January 25, 2009

Possible world record for newborn in Utrecht

Filed under: Food & Drink,General by Orangemaster @ 12:55 pm
Beschuit met muisjes

On Saturday, 12 January at 10:53 am residents of the neighbourhood Tuinwijk in Utrecht celebrated the birth of Helena Dijkhuizen, the 300,000 resident of the city. The city wanted to make a big deal and threw her parents the biggest maternity party (‘kraamfeest’ in Dutch) ever. Everyone was invited and the neighbourhood offered the traditional coffee and beschuit (Dutch-type rusk) with special red and white sprinkles (‘muisjes’). ‘Beschuit met muisjes’ is what people traditionally eat when a child is born. They have blue sprinkles for boys and pink for girls, so the red was to make a point, I imagine. When a Royal child is born, they serve orange and white sprinkles, orange representing Dutch royalty.

The city wants to get its party in the Guinness Book of World Records and so we don’t know at this time if that is the case.

(Link: blikopnieuws.nl, Photo: helmaschreuders.web-log.nl)

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January 24, 2009

Less Brits in Amsterdam, but do they feel welcome?

Filed under: General by Orangemaster @ 1:27 pm
Pound

According to figures of the ATCB (Amsterdam Toerisme en Congres Bureau) featured in the latest paper copy of Amsterdams Stadsblad, less Brits are coming to Amsterdam to the tune of 6% less in 2008. The main culprit is the dropping pound, which is almost equal to the euro (1 GBP today is worth EUR 1.046 as I write this – hey guys, wanna finally have the euro?). Let’s face it, it’s time to visit London now… and I actually wanted to go to Dublin, but hey.

Many cafes in downtown Amsterdam which specifically cater to a UK-oriented audience have seen their clientele shrink. The article mentions that the usual Brits and Irish who frequent such places are mostly expats rather than tourists. Apparently, the talk of the pub is that the Dutch media negatively portrays Brits (and yes, I’m assuming the Irish, Scots and Welsh, too, though I could be wrong) as ‘loud, annoying drunks’. Amsterdam Mayor Job Cohen even said on television in England that this group of Brits were not welcome. Now, picture the hard-working, decent expats at the pub with their pints rightly complaining that everyone is being depicted as idiots, like the media tends to do with ethnic minorities. Imagine the average Dutch person believing the newspaper they pay money to have delivered to their house and you have an image problem.

Why would any British tourist (or British pound user) want to come if they don’t feel welcome? What part of hospitality is the part where you insult a badly behaving minority to piss off the majority you’re trying to woo to your nation’s capital?

UPDATE: BBC four films in Amsterdam and gets Job Cohen’s opinion on camera.
Amsterdam plans ‘cannabis clean up’.

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January 20, 2009

Squatters driven out by thugs, police puts them back in

Filed under: Architecture,General by Branko Collin @ 3:29 pm

Last Sunday a group of thugs who were sharing a building complex in the Kinkerstraat in Amsterdam with a group of squatters drove out the latter with the use of force, wounding three of the squatters. At the end of the fight, the police installed the squatters back in the building, and arrested 14 members of both groups. One of the squatters was taken to a hospital with a double fractured jaw.

The squatters told Parool (Dutch) that the thugs spoke Russian with each other and partly consisted of builders that were staying nearby. Quote thinks (Dutch) that the owner of the Vinkzicht buildings, Cornelis Komen, may have paid the thugs to drive off the squatters. Komen denies the allegations.

The buildings have had no designated use since 1972 until Komen bought the six buildings in 1999 for 1.6 million euro each, with the plan to wreck them and build a hotel in their stead. That plan came under heavy fire from the neighbourhood, which managed to convince city hall to declare the gables monuments.

The top floors of the buildings are rented out in so-called anti-squat constructions where a tenant gets a short-term lease typically at a low price. Sometimes, you can score magnificently large housing this way for a price way below the going rate of the average shoebox an Amsterdam resident calls their castle, though I hear that with the housing shortage in the city even the anti-squat rates have gone up.

Squatting is mainly legal in the Netherlands (albeit often frowned upon) because of a constitutional right to domestic peace. The police may not invade your home, even if your means to acquire the home may have been less than legal. The house owner must then go to court and prove they have a pressing need with their property to get the squatters evicted. Neighbours tend to prefer squatters over slowly decaying houses.

It’s been a while since I’ve heard of thugs being used to evict people. The university grapevine in Nijmegen had stories of students being evicted this way, but I cannot remember a single proven one.

This is one of those stories that spawns two new questions for every answer you find, so I’d rather field any actual questions our readers have.

Totally off-topic: many congratulations to Orangemaster for getting her Dutch driver’s license! Wootalicious!

Link: Radio Netherlands, the only medium I could find so far that thinks the fight was between two groups of squatters.

(Photo of the Kinkerstraat by Wikimedia user Ilonamay, some rights reserved)

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January 19, 2009

Screening process for Amsterdam prostitutes

Filed under: General by Orangemaster @ 5:28 pm
Moulin Rouge

In an attempt to reduce the number of women forced into prostitution, unexperienced working girls in Amsterdam’s red light district are to be interviewed and must answer a bunch of questions about why they want to get into the ‘oldest profession in the world’. Bordello owners will have to inquire about identity, age and nationality of the girl, her family, any criminal record, education and language skills. The first three you can get from a passport, unless it’s fake. It sounds like questions immigration usually asks even though they have 20 copies of the info already.

The girls will also have to divulge how they get to work (bicycle vs. some big guy in a BMW who tells me to shut up all the time?) and demonstrate ‘some knowledge’ of the Dutch language and of Amsterdam. Speaking Dutch, fine, but I bet they do have to speak a lot of English with those shy Japanese businessmen. Knowledge of Amsterdam? Like what, where you can get food at 2 am? The local government can barely get taxi drivers to show off their knowledge of Amsterdam.

