dug out because the new floor will be lower than the existing one and the ground is seriously contaminated and needs to be cleaned.  There will be some refilling of the space with sand.

After the space is dug out, they will break holes in the outer walls that the new foundation will mesh into.  A new concrete floor will be poured, and this floor will sit on top of the new piles and into these holes in the wall.  The holes will be 50cm wide, spaced 50cm apart, meaning at floor level half my wall will be cut away.  Jacks will be placed in these holes to support the house on the existing foundation during the work, but after the cement floor is poured, the weight of the house will be transferred to the new piles via the cement floor.

I’ll be posting pictures!

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Bank Fees and Currencies in the US and Europe

Bank Fees

One of the things I was astonished at during my recent trip to the US were bank fees.  At least in the Washington/Oregon area, and I assume the rest of the US as well, they are everywhere!

Since my bank has some fees when I use my bank (ATM) card or credit card in the US, I was seeing fees added to fees, and it really added up!  During the 10 days we were there, we probably paid US$50 in bank fees alone.  It was a standard $3 to take a maximum of $300 from a cash machine (ATM).  Paying with a credit card often cost an extra dollar or two, especially to fill the tank in my car, and 45 cents or so extra for an ATM card.

From my bank, there were no direct fees to use a credit card, but on currency conversion I lost a few percent.  My bank charges about an initial $2 or so to use a ATM card in the US, plus a percentage, plus a few percent for currency conversion.  Including fees on each end, it cost about $5 to make a $50 purchase with my ATM card!

I could escape the fees on the US side by making a supermarket purchase with an ATM card, and asking for cash back, but I still paid my own bank fees for this.  In general, the cheapest way was for me to pay for things with a credit card, where I would only pay a few percent for the currency conversion.

One of the things I found very annoying was the cash machines would only give me $300.  If we were able to get $500 or even $1000 in one go for our $3 fee, we would have been able to get enough cash for our whole trip at the start and saved a lot of fees.

Here in Amsterdam, I can get €1000 (about $1300) in one go, if I use a cash machine from my own bank.  I’m not sure what these machines will give to foreign cards, but perhaps it’s closer to the $300 limit in the US.  I don’t think any local machines charge any fees for foreign cards, but I could be mistaken.

In any event, I don’t pay any fees to use any cash machine to withdraw euros, anywhere in Europe.  I also don’t pay any fees for an ATM card purchase.  I do pay a fee of about $25 per year on my bank account.

In the US of course banks make a lot of fees with overdraft or returned check charges.  This is where you pay for something with a check, and there are not enough funds in your account.  These fees are really exorbitant, and we don’t have these here.  By now all payments are electronic, we don’t use checks anymore, and if you don’t have enough funds the payment simply doesn’t go through.  Generally here you negotiate an overdraft limit with your bank, for this you only pay interest for the days your balance remains negative and otherwise no fees.

A few years ago I did see one ATM machine here in a McDonalds saying it charged a €2 fee.  This is the only machine I have ever seen in the Netherlands with a fee notice on it.  I didn’t see anyone using it that day, and I haven’t been back since so I don’t know if it’s still there.  I doubt they got much business, and I suspect under new EU regulations this isn’t legal anymore.

Currencies

As useful currencies, the US dollar and Euro have diverged in a way.

When the Euro was introduced, the value of the dollar and Euro were pretty close to 1 to 1 in terms of exchange rate.  In particular since Obama came to power, he made some policy decisions that led to a weakening of the US dollar.  For what it’s worth, I think he probably made the right decision at the time, but it does mean things have become a lot more expensive in the US and the exchange rate has fallen.  In fact the value of the US dollar on international markets has been on a decline for some time.  At the same time, the paper and coin currency hasn’t been updated to reflect this!

In my opinion, the dollar has become a really difficult currency for day to day use.  It’s very annoying for example to count $1 bills and pennies.  There is the long running debate over the $1 coin in the US, and really I think the time has come to start thinking about a $5 coin instead or in addition.  The usefulness of the penny ended decades ago, and it’s really time to get rid of that too maybe even together with the nickel.  Is it time to simply drop a zero off the end of the US currency, and reissue notes and coins in the same denominations?  It would be really handy if ATMs dispensed bills larger than 20s, and $100 as the largest note does not really fit in well with international standards.  In fact, maybe it’s time for a complete overhaul and rethink of the currency design.  These ergonomics are probably why most transactions these days in the US seem to be made with plastic.

