I was a little worried initially about moving from a large city (Chicago, 2.7 million people; Chicagoland, 9.5m) to a smaller one (The Hague, 500,000 people), but it turns out the Hague is dense enough that it is about the same (and anyways I hardly ever went out to the edges of Chicago). And the Randstad region (The Hague plus Amsterdam, Rotterdam, and Utrecht, and all points between) is about 7.1m with the other cities accessible by about a forty-minute train ride, so honestly it’s basically the same. Me going to Amsterdam for brunch last Sunday was basically about the same as me going to brunch up on the north side back home, except the train didn’t smell like pee. (I love you, CTA, but y’all know.)

I’ve been staying with a friend while I got settled in and look for a place, and hopefully I’ve found one — I put in an offer on Friday so we’ll see what comes of it. It has been, honestly, kind of rough looking for a place. The housing market is much, much different here than at home. I’d heard that it was tight but I kind of brushed it off — so many expats here (like 10% of the Hague’s population is transient, with people coming and going all the time, working for the diplomatic services or for major multinationals), how hard could it be? Turns out, pretty hard. For starters, there are no free apartment-finding services like back home. You can work with a makelaar (realtor) but most of them will only sell their own listings. So you wind up spending hours glued to aggregator websites like funda or pararius, writing or calling with inquiries, only to find that the listings are stale and the place is already verhuurd (rented). Also, my #1 priority was a place that would permit cats — my two cats are still back in the States, staying with a friend, waiting for me to find a place so I can bring them over. Most of the listings do not specify if huisdieren (pets) are possible, or even considered (in overleg). So once you find a listing that isn’t stale, the pet permission is the next step, and that rules out probably 2/3 to 4/5 of the listings (which I honestly did not see coming, because so many people here have pets).

The answer is actually pretty simple. Most people who live here buy places rather than renting. The rental market is functionally split up into low-income housing for people on social assistance, student housing (lots of bedrooms and one-room studios with shared common kitchens and bathrooms), and “soak the clueless expats and/or their employers” housing, with a tiny leftover slice of just-an-ordinary-person rental units. If you have pets, you’re probably a stable resident and not transient, therefore a local; therefore you buy. And the “soak the clueless expats” penalty is huge. I was looking at flats that effectively started around €900/mo, whereas a mortgage for an equivalent place would run me about €450/mo (and that’s before the monthly tax refund for your deductible mortgage interest, which could be €100 or more). I found that actually kind of hard to deal with, especially because back home rental was more or less on par with mortgaging. But oh well. When in Rome, and anyways — I can’t back out now! (Apparently the pricing in Amsterdam is even worse, because fewer expats know any Dutch or anything about the local government, and so they just accept that what they see is right… there are price controls on rent rates based on property tax values, but if the landlord is sleazy and the clueless newbie doesn’t know to check the price with the authorities, suddenly €1500 for a 15m2 studio is the real market value. See above re: “soak-the-expats.”)

So I hope now I have found a place, after weeks of looking (and having one offer I put in previously denied, probably because the landlord prefers to rent to the stable professional local couple who speak fluent Dutch, over the newbie unknown expat, since we both applied at the same viewing — I was crushed, it was a killer space). If it does come through, it’ll mean more new things to adjust to. For starters… apartments here come in three flavors:

• Gemeubileerd: fully furnished. Includes household appliances, window treatments, furniture, bed linens, dishes, the whole 9 yards. Fully-furnished apartments naturally have a large fee over the base rent.
• Gestoffeerd: partly furnished. This does not mean furniture. You probably have a flooring of some sort, and you might have window treatments, but mostly, it means appliances. The things you take for granted in America, like all kitchens have a fridge and a stove, are not true here. Your kitchen may come with a koelkast or vries (fridge, maybe freezer), kookplaat or gasfornuis (hob, gas cooktop), oven, vaatwasser (dishwasher), magnetron or combimagnetron (microwave or combination microwave/convection oven, which I must say is a brilliant appliance and really we ought to have those back home). You may have a wasmachine or drooger (washer, dryer), you probably don’t (but you are likely to have at least a wasmachine aansluiting, the washing machine hookup). But any one of those things is not guaranteed. You could find a gestoffeerd flat with a fridge but no hob, a stove with oven but no fridge, a fridge without a freezer. Whatever you do find is supplied, however, you will pay an upcharge in your rent for it. The base rent may be advertised as, say, €700 but then there’s a €30-70 gestoffering fee, depending on what’s supplied.
• Kaal: empty. They really, really mean empty. You’ll get a space with no appliances, no window treatments, likely no flooring either (bare concrete, depending on the construction). That’s right, BYO carpeting or laminate. Some people lay wooden floors that they rip up and take with them to their new apartment when they leave, and re-cut it to fit the new space. Also, BYO appliances. You thought moving boxes of books was a heavy pain in the ass? Wait until you get to move a fridge, stove, and washing machine/dryer combo unit.

