It’s been quite a long time since I last posted a blog. A lot has happened since May and this could easily become a very long post. Rather than write an entire book when I should be studying common dutch verbs, I’ll try to hit the highlights (and lowlights) of the past couple months. For starters, I did sell my house finally in the US and I am now living in my house in the Netherlands. It’s what happened between these two points which is noteworthy.
The sale of my house in the US was incredibly challenging. I had close to 60 showings and several offers, all of which were well below my asking price. It turns out the market in my area was at the beginning of a decline. The combination of high prices, high interest rates, and a general feeling of discomfort with making big purcheses turned the Minneapolis market into a very competitive one…for sellers. I ended up pulling my house off the market for two weeks to remove the carpet and have the wood floors refurbished and then relist it as freshly remodeled. That also meant pushing back my departure for the Netherlands by a month, something I was not very excited about. Thankfully the sellers in the Netherlands were willing to work with me to adjust the closing date. Once the house was back on the market, I did get an offer of a reasonable amount, but the potential buyers were very slow to respond to messages and quite difficult to work with. We were able to come to an agreement, but even then there were multiple times when I thought for sure the sale would fall apart, and that includes some last-minute drama while I was on the plane on the way to the Netherlands (I left a few hours before the closing as sellers no longer attend closings and I had nowhere to go with my cats and suitcases anyway.) In fact, we had high drama after the papers were signed when the closer failed to send the proceeds to me. For 24 hours! I suspect some individuals involved may have been reported to the state commissioner’s office. I am eternally grateful to my banker at Bell Bank who quickly organized the transfer of my funds to the closer in the Netherlands. The money just barely made it in time, and it was a massive relief when the closer here emailed me to confirm receipt. I cannot imagine how I would have reacted had the money not arrived in time due to the incompetence of the closer in the US. I really do hope that person ends up finding a new occupation due to this event. Perhaps toilet cleaning for their company would be a suitable occupation?
The closing in the Netherlands went perfectly. The sellers were here to walk my makelaar (realtor) and myself through the house. They explained some important things like how trash works here (much more complicated than the US.) They sent me an email full of all sorts of important details for utilities. Just super nice people. You’d think once the papers were signed that all the drama would be over right? Nope. I’m not that lucky. My mom came with to help me bring the cats over and get settled. I left the cats in the house with my mom while I signed the documents. When I arrived home, my mom was sobbing. The cats had somehow disappeared. The best she could figure was they somehow climbed out the bathroom window. While I thought that unlikely because the window is small and that’s not really like my cats, there really wasn’t anywhere in the house for them to hide. The last my mom had seen them was when they were climbing on the kitchen cabinets. We searched the house multiple times calling out for them. Then I searched outside up and down the streets. In the process I met quite a lot of the neighbors and the neighbor kids all helped search for the cats. I had arrived with a car load of Ikea furniture and had to go back to Ghent to retrieve the suitcases. I hated to go without finding the cats, but I really had no choice. We needed the suitcases! It was a very stressful drive to Ghent and back constantly watching for a message saying the cats had shown up, but sadly there was still no sign when I returned a couple hours later from Ghent. Finally, my mom called me back inside from my outdoor search to say she thought she had heard a faint meow in the kitchen. I decided to climb up on the cabinets to see what the cats might have saw when they were last seen. That is when I discovered the gap at the top beside the oven. There is a false panel there, and down at the bottom, were two beady little cat eyes shining back at me. Ludwig was found! But how to get him out? After some digging through boxes, I located a screwdriver and proceeded to remove the panel enough to shift it out of the way and retrieve Ludwig. However, Johann was nowhere to be found. The two brothers usually stick together, so I figured it was likely Johann was somewhere in the house. The question then was whether he was terrified and silent lurking under the cupboards, or dead. I went to bed that night with one cat, and quite distressed.