On the other hand, the Euro has probably increased in value more than they expected at the time of issue, and has some problems because of it’s high value.

There are a number of cash machines in Amsterdam that will not dispense notes smaller than €50, which is about US$65.  You don’t make any friends here if you show up first thing in the morning at a farmers market with a €50 note in your hand.  Generally the stand operators simply can’t give change for them, until they’ve had a chance to collect some smaller money from other customers.  They can be a problem to spend other places as well.

The €500 note (worth about $670) also turned into a bit of a disaster for Europe, and even the €100 note (worth about $135) is a little difficult to get or use.

When first introduced, the €500 note disappeared as fast as they could print them.  Even now, they aren’t completely sure where they all went.  The last I heard they think almost half of them are in Spain.  When it was introduced, people exchanged it with their hoards of $100 notes.  It became the black market currency of choice.  With the €500 notes, it’s possible to carry something approaching $20,000 in a space the size of a cigarette package, making it very easy to carry over international boarders in large amounts.  After a year or so of printing them as fast as they could, only to see them vanish, I think they finally decided not to put any more into circulation.  There are now about 3 of these in circulation for every EU citizen.  They are extremely difficult to get, and if you have one your only option is probably to take it to a bank because I don’t think anyone else will accept it.

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Pirate Party

Probably a lot of people reading this have heard of the Swedish Pirate Party or perhaps The Pirate Bay website where you can find things like videos, music, software and other things to download, copyrighted and otherwise.

In fact the idea of the Pirate Party has spread worldwide, and many countries have similar emerging parties.

The Pirate Party really came to peoples attention when The Pirate Bay website was raided by the Swedish police.  It was raided, not because it was in violation of Swedish or other law, it was raided on the request of the US government who threatened trade sanctions against Sweden(!) if they didn’t shut the website down.  In Sweden this is illegal.  Politicians are not allowed to request the police to do this, but they did it anyway.

In the following video, Peter Sunde, one of the founders of The Pirate Bay website tells the story of The Pirate Bay, the Swedish Pirate Party and Flattr:

In the last European elections the Swedish Pirate Party won 2 seats in the EU Parliament. Since the ISP of The Pirate Bay was ordered by a judge to disconnect the website, the Swedish Pirate Party decided to become an ISP and now hosts The Pirate Bay website in the Swedish parliament building. The Swedish constitution gives them immunity from prosecution as long as their actions are consistent with their party mandate. This is the reason The Pirate Bay website is still available on the Internet.

I am no spokesperson for the Swedish or any other Pirate Party. In fact one of the things I’ve discovered recently is there is a huge diversity of opinions within these parties. As a rule however, these parties are opposed to the injustices imposed by copyright holders on users of the Internet. These include lawsuits, threats of lawsuits, disconnection of Internet service and other actions.

I think many Pirate Party members feel like I do, that downloading anything from the Internet is a good thing. It is the nature of how the Internet works technically. It’s how information and computer tools are distributed and it’s how people communicate. This is simply an important aspect of how the Internet works, and people should use it as such.

Few people are opposed to creators of this content being paid! I think it’s a fine idea for people to be paid for their work. The idea of enforcing this payment by imposing rules on the use of the Internet is seriously flawed.

There are even some politicians who believe people who break these or other rules should have their Internet service disconnected! Can you imagine this? This is like taking away someone’s library card, because they’ve abused the information in the books.

In today’s world the Internet is far beyond a luxury. If you’re a person of any age in school, you’ll almost certainly receive a portion of your assignments on the Internet. Some companies now only bill via the Internet. It’s simply the largest and most important source of information and communication, and it’s not something you take away from someone because they’ve been bad! Already it’s a necessary part of life, and in the coming years it’s going to be even more important.

This video has some Dutch but it’s mostly in English, and features the founder of the Swedish Pirate Party talking a bit about the party principles:

While these principles apply now to the Internet, there are ramifications for Democracy as a whole. Do we want seed companies to someday be able to tell us we can’t trade seeds over the Internet?