Then there are the non-tangibles:

• There usually are servicekosten – service charges, not included in the base rent. These pay for cleaning, heating, and warming communal areas, leaf/snow removal, etc. Depending on the place you’re probably looking at minimally €25/mo.
• Are your utilities included? G/W/L (gas, water, light) often are packaged together, but not always. Basically it depends on whether the apartment you rent has its own meters or if the building only has one. If your utilities are nominally included, they probably include only up to a certain usage level — if your toilet keeps running continually, get that shit fixed or you’ll run up a surprise bill for overages. Sometimes kabel (cable) and internet are included, often not. Budget €70-100 for utilities. A basic landline/cable/internet package will be around €30/mo.
• There are our friends at the belastingdienst — tax authority. Local taxes may or may not be included in your rent/servicekosten. This includes grondwaterbelasting (the “please stop the land from flooding” tax), afvalstoffenbelasting (trash removal), rioolheffingen (sewer costs), or other gemeentebelastingen (local municipality taxes). Car? Parkeerbelasting. Dog? Hondenbelasting. (Cats are tax-free — MUAHAHA.) This all depends on where your place is and how much resources you take up, but I’m told that here in the Hague, I’ll probably pay €35/mo or so for my place.

So, to sum up, when you’re searching for apartments, you have to lay out all the costs. Here’s an example picked on a random example, a 2nd (3rd, American-style) floor 3-room unit including only cable:

Like magic, our €670,- flat now costs €830,- per month…and it’s kaal so have fun buying those appliances. At least it has carpeting, so you’re off the hook for that. But what I’m saying is, do not plug your actual max budget into the search bar. You are asking for disappointment and budgetary frustration.

And as for your deposit…that’s probably only one month’s rent, but you also have to pay the makelaar who agented the apartment. That’s equal to one month’s rent as well, and also subject to the 21% BTW (VAT, sales tax). So when you sign, you’ll pay not 2 but 3+ months’ rent at once. That was an unwelcome surprise. Hey! I’m not the customer here, the landlord is! Quit soaking the damn expats!

Oh and — hope you don’t want a bathtub! They’re unicorns. I’ve heard of them, but they don’t actually exist in the wild. (This is the only thing I’m really and sincerely bummed about. I love bubble baths, they’re the best. Until I buy, however, I can’t have one. On the other hand, I do get to live in Europe. So I guess it’s a fair trade.)

All of those help explain why one might rather buy than live in rentals, which in turn helps explains the tight/expensive rental market. Also, it’s really, really hard to do an apples-to-apples comparison, especially between gestoffeerd apartments, because of the “which ones do you get” factor. Is the gestoffering fee for the one where there’s a fridge and a cooktop equivalent to or cheaper than the one where there’s a dishwasher and fridge but you have to bring your own stove? Do you even want a real stove with oven or do you just want a cooktop? Figure it out fast, because the good apartments get snapped up in a hurry.

Initially I set my sights on finding a gestoffeerd place, chiefly because what the hell do I know of buying appliances here where I don’t know the reasonable price ranges or features to look for, but it really limited my choices when I did that. Because I did have a neighborhood preference — fairly broad, but still limited to say 1/4 of the city — that cut it down, and the cats cut it down much further, the appliances requirement just cut it down to the point where my choices were all out of my budget. (Since my cats are indoor-only, I had to eliminate all the otherwise-good places I saw, for example, where I would have to open the windows for ventilation (everything is radiators, no central hvac, so if you want air circulation it means windows or balcony doors) and the cats could get out on a ledge or nearby shed roof and escape. They’re lucky they’re cute, is what I am saying.) The place that I applied for is empty — no appliances. I will have to go out and buy a stovetop and fridge, and a washer and maybe a dryer, and maaaybe a dishwasher. It’s a pretty hefty up-front expense. If I buy all of those items new it’ll easily cost €1600+, which is why I hope to avoid doing so… again because of the expats, there’s a pretty swift-moving secondhand market. Prices all depend on the age and features and energy efficiency and how badly the person wants to get rid of them (they are big and heavy and if you wait out until the end of your lease and get desperate…that there is bargain season, my friend). Of course the downside of buying used is…used things do not come with delivery as an option. And they are big and heavy. So you have to factor in hiring someone with a van, and a willingness to schlep, into the prices.

