May 28, 2014

Noise during exams and other complaints

Filed under: General by Orangemaster @ 11:10 am

Every year at exam time the media reports on how many complaints the LAKS (national action committee for students) receives because it’s always quite a lot. This year, the tally is currently at 108,000, as compared to last year’s 147,000, with one more exam to go today.

Besides thousands of legitimate complaints about exams being too long, too complicated or just badly written, there’s some funny bits mostly related to noise. One girl complained about the djembe lessons above the classroom where she was doing her exam, saying she couldn’t concentrate. Apparently noise from a music class is a classic complaint.

In a similar category, students have complained about screaming kids coming by the exam room window who were doing their cycling test outdoors (yes, children do cycling tests here). And then to really drive home a point about noise, some students had their thoughts drowned out by a Formula 1 racing car that was ripping through town during the making of a commercial.

Then there’s general weirdness like a student with a pimple on his neck that distracted another student, the exam monitor falling asleep and snoring really loud, and good old hay fever from open windows. The most controversial could be the male students complaining about the short skirts and shorts of the female students that distracted them.

(Link: www.volkskrant.nl)

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July 19, 2013

No wonder Dutch students live in containers

Filed under: General by Orangemaster @ 12:10 pm

It’s not too much of a surprise that student rooms in Amsterdam are the most expensive in the Netherlands at 100 euro a week, but maybe a little surprising that Dutch student housing is the second most expensive in Europe after the UK at 139 euro a week. Belgian and German neighbours are lucky, paying respectively 66 euro and 57 euro a week.

The typical ‘I’m looking for a room ad’ shows that people are willing to pay just as much and even more than people renting an entire flat to get a room. I also know a lot of Dutch adults who still have roommates, but then the amount of British television shows where adults share flats taught me as a non-European that it’s perfectly normal in Europe.

A few weeks ago I was part of a Canadian documentary about Amsterdam North’s NDSM dock area and both cameramen were stunned by the container village (see pic) that students have to live in, first thinking it was some sort of elaborate artwork. When I told them it was student housing, we talked about the differences between Amsterdam and Montréal were the entire crew and myself are from.

Amsterdam style:

– I actually know rich Dutch parents who bought a second house so that their daughter could have a room and share the house with friends.
– There used to be parties in Amsterdam where students could win a room in a house, not rent-free of course.
– Some adults stay in their student room years after graduation because there are very tough laws about throwing people out of their homes.

Montréal style:

– Student housing provided by universities is overpriced and usually full of foreigners who don’t know better. They usually wise up really quickly and get a normal flat.
– Renting a flat is easy, so there is no need for students to live in student housing. They live in flats just like normal people.
– The idea of renting a room in a house is weird. People rent a flat or share a flat, but don’t usually go looking for a room with the assumption that renting a flat is very difficult like it is in Amsterdam.

(Link: www.iamexpat.nl, Photo of Multi-storey container housing by Rory Hyde, some rights reserved)

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March 15, 2013

Sexual violence at school is part of student life

Filed under: General by Orangemaster @ 11:27 am

Four out of five teachers at schools witnessed sexual violence in 2012, which according to researchers, is not translating into preventive measures, so students have no idea what is OK and what is not. Some 12% of students have been a victim of sexual violence, which includes unwanted gestures or comments (harassment), being touched, groped, assaulted and raped. If I were a bad student, my boundaries would be what I can get away with without being caught. How can schools make a big deal out of teaching children about sexuality and even homosexuality, but not deal with preventing sexual violence? Or we’ve missed something.

Sexuality research institute Rutgers WPF has said that all secondary schools should draw up rules to make it clear that some forms of sexual behaviour are unacceptable. I am surprised this doesn’t already exist, and if it does, it should make the papers as well.

Forcibly putting one’s tongue into someone else’s mouth is now no longer be classified as rape, according to Dutch courts this week. Imagine, French kissing (in Dutch, ‘tongzoenen’, or ‘tongue kissing’) was considered rape, but all of the above is still taking place in school.

I remember a boy who was taller and more developed than the rest of us in my first year of secondary school had poked me very hard in the ‘breast’. I was wearing overalls and he basically pushed really hard on the button part several times. I waited until he walked off and kicked him in the balls from behind, forcing him to the ground. I was dead scared he would beat me up, but because his friends saw it, I was OK. Not defending myself would have made it worse, à  la Freaks and Geeks.

(Links: Dutch News, www.nrc.nl)

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July 6, 2012

Dutch Olympians to be fined or fired by government

Filed under: Sports by Branko Collin @ 9:59 am

Hurdler Gregory Sedoc is one of five soldiers to get the boot.

Dozens of students taking part in the 2012 Olympics will be fined for failing to meet their study goals, Dutch News reports:

At least a quarter of the Dutch squad for this summer’s Olympics in London may end up with a fine for taking too long to finish their college or university degrees, the Volkskrant reports on Wednesday.