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De Vliegende Schotel

I did a post a few months ago about a favorite local bar that served local beers, and I thought it was time to do a post about a local restaurant, located at Nieuwe Leliestraat 162-168 in Amsterdam.  The name Vliegende Schotel is a play on words in Dutch.  Schotel means plate, dish or saucer, and a common word for restaurants to use in their menus to indicate ‘dish or dishes’.  Vliegende means flying, and so the name of the restaurant also means UFO.

I’ve been going to this restaurant longer than any other in Amsterdam.  My first visit was 25 years ago, when I was here as a tourist.   The staff got to know me from the start, and greeted me as a returning customer on every visit.  I’m really happy to say last October the restaurant has been sold, and is now under new ownership — Woohoo!!  As much as I continued to go there, about once or twice a year, it used to be a really bad restaurant.

I used to go there because Amsterdam is really lacking in quality restaurants, and there are only a very small handful of vegetarian restaurants.  It’s also close to where I live.  It had me as a captive audience on those nights I didn’t want to cook for myself.

How it Used to Be

Americans, and maybe others, will know Molly Katzen.  She first wrote a vegetarian cookbook called Moosewood.  It was famous first because Molly wrote the cookbook without ever trying any of her recipes first, just off the top of her head, so none of them worked properly when you tried to cook them.  The other reason this cookbook became famous is it sort of defined 1980s vegetarian cuisine in America; bland, overcooked, strangely spiced, uninspired and boring.  It was also a difficult book to cook from, because every recipe needed very small amounts of large numbers of exotic ingredients, so a large shopping expedition was always needed first.  Anyway, this was the sort of food the Vliegende Schotel used to serve; boring, overcooked, uninspired and strangely spiced.

In the 25 years I went there, the menu hardly changed.  All the dishes were all pre-planned, usually totally lacking in seasonal ingredients, and without any inspiration from the cooks.  The portions were all carefully measured, so while tofu was expensive and cabbage was cheap, it was served proportionally to maximize their profits.  Much of their food came from the freezer, and it was not uncommon for it to still be half-frozen on your plate.

The big changes came about around 5 years ago, when they started serving alcohol legally (they used to have it behind the counter if you knew to ask for it), and they started using organic food ‘when available’.   This ‘when available’ business meant you never knew what, if any, part of your meal was organic, you knew profit was their overriding goal, so you never knew how much extra they were willing to pay for certified organic food rather that just stating it was unavailable.  Also, local had little to do with their purchasing choices, rather they just served supermarket certified organic foods.  They were associated with a natural foods store, that sold supermarket style certified organic foods, and presumably what was served at the restaurant was the leftovers.

They also had a ‘quiet non-smoking room’.  This was a little bit revolutionary in a city which until about a year ago pretty much didn’t have any non-smoking areas in any restaurants.  I guess the ‘quiet’ part about it was to somehow rationalize it for smokers as not being a room that discriminated against them too much, and perhaps at one time was full of loud non-smoking Americans, so they wanted to ask them to tone it down a bit.  This was a separate room, but the door between it and the rest of the restaurant was usually open, letting in smoke.  Also the staff of the restaurant used to smoke outside the window of the non-smoking room and blow all their smoke in.

You also needed to order your food at the counter which was in the smoking area, so no one was allowed to escape.  I only sort of appreciated the effort they went to providing a non-smoking room.

It’s all changed now!

Steph and I went there for dinner, the first time we’ve been there since it changed owners.

It was really good!

Amsterdam has for more than a year now banned smoking in restaurants, so that’s no longer an issue.

The menu still has a lot of the old dishes on it, but I hope they will soon phase these out.  There are several new and interesting dishes, including daily and weekly specials offered at a low price.  There are lots of vegan choices.

I ordered a salad, and the cook not only took a great deal of care preparing it by hand, but he came out to the table and presented it with pride.  It was really nicely made.

They like sprouts, everything from bean, radish, lentil to pea and more.  This really gives their food a fresh taste, and is something unusual.  It’s a little early to know if they will truly embrace the idea of local and seasonal foods, but their heads are in the right place and I have high hopes.  Their English is excellent, I think they are native speakers, and the menu is in Dutch and English.

Time will tell if it really turns into a nice restaurant in the long run, but for now I can safely recommend it to anyone who finds themselves in Amsterdam and is looking for a vegetarian restaurant serving fresh and unprocessed foods.  In fact, it’s still one of the few choices available.