And did I mention I don’t have any furniture? I got rid of everything when I moved. Turns out work would have paid for a 20-ft shipping container, but I didn’t ask. I could at least have hung on to my desk or bed. Oh well, too late now. Secondhand everything, here I come! But that is a post for another day, for now, I have to go shower, get on my fiets (bike) and go to Centrum (city center, downtown) to meet a friend for lunch! In Europe! Where I live!

I’m currently trying to get a position in London through work. If it works out, it will literally be a dream come true. Maybe not necessarily the job (my dream job is, after all, driving a train for the Underground. I don’t think they sponsor visas, though), but certainly the location, and I do like what I do for a living (even though it’s not driving a train. I mean, trains! Best ever!). We’ll see how it goes. I’m admittedly a little afraid to say anything publicly in case I jinx it. Nothing is certain until the paperwork is signed, of course. But I’ve gotten the cats microchipped, and I’ve started selling off my stuff, Just In Case the stars align. Y’all know how it goes.

It’s a little peculiar how this feels though. On the verge of, as I said, having a dream come true — comes tension. It’s all the stupidest of things. Should I sell xyzpdq? What if I don’t get the job and want my xyzpdq? I had that happen with my drum carder. For those of you who aren’t yarn spinners, a drum carder is a rather pricey gadget that you use to prepare fiber for spinning. I bought mine a couple of years ago, and I loved it… I used it to prep art yarn batts, or prep fleece, or just generally make fiber for yarns for fun. I saved up for it, $25 a month for quite a while, to be able to buy a KitchenAid, and in the end I decided I would get more use from a carder than a KitchenAid, and I finally got it and I loved it… and a few weeks ago, I sold it. Because it wasn’t important enough to make the cut. If I pull this off, I want to pull it off in the least baggagey way possible, and that means not carting around boxes of shit I’ve carried with me since forever. I sold it to two friends, who are actually the fine ladies behind YarnCon (which, if you are a Chicagoan and a knitter or a spinner, you should certainly be familiar with!), and when Natalia picked it up from me she was practically rubbing her hands in glee at getting to process a particular fleece she had. But, all the same, there’s no amount of sending something you love on to a new home where it will be loved that cancels out the sense of pre-emptive regret, the “what if this doesn’t happen, and I’ve sold my drum carder for no good reason.” The price isn’t the most major factor (though it was definitely a sale at a loss) so much as it is, in economic terms, the opportunity cost. The “what-if” cost, the hedge against failure. The things that I have, I bought for a reason; if I sell them off and I wind up losing out on the London opportunity, I’ve not only lost out on my dream but also on the things I had before I was tempted at all.

I suppose it’s a lesson in materiality. I try not to be overly attached to material goods. I live in a small apartment, and I don’t have a lot of stuff in general. I had a CD collection which I did prize, and quite a lot of vinyl for a dilettante, and a fair number of books. Those are mostly gone now. The CDs are nearly all gone, but for one last box that I’ll haul off to sell; and the books are down to about one shelf on a bookcase, which — the more that I think about it — can be cut down even further; and the vinyl, well, maybe I’ll bequeath that to Michael. The more I think about things, I really think I can move with just a couple bags of clothing, my spinning wheel (only that because a Lendrum is pretty expensive in the UK), and my bike (because I love Ella Mae so, and she’s all tricked out with perfectly fitted aerobars and fancy waterproof German saddlebags and everything, these days). But it’s still a little confounding to try and balance the desire to get rid of extraneous stuff against the desire to have all of said extraneous stuff until the last possible minute because, after all, everything could always fall through.

I really, really hope everything doesn’t fall through. For so many reasons, and the stuff is the least of them.

What else? There are other things on the list, I’m just drawing a blank at the moment. Will add to this if I remember them.

(You know what’s not on the list? Freaking Disneyworld.)

So that’s kind of cool. I can keep a couple of projects in the caddy, it has pockets on the side for accessories, and the tabletop is removable so I can still use it as a table. The caddy bit is removable and washable, and it still mostly folds up, if I don’t mind moving the tabletop separately, and all it cost me to make was a $5 hacksaw and a $2 dowel. Rock!