According to the article, many employers already take the time to check out their future employees, but not all of them. The idea is to get everyone to weed out forced prostitution. If I remember correctly, I once read that 70% of all prostitutes in Amsterdam were foreigners, which I imagine makes the city ripe for exploiting women. But I don’t know, and hope this is all for the better. Oh, and only if this screening works will it be applied to other places in Amsterdam were prostitutes work.

(Link: parool.nl)

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January 16, 2009

Proud of what exactly?

Filed under: General,Literature by Orangemaster @ 1:59 pm
Proud

Let’s start on the positive side: Job Cohen, the laidback mayor of Amsterdam on the cover, is popular in a good way, here and abroad. But I’m shaking my head at this new magazine’s cover. I collected some opinions to make sure I wasn’t reading too much into it.

Robin Pascoe over at Dutchnews wonders if anyone at city council realises that ‘proud’ means ‘gay’, and that this magazine with Cohen looking like a dirty old man in a rain coat is not exactly the way to sell Amsterdam as a hot business location. I totally agree, and to make sure we weren’t both reading too much into it, I asked gay Amsterdam politician Laurent Chambon what he thought. He said that it means gay to him straight off, while his partner peeking over his shoulder simply said “really scary”. I also asked Dutch journalist Jeroen Mirck, and he didn’t see the problem at all, except for the dirty old man disposition, of course. Let’s remember that this is an English-language magazine aimed at foreigners, but made by Dutch people.

Besides the gay thing (the Mayor is hetero by the way) and the flasher styling, there’s another questionable layer of meaning to using the word ‘proud’ as of late. It denotes the serious rise in populism plaguing the country. Nowadays, when the Dutch media talks about being proud of being Dutch for example, it automatically excludes any kind of foreigner. There’s even a new populist if not racist political party that has the word “trots” (proud) in their name.

I just don’t get the whole idea of the name. When you’re proud, you shouldn’t have to push it, just like when you’re cool.

(Tip: Dutchnews.nl)

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First digital Citizen’s Initiative — citizens say no to fun

Filed under: General by Branko Collin @ 9:43 am

“You stupid woman, digital signatures don’t count,” we said less than a year ago, but a new law has changed that rule. If you want to tell parliament to put certain topics on the agenda, digital signatures are good enough to support your Citizen’s Initiative. Last year for instance, a group of women wanted parliament to debate on binge drinking youth. That bid failed, because the autographs had been digitally collected. The law has now been changed, and as of 1 January 2009 digital signatures do count.

So, with this great democratic leap forward, what do citizens elect to do with their new found power and responsibility? Why, declare their support for the War on Fun of course! The first digital Citizen’s Initiative is here, and it’s about fireworks. The citizens, led by Green Party city council member and sour puss David Rietveld, want it outlawed. To be precise, they demand that only professionals are allowed to light fireworks on New Year’s Eve, an activity often shared between dads and their sons.

As is typical for this time, something that is clearly wrong and illegal is taken and glued to something that is fun, yet irritating to some. In this case, the New Year’s celebrations are a signal to a very few troublemakers to start burning cars and houses. And so the David Rietvelds of this world figure that it is clearly the fireworks that are at fault, not the troublemakers—who in my opionion won’t be hindered by fireworks-banning legislation in the first place, and if they did would just find other ways to be dorks.

Photo by Mark Crossfield, some rights reserved.

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January 14, 2009

Dutch-powered Frogsmoke blog calls it quits

Filed under: General by Orangemaster @ 1:30 pm
Frogsmoke

After two and half years of posting about anything from old French adverts to naked pictures of Carla Bruni and tons of stuff in between, Dutchman Romke Soldaat of English-language blog Frogsmoke has decided to call it a day. Having lived abroad for “a quarter of his existence”, Romke blogged about some of the best, funny, sad and scandalous things going on in France, with his laidback sense of humour.

According to his last post, Romke plans to retire in the middle of a French forest with the nearest neighbour at a kilometre down the road. He says he could come back, but he’s not making any promises.

24oranges wishes him and his entourage good luck in the future!

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Dutch to profit from German bailout plan

Filed under: General by Branko Collin @ 11:43 am

Angela Merkel’s 50 billion euro plan for propping up the German economy might very well benefit the Netherlands, Z24 analyst Mathijs Bouman argues. The German Prime Minister’s plan consists mainly of Keynesian measures that should let money trickle up: tax cuts and insurance premiums cuts and inceased child support are all part of it. There will also be a car wrecking premium of 2,500 euro for cars older than 9 years which is supposed to help the famous German car industry, but which also sounds like a recipe for car theft to me. Still, I guess it is a lot better than giving the money straight to the people who got us into this mess, as some countries do.

According to Bouman, similar measures would be less useful for the Netherlands, since we are a trading country and much of the money our government would pump into the economy would simply flow across the border. However, Germans spend much of their money domestically, but Bouman believes that still plenty of it will end up abroad. And with 25% of all Dutch trade conducted with its large neighbour Germany, Bouman figures that plenty of the German bailout cash will end up here.

Bouman quotes economist Wim Suyker of the Centraal Planbureau (CPB) who estimates that a 50 billion euro plan in Germany leads to a growth of 0.6% of the Dutch economy.

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January 13, 2009

Ice skates totally sold out

Filed under: General,Sports by Orangemaster @ 4:30 pm
Skates

It was bound to happen. People have been frantically trying to score new or second-hand skates for days, but alas, ice skates are totally sold out in the Netherlands, according to skate manufacturer Viking in