Decisions, decisions, decisions

Decisions, Decisions, Decisions

Over the past couple of weeks, a bunch of decisions have been made – all of which have been fairly important to my life here in The Hague.  The first one, contrary to what everyone had said, you do need (want) a car over here, so I made arrangements to have my car shipped to me in the Netherlands.  No easy task when you are living half way around the world, and your car is sitting in your locked garage and in dire need of a good cleaning.  That is where having good friends comes in.  God bless my friends Susan and Nick, as they went to my house, got the keys for my car out of the drawer in the kitchen, got the car, drove it around to drain it of gas, arranged with the shipping company to have the car picked up and also took it to get it detailed.  I can’t thank them enough for their help and I now owe them BIG TIME!  To be clear though, I had arranged the shipping and told Susan where to take it for detailing.  And oh, she had to send me copies of my insurance and registration for customs purposes on this end.  Definitely not the most optimal way to do things, however I listened to what people told me (you don’t need a car) and I since determined otherwise.  I figure that if all goes well, it should be here sometime in May.

Another big decision that took place in the past couple of weeks is around my permanent housing situation.  I had been out with the housing search company that Shell provides me  and had looked at probably a dozen places or so and then one afternoon I walked into this house and went “OMG – this is it!”   It is the quintessential Dutch house (note:  in the Netherlands, there are very few stand alone homes-  I won’t go and try and describe it as I have included a link with pictures).  In Holland, you have to be careful about what you say when you look at a property because a verbal acceptance of a place is considered a contract, so while I was brimming with excitement inside, I kept a stoic face while I looked at the property.  After we left I said – this is the one, however not wanting to make a completely spur of the moment decision based on emotion, my agent and I agreed to go back one more time and in the mean time she would do one final scan to make sure that we hadn’t missed something.  And of course I did one last scan as well and lo and behold, what did I find, a new property that came on the market that very day and had a more modern kitchen.  So I quickly sent my agent a note saying that I needed to see this place before I made final decision.  The long and short of it was in the end, I decided to go with the last place and that is where it got exciting (or as exciting as renting a house in The Netherlands can be)

Pictures of Prins Mauritsplein 4 - my house!!!!

Over here, you can ask people to do anything when you rent a house and it is somewhat expected.  Hell, my boss asked that all of the laminate be taken out (they LOVE their laminate over here) and be replaced with hardwood (and he did).  I looked at one place that didn’t have a bath tub and my agent said that we would ask them to put one in.  Now if you were in Canada and asked this, you would be told to go pound sand!  My requests were fairly simple, I wanted him to leave the wine fridge, do some touch up painting, steam clean the carpets, put in a couple of shelves, etc – nothing too crazy.  So I can tell you that trying to negotiate a deal over 3 continents, across 14 time zones was not  easy.  The owner of the house was in Houston (GMT - 7), Jorien, my agent was in The Hague (GMT +1) and I was in Beijing (GMT +8).  So when I would send Jorien an email in the morning, it would be the middle of the night for her and late evening the day before for the guy in Houston.  So then she would send it to the guy in Houston, who in the morning would respond which would be the late afternoon Hague time to hear back which would be the middle of the night for me. But in the end, it all worked out and I got most of what I wanted, including the wine fridge and hopefully I will be moving in when I get back from Palm Springs/Calgary in early April.

And my last decision and a little less exciting, now that I have a place to live and I know what my space is like – I bought a new dining room table and chairs.  Hopefully they will arrive in 6-8 weeks and will help to fill up some of my space!