I also did some spinning. I can’t spin in the wintertime (which is deeply annoying) because the skin on my hands gets too dry to handle fiber (and there is no lotion that helps this, I’ve tried — climate changes help, actually, so travelling in January actually healed my hands up a bit), but I have gotten a bit done in the past couple weeks. I finished up spinning the last of an 8oz. hank of Frabjous Fibers Blue-Faced Leicester in the “Deep Space” colorway. I drafted the full width of the roving out to pencil roving (so I had nice long chunks of colors) and navajo-plied it to preserve the color changes and shade neatly from color to color — came away with 540 yds of slightly-more-than-worsted,-not-quite-chunky weight yarn. Here’s a hank. I have four hanks now and I just want to sit and pet them. My pretties!

This roving was, to be perfectly honest, TEH BEST EVAH. If it weren’t like $30 a hank or something, I’d run right out down the street to Loopy and get like a dozen more and spend the rest of my life in fuzzy, soft, blue-purple bliss. (P.S. It is extremely dangerous to a budget having Loopy Yarns a block away from your house. Especially on rainy days when someone emails you a new project idea and you raid the stash and come up empty handed, and you whisper those fateful words: “I’ll just be like ten minutes.” I am just saying. Danger!)

I’ve also been working on Johnny’s Guitar Hero scarf. I changed it from crochet (in the pattern) to a broken-rib stitch, and am about halfway done — no pix, though, it’s not very interesting yet. But Johnny’s in a Guitar Hero tourney in a month so I have to get it one before then!

I also bought — drum roll, please — a shiny new lovely — OH YES I DID — Strauch Petite drum carder. I’ve been messing around with it and carded up a few batts of some Brown Sheep mill end rovings I got a couple years ago from The Sheep Shed Studio, which I spun up yesterday into some neat zebra-y singles I hope to turn into a two-ply worsted-weight yarn. This was a huge purchase and I dithered over it quite a bit, but I’ve been wanting one for ages so I can try making more interesting yarns, and I had the money… since, to my MASSIVE irritation, my annual spring trip to Ohio for the Ohio-Kentuckiana Soapmakers Gathering got cancelled this year due to it being scheduled on the same day as an exam in my bio class that I cannot miss — and as this year’s Gathering is in Greenville, OH, home of the Kitchenaid Experience outlet store, I’d been saving up my money for ages to buy a Kitchenaid there, which I was no longer going to be able to do what with the not going and all. (Note to self: NO MORE Saturday classes!) Sure, I could have just gone to Macy’s and bought a Kitchenaid there but, srsly, it’s not the same. And I decided I would probably use the drum carder more than the Kitchenaid this year (since I really wanted it so I wouldn’t have to knead bread dough anymore and I discovered no-knead bread last year), so I used that money for a drum carder instead. Despite the fact that I’m pretty sure I soundly confused a couple of coworkers by going on and on about “I WANT MY DRUM CARDER!!!” for like two weeks while waiting for it to ship… Nonetheless, it is awesome. And now I am going through life wanting multicolored loose silk fiber to drop from the sky…

And, since I’ve been wearing the hell out of the last one I made, I went stash-diving for some soysilk laceweight I knew I had in there somewhere and cast on for a third Clapotis. It’s nice to have a little mindless-yet-interesting knitting in there you can default to. Even if the laceweight does move annoyingly slowly, on #4 needles. It’s turning out pretty nice, I think I’ll be pleased with it when it’s done.

Of course there’s also been all the usual stuff — work, school. School is going well enough that really, I’m just mad at myself for putting it off so long. If I stick to my schedule, I should hopefully be getting an AA from HWC after summer 2010, and then that just leaves finishing up — the current contender for that is DePaul. I’m sort of miffed at the U of I system for being completely useless — UIC’s evening program is, as always, deplorable. UIS offers an online program for a couple of courses of study, but the enrollment is extremely limited (20 students? Really?). UPenn have an online program, but, meh. The nice thing about DePaul is that their School for New Learning (cough: School for Adults who Took a While to Get Their Shit Together) offers (a) classroom- or online-based classes, (b) earned credit for experiential learning (present a portfolio of work and get school credit for it — wonder what they will give me for my massive background in Internet memes?), and (c) build-your-own programs so you can study what you are actually interested in, and/or a Bachelor of Arts in Computing, meaning I could get a degree in my field without having to take Remedial Discrete Math eighty times to pass. They’re not really cheap, but I think it’ll be doable. I’ve figured out about how much money it’s going to take me to do this, and I’ve decided I have to handle it basically like my credit card debt… I just have to treat it as immutable: I must pay this amount into savings, which is playing the role of Discover Card in this little show. That amount also includes a targeted amount for my “escape fund,” which is for covering visa application costs, cat importation costs, first+last+deposit on an apartment, expenses, etc. for relocating. It’s sort of an ugly amount to stare at; even more so when you do the calculations for how much you need to save to have $XX in Y years at a 1.76% interest rate and the interest is just laughable. On the bright side, that formula was taught to me by the math class I’m in this semester, so I suppose it is making itself useful already. On the extra bright side, I won’t be getting done with this degree and thinking I’m all ready to do this thing and then suddenly realize I am thousands of dollars short. So that’s something, I guess. (Even if it does severely impair my plot-since-I-was-21 to get a fancy-pants sports car for my 40th birthday: The plan was always to pay cash, so there’s no way I’m going to pay cash for a bachelor’s degree out of pocket, plus save thousands of dollars for a move overseas, plus save like a hundred grand for a shiny new 911, in … 9 years. Ain’t gonna happen. I loved you, though, Dreams of Potential Car. Always remember!)

