Driving down the Dutch highway I have seen overpasses for deers and I have heard of frog overpasses and tunnels, but this is a first for me too: the very first beaver tunnel in the country.
Yes, as of today, the wee village of Panheel (189 villagers) in Limburg has opened a 30-metre-long tube, 70 centimetres in diameter so that beavers don’t wobble down a busy street and get turned into road pizza. Not only have many beavers died, but they damage cars when then do because they are bigger and bulkier than they look.
The people and animal lovers involved believe that other small woodland creatures will use this tunnel as well. It cost 40,000 euro and was paid with contributions as well as tax money.
I have only respect for beavers, and OK, this one is darn cute. I spent part of my youth at summer camp tearing down their dams only to see them fully rebuilt days later. It was either portaging (carrying a canoe over your head because of lack of water or obstacles), with two 9-year-old girls lifting an aluminium canoe of 45 kg over their heads with backpacks for 2 kilometers through the woods being eaten by mosquitoes or tearing down a beaver dam that grows back like weeds and canoe on the water like normal kids.
The chair on the right is ‘Cinderella’s Chair’, a follow up of designer Anna Ter Haar’s 2007 graduation project ‘Buitenbeentje’ (meaning ‘odd man out’, but literally translated ‘outside leg’).
“Glass is a malleable material when heated, so the glass was blown onto the chair, which provides every chair with its own unique prosthesis.”
The chair on the left is from the original ‘Buitenbeentje’ project. Anna Ter Haar also designs other types of chairs, shoes, movies and more.
On 8 March, Sotheby’s auction house in Amsterdam auctioned off Dutch art belonging to cigarette makers BAT (British American Tobacco) to the tune of a record 13.6 million euro, the highest total for an art auction in the Netherlands. All but four of the 161 lots offered in Amsterdam found buyers.
Back in October 2008 we posted about a major art sale due to cigarette factory closing in Zevenaar, which is where some of these works used to hang, like Karel Appel’s ‘Tête Tragique’ (shown here), a 1961 oil on canvas, which sold for close to 493,000 euro.
I saw this on Dutch commercial television, which more often than not features American series and subtitled or dubbed American advertising ‘like you never left the US’.
Translation:
Guy: Hey, you owe me money.
Girl: …
Guy: For the burger.
Voice-over: So very Dutch! Our new (product name), etc.
Guy: Yep, right amount.
Voice-over: It can’t get any more Dutch.
The adjective ‘Hollands’ meaning Dutch has this reference to the olden days when the Netherlands was just North Holland and South Holland. It can be used in a neutral manner, derogatory or positive manner, depending on the context. In this case it denotes comfort food (brown bread and cheese being a classic here), which is positive.
The negative part remains the stereotype that the Dutch are cheap, which is a gross generalisation, but sometimes where there’s smoke, there’s fire. The Dutch are traditionally thrifty and save a lot of money and don’t run rampant with credit cards, not so much cheap. Oh, and all the Dutch television shows with people about to lose their homes due to overspending kill this stereotype, with the Dutch calling their situation ‘an American one’.
‘Going Dutch’ means paying your own way in English, which in American dating land is surely not a given. And of course, anyone who only wants to pay half the bill at a fast food chain while on a date could easily be labelled poor, not cheap.
Dutch house DJ and producer Fedde Le Grand has his own iPhone application, iFedde, available in the app store.
“Anything you can do at Fedde’s website, you can do with the app. You can upload and share pictures, chat with friends, find out what Fedde’s up to and send him direct messages.”
I can see why the community aspect of this application is very important. Now I want to see other artists come up with apps and what will happen when 100 of your favourite artists want you to use their specific app!
Noise pollution, Dutch style: some 16.5 million of us are packed into a small country and the people living in the four big cities known in Dutch as the ‘Randstad’ (Amsterdam, Rotterdam, Utrecht and The Hague) often live in old houses that have very little isolation. I have friends who refuse to live anywhere with upstairs neighbours, and in my case here in Amsterdam I can hear the neighbours’ dog yelping at passers-by. When I lived in Nijmegen, the old man downstairs had the telly on really loud. The day that stopped, we found out he had passed away.
We can’t just move to the country: for most jobs you need to leave within 10 km of your work because beyond that employers would have to pay for your travel costs and therefore will not hire you. Coming by car means major traffic jams, and so we live in town and often bike to work. You can’t rent anything in the country, you have to buy, which many people can’t do. Oh, and in the country, they have bored youth with noisy, high-pitched scooters driving around, which has become a major noise pollution issue.