Of the 180-strong team, around 50 are still studying and are likely to end up with a €3,000 fine for taking more than a year too long to graduate.

The bitter irony is that the students still have it good. Having to pay a fine is nothing compared to losing your job, which is what will happen to two judokas, a hurdler, a middle distance runner and a shooter as of December 1. The five athletes are part of a project that puts top Olympians on the Defence department’s payroll. The project is stopped due to extensive budget cuts.

The five athletes were told they were fired by phone, Telegraaf reports

I doubt there are many other countries that treat their heroes this way.

The students will be fined because of a law that states nobody should take more than 5 years to finish a university or polytechnic education. The law itself fits nicely in a long standing tradition of painting students as lazy for political gain. Meanwhile studies confirm that Dutch students often work hard.

Prime Minister Mark Rutte and Vice-Prime Minister Maxime Verhagen used a total of 18 years to finish their degrees.

(Photo by Erik van Leeuwen, some rights reserved)

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May 11, 2012

Fast food chain upset at student delivery service

Filed under: Food & Drink,Online by Orangemaster @ 3:11 pm

Since the 1970s American junk food chain McDonald’s has been big in the Netherlands, so big it was the biggest restaurant chain second year in a row in 2011, and for all we know it still is.

Some smart students from Barendrecht near Rotterdam area have managed to piss off the Golden Arches by starting a delivery service. You can Twitter @MacDeliveryNL or e-mail McDeliveryNL@live.nl and some kid on a scooter will pick up a burger, fries and a shake for you. Nope, no idea what the extra cost is, I imagine it’s cheap. For the expats out there reading this, the Netherlands doesn’t have ‘drive thru’ service the way they do in North America, and we’re used to onlines services that delivery food from over 100 restaurants.

According to Twitter, the students are making headlines in the media this week. The junk food kings are upset at the students using the name ‘Mac’ and ‘Mc’, and I wonder what the rest of this story will be because it seems it just got started. Mac delivery could also get Apple computers upset, who knows. To be continued.

UPDATE: McDonalds still is No. 1 in the Netherlands.

(Link: www.rtl.nl, Photo of burger by huppypie, some rights reserved)

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March 5, 2012

BodaBoda produces pillow seats for bicycle luggage carriers

Filed under: Bicycles by Branko Collin @ 2:50 pm

It certainly surprised one American tourist when he noticed several women giving their male friends a ride on their bicycle’s luggage rack on a sunny afternoon in 2006. Why wasn’t the man doing the work? Lack of courtesy? Emancipation? The reason is much more prosaic, I am afraid. Luggage racks are pretty hard on one’s behind. And the unspoken rule in the Netherlands is that the owner of the bike gets to decide who gets to sit where.

Three Utrecht students are now selling seats for the luggage rack. According to De Pers they noticed bicycles in Kenya kitted out with such seats:

Crossing the border between Kenya and Uganda in a motorised vehicle costs a lot of money. That is why people get off the bus and walk the two miles to the other side. Cyclists saw a gap in the market and started carrying people across the border. They would advertise their services asking “Border? Border?” That is how the bodaboda was born.

Quax [one of the Dutch students] would ride one of those bikes, and being white, people would stare at him, especially the time he offered to give his landlord a lift to the station. “The people who saw us did not believe their own eyes. This should not be. This should be the other way around. A white person should be on the back”, Quax said.

The seats cost between 20 and 27,50 euro, or 35 euro if you want your own design printed on them. You can also buy a complete bodaboda bike for 300 euro (shown above).

The students from Utrecht are happy when they spot the occasional bodaboda rider in their home town. In Kenia in the meantime the bodaboda has really taken off, and more and more often bodaboda riders use motorcycles. The Star publishes articles on boda etiquette (“place your hands on the rider’s hips around the waist”), and a local government has set aside 2.5 million Kenian shillings to train 500 bodaboda riders, also according to The Star.

Just remember, next time you hear Gers Pardoel sing “why don’t you hop on the back of my bike”, he’s not necessarily being a gentleman, unless he owns a bodaboda seat.

Illustration: bodaboda.nl.

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August 3, 2011

The best places to live in the Netherlands

Filed under: General by Branko Collin @ 9:42 am

In a tongue-in-cheek article, daily De Pers figured out the ideal Dutch towns to live in for large groups of people:

For the poor, Vaals (in the Southernmost tip of the country), because it is apparently easy to get social security there. The town wants to crack down on social security tourism though.

For the gays, Hillegom (South of Haarlem), of which the Pink City Guide of Bureau Movisie says it’s the gay friendliest town in the country. The municipality is working on a policy to support eldery gays, amongst others.

For the elderly, Kerkrade (Limburg). The paper quotes a citizen as saying: “Perhaps we can even draw older people from the rest of the country or even from abroad, because growing old in Kerkrade is fun.” It doesn’t say why it is fun.

For muslims, Alblasserdam (near Rotterdam). The town sports the highest percentage of muslims in the country.