Somewhere around 3am I woke up to a cat sitting on my chest. Ludwig has a collar, but Johann lost his quite some time ago. In the dark I could tell that the cat didn’t have a collar. I turned the light on to discover my missing cat sitting happily on my chest purring in my face with his nasty cat breath! “Johann, where the hell have you been? You had me worried sick!” It turns out he had decided under the kitchen cabinets was an ideal place to hide during all the chaos. How he fit under there, I don’t know. There’s not much space. I grabbed a heavy box of books and placed it over the hole on top to block their access until a more permanent solution can be found. Then I went to the pet store and bought them a giant new cat tower with hidey holes.
Thankfully that was the last of the big drama. Since then I’ve been gradually settling in, setting up utilities, and painting over the less than ideal red and green walls in the main level, and of course assembling a lot of Ikea furniture, the worst of which was my bed. If you think it’s a pain to set up utilities in the US, try doing it in a foreign country where you don’t have a great command of the language, and you have to have a Dutch bank account to pay for them. Of course you can’t get most Dutch bank accounts without a Dutch social security number, and you can’t get one of those until they start processing your Visa. But, they can’t start processing your Visa until you live here and have a Dutch address. See where this is going? I’m lucky to have gotten connected with a Facebook group specifically for my Visa type where I learned there are two banks that will give you an account before you have the Dutch social security number. Both took some time to approve my account, and technically both are also still waiting on that number, but I was finally able to get the needed bank account. I got declined multiple times for a cell plan and finally got one with Simpel, a carrier recommended by my makelaar. Home internet was another story. I got approved quickly and the router arrived the next day, but the service didn’t work. With all the other priorities, it wasn’t until a week later that I finally got a tech in who quickly informed me that I had plugged the router into the wrong port. Of course the right port was one underneath with no label that I couldn’t see. These are the challenges of settling into a new country. I’m just really glad most everyone here speaks at least some English until I can improve my Dutch. The lady working the paint counter at the local home improvement store even speaks German. I learned this after trying to order paint in Dutch, and then responding unintentionally in german when I didn’t understand a word she said in reply. By the time I got my paint we had conversed in three languages.
Yesterday I received my final big Ikea shipment with the couch and bookcase, two items I have been eagerly waiting for. The boxes of books are the last thing really to unpack and made the main level look really chaotic, along with all the piles of bubble wrap and empty boxes. My lovely neighbor gave me several bags for plastic recycling which took care of the piles of bubble wrap, and the bookcase took care of all those boxes of books. I got to the end of unpacking books and realized I was missing one box containing my prized Asterix and Obelix collection, and most of the Bikeline bike route map books. I searched high and low all over both levels of the house and even out in the work shed. I could not find that box anywhere and I couldn’t imagine I would have left it behind. Finally I searched the kitchen, and that is when I found the box, atop the kitchen cabinets smiling down on me while performing its critical task of keeping the cats from under the kitchen cabinets. The box is still there. I haven’t worked out a permanent solution to keep the cats out. (Zoom in on the photo to see what was on top of the box….)
It’s been quite a crazy couple of months, but I don’t regret one bit of it. I did not go into this move with any preconceptions about what it would be like to live here, perhaps in part because I’ve spent so little time in the Netherlands. I expected it to be at least a little similar to Germany. A lot of the shops are the same, except actually open on Sundays, and the people are much friendlier than I expected. The pace of life is slower, and after 20 years in a city, I’m ready for that. People spend a lot more time outdoors here. I’m no longer the only bike parked at the store, the home improvement store included. I can get to two grocery stores and the home improvement store entirely on separated bike path. The same goes for the beach at Cadzand-Bad which has a lovely scenic bike path all along the ocean up to Breskens (and probably beyond that as well.) The weather has been mainly very pleasant in the 70’s, aside from a few days this week in the 80’s. It’s always humid, and always windy, but I expected that. This weekend I’ll take a trip to Dronten to pick up a used velomobile so I can get out and explore a lot more here. It’s a lovely place to live, and while I don’t expect everything to always go smoothly, I’m happy to be here and feel very fortunate to have this opportunity.