So tape your neighbours in the hopes of getting them evicted is a new strategy in the country’s second biggest city, Rotterdam. Granted, many people will pipe down if you ask them nicely, but many people, and I am sorry to say, usually with children, have no idea what kind of anti-social racket they are making.
“Since February, Rotterdam is offering possible victims of ‘noise pollution’ a noise-o-meter to monitor the nuisance. The noise-o-meter is part of a campaign to counter ‘neighbourhood terror’. According to a city survey last year, some 49,000 people in the Netherlands’ second major city say they regularly suffer serious nuisance from neighbours. The noise-o-meter offers ‘an objective measure of the sound, which gives us a stronger legal case in case of an eviction request,’ said city executive Hamit Karakus about the new weapon.”
Again this year the Netherlands and Finland are going to trade euro coins. In 2009 both countries were the first countries in Europe to do so, saving costs and probably giving the environment a break, too. Instead of running out of 5 euro cent coins and making more, trading is a much better option.
The Finnish need 2 euro cent (French one shown here) and the Dutch need 5 euro cent coins (Dutch one show here). The 1 euro cent is here is Belgian. Of all the euro cents I have had, the Finnish ones are quite rare and I was told that they made less of them, as compared to other countries.
What I do find odd is that I was told that big stores in Finland round off prices to the nearest 0.05 cent, which would mean that like the Netherlands, they would need more 5 euro cents. If they need 2 euro cents, this means they don’t round off prices nearly as much as we do here or enjoy giving out lots of 2 euro cents to their customers.
Prices in big stores are rounded off to the nearest 0.05 as they were when we still had the guilder and did not have 2 euro cent and 1 euro cent coins. And rounding off saves time, money and space in cash registers. Paying with 2 and 1 cent coins is frowned upon in the Netherlands (never mind paying with anything more than a 50 euro bill – tourists often get the third degree with their 100 and 200 euro bills), while doing so in neighbouring Germany or Belgium is common. Both Germany and Belgium had equivalent coins back in the day.
Apparently 2 euro coins are also rare in Finland, while the Netherland has truckloads of them. It’s interesting to see how different countries deal with the same currency. The Dutch plan to swap 3 million 2 euro coins for 30 million 5 euro cents.
I’ve just realised that I had a big coffee can full of 5, 2 and 1 cent coins lying around.
In 2009 the Netherlands and Japan celebrated their 400th anniversary of trade relations. The story goes that back in 1609 shogun Tokugawa Iesayu issued an official trade permit to the Netherlands. Although the Portugese were the first Westerners to show up in Japan back in the mid 16th century, they were more preoccupied with pushing religion than doing business and eventually left. They did leave words like ‘tempura’ behind that most people still think is Japanese.
(I can’t believe the introduction to Japan course I had to take to finish my university studies because it fit my schedule is actually of some use!)
Another huge link between the two countries is the Tokugawa shogunate’s desire to learn about all things Western, all while practicising a policy of isolation of Japan from the world. And so Japan developed ‘rangaku’ (’Dutch Learning’, also meaning ‘Western learning’), with the Dutch as a unique source of information about medicine and science in general. History notes that the Japanese were pretty freaked out at seeing men with red hair for the first time.
And knowing that Japan is not only up to speed with the Western world, but can kick its backside any time it wants, business is still a major common point and apparently worthy of a new online magazine.
Download the first issue of the The Netherlands-Japan Review as a PDF for free. Articles are in Dutch and English.
(Link: breitbart.com. Illustration by 17th century artist Yoshida Hambei)
Filed under: Animals, Nature by Orangemaster @ 9:42 am
The Dutch bird protection society (Vogelbescherming) has webcams on the birds of eight nests so people can watch the birds from a safe distance and maybe catch a glimpse of eggs hatching.
“Among the birds being monitored are various owls and birds of prey, a stork and a coal tit. It is the fourth year in a row that the bird society has installed webcams close to nests.”
Who said trying to quit smoking couldn’t be fun? On 1 March, Lianne Sleebos of the Delft University of Technology will be launching My Stop Buddy, an app to help people stop smoking. For a mere 2,99 euro, you can choose an English or Dutch app that will support you for 21 days. Fill in a personal profile and you will get activity suggestions to help you not reach for a ‘cancer stick’, lots of jokes about health and information on how much money you saved by not smoking. You can also push buttons according to you mood and you’ll be told why you’re going for a smoke according to it. It sounds like a nagging grandmother so far, but hey, I haven’t seen it yet and I do hope it works. I am curious about the English version, translations and all.
And although 2,99 euro is much cheaper than a pack of cigarettes, the iPhone isn’t, but OK you can get one for free with a certain telecom provider here in the Netherlands.