So that’s the news from the south loop. But now: big bio test to study for, and batts to spin! Quick! To the bat-comfy chair!

i was sorta right…

i finally managed to excavate enough boxes to get access to my desk today, and get the computer set up, and the wireless, and so forth. i plugged everything in and the computer happily rejoined my wireless network, and that’s the point where i went to go reconfigure the access point away from my old static ip ethernet configuration over to bog-standard PPPoE, and i realized that although my dsl seemed to be live, i had blinky lights and everything, but i’d forgotten to get my username and password from the sales agent on the phone. oops.

after sulking about it for a while, and trying all of the rather a lot of wireless networks i have within range all the way up here (seriously. there are like a dozen “linksysNNN” networks alone) and finding not one individual trusting enough to let me mooch bits from, i decided that… i would try the last username and password i had for sbc PPPoE dsl, and rely on basic ISP account maintenance incompetence to have prevented them from ever having purged that long-cancelled account from the authentication servers, and see if that worked. keep in mind, the last time i had sbc PPPoE dsl was when i lived in hyde park, which was before i lived in printer’s row last time, which puts it at about 4 years ago. it worked great! hooray for basic ISP account maintenance incompetence, the one thing that is universal through all providers everywhere!

Tiger likes the view.

Kiyoshi is cowering in his kitty carrier, being very bitter about everything in general, and me in specific.

if, in the course of reading this blog, you come away with no other, more helpful information, at least you should know this:

i really, really cannot recommend coming down with the evil death flu a day and a half before moving into a new apartment. it is a bad idea. it is no fun. it is going to make tomorrow suck.

(at least i had the good sense to hedge my bets, and leave out my painkillers and some sudafed, while packing up the rest of my bathroom. still: ow.)

:(,
–s.

just a little left yet to box up. boxing things up is, as it turns out, sooo boooring. and thursday is shaping up to be quite busy with non-packing:

• Bank – cash for tipping movers
• Jewel – bottled water for movers at both apts
• Clean fridge out and move everything to new apt
• Drop carload of crap at Brown Elephant
• Get keys back from cleaning service
• Get keys back from laundry service

i think i’ll spend basically the whole morning and probably early afternoon on thursday running those errands. (joy!) i’m getting pretty close to being done packing, though — in the kitchen, i just have my cookbooks, wine glasses, and some coffee mugs and plastic tupperware stuff left to go; in the bedroom, my nerdy t-shirt collection which i forgot about due to its being in the bottommost drawer of my chest of drawers; in the computer room, my printer and speakers that can get packed ahead of time, and the computer itself plus networking gear, which goes in last; and my CDs/DVDs, which i have not yet packed on the basis of “i might want to listen to those while packing!” oh, and a little bit of soap stuff yet as well. and the guy is coming by tomorrow after work to disassemble my elliptical. actually, it kinda does sound like a lot of stuff yet. but mostly what really needs doing is cleaning and hauling stuff away to donate it.

everyone keep your fingers crossed that in the next 6 days, someone will (a) lease the apartment and (b) decide to take me up on keeping the air-conditioners, so i don’t have to try and hock them on craigslist, which will inevitably lead to two people bailing on me before the third shows up alone, thus forcing me to help them haul 3 a/c units down two flights of stairs. — i am somewhat surprised and yet not surprised at all that no one has (evidently) leased the place yet. it’s a great place, location-wise, and frankly if you’re only visiting briefly to see about leasing it, you wouldn’t know (as i didn’t know) about the weirdnesses like the shouting neighbors and the OMG so leaky porch roof and the furnace of doom. i wonder if $landlord raised the rent substantially? i certainly wouldn’t pay a grand for this place. and the poor person that does take the place is going to get smacked with some ugly-ass gas bills next winter, especially if the gas rates keep increasing. oh well. not my problem, i suppose… i just hope someone wants to take those air conditioners off my hands!