For the handicapped, Huizen (East of Amsterdam), which is quick in allotting funds for medical needs.

For the Polish, Venray (Limburg), which realizes it will always need seasonal workers, so why not be nice to them.

For the drug addicted both Amersfoort (near Utrecht) and Utrecht (near Amersfoort). Junkies get free beer in the former town, and free methadone in the latter. (Pretty girls get free beer in Weert, Limburg. From the bar owners, that is.)

For the students, Sittard (Limburg), as it has the cheapest student housing of the country.

And finally, for sailors, the devoutly religious town of Urk (near nowhere in particular) which refuses to charge boat owners money for delivering electricity and water on Sundays, as that would constitute working on a Sabbath.

(Photo: an abandoned looking factory in Huizen)

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February 9, 2011

Flanders fears Dutch invasion of slow students

Filed under: General by Orangemaster @ 2:49 pm

De Telegraaf reports that universities in Flemish-speaking Belgium fear an influx of Dutch students once tuition fees in the Netherlands go up for ‘lazy students’.

State secretary for Education Halbe Zijlstra wants to crank up tuition for these students to about 5,000 euro, while studying in Flanders costs a mere 557 euro a year and is of comparable, if not sometimes better quality.

“Dutch students in Flanders already have a bad reputation: at the University of Antwerp Dutch students are twice as likely as Belgians to drop out and the failure rate at the University of Ghent is also very high.”

Under European law, universities are not allowed to discriminate against students from other Member States, and Flemish Minister of Education Peter Smit is keeping his eye on the border crossing. Sounds a bit much? It apparently happened to French-speaking Belgium (aka Wallonia) with an ‘invasion’ of French students some time ago.

And then using the word ‘lazy’ is something Zijlstra himself uses on telly as of late. He feels that someone who takes 7 years to complete a university degree has issues. Then again, stories like having sick parents, having been in an accident and ‘I chose the wrong study programme’ are often heard as responses.

(I took 5 years to finish my 3-year Bachelor’s in Québec because I did two years part-time (had to work part-time to pay for it) and had to do one year over when I switched universities because an entire year was refused by my new university. Laziness was not an issue! Oh and I graduated cum laude.)

(Links : dutchnews via telegraaf)

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September 1, 2010

Recruiting students for sex line causes a stir

Filed under: Weird by Orangemaster @ 11:19 am

In the Student Handbook 2010-2011 for students in Breda there’s apparently a two-page advert to get students, most probably girls, to work for phone sex lines. While students usually work at the supermarket for about EUR 7,50 or so an hour, talking dirty on the phone pays a cool EUR 24 an hour, which is a lot of money for a student. The advert has a funny title as well: ‘Geld verdienen met lullen’ (‘Earn money with talking’, although ‘lullen’ (infinitive verb) just happens to be the plural of ‘cocks’ as well). The students have to be 18 years of age to be hired.

Why did this make national news? Well, it preys on poor students. However, a job is a job, the company is legit and I don’t really see the problem. I know for a fact that talking dirty as a job for money is hard work because when I was a student, I used to translate such delightful phone messages before all of this was online for good money. Some of what you hear is very difficult and not funny or sexy at all. I can’t even imagine being the one answering to or saying these things on the phone for hours on end. The students deserve that EUR 24 an hour.

(Link: kijkditnou, Photo of Phone booth in Buenos Aires by Javier Volcan, some rights reserved)

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July 23, 2010

German and Dutch students don’t mix in Maastricht

Filed under: General by Orangemaster @ 10:49 am
Maastricht1

At Maastricht University in Maastricht, just a few kilometres away from both Belgium and Germany, Trouw claims the Germans keep to themselves and so do the Dutch. The main reason is that stereotypes prevail: the Dutch like to party a lot and are considered lazy, while the Germans actually want to be studying and are too serious. Those are excellent reasons not to hang out together, although not convient for collaborative school projects. The article says the Germans don’t ‘integrate’ and that’s a loaded word to use, they didn’t ‘immigrate’, they just ‘don’t mix’.

Even though there are foreign students in Enschede, Groningen and Nijmegen, half of them are German, which doesn’t give an international allure to any of the establishments. A student council representative explains that it’s easy to mix with international students (non-German), but much less with Germans. No explanation is given and that’s odd.

And then apparently the Dutch “are annoyed at the level of Dutch the Germans speak, as it is not good enough”. Isn’t that usually a given? That’s cold.

Non-German students in Maastricht came for an international atmosphere and have ended up in the middle of a Dutch-German group, forcing them to try and blend in with both. “Maastricht should not make promises it can’t keep: don’t call yourself international when all you have is Dutch and German students,” said one student to the newspaper.

Anyone from Maastricht, expats, students, Germans have anything to add? Don’t mention the war for no reason or make stolen bicycle jokes in the comments please.

(Link: trouw.nl, Photo: a shopping street in Maastricht)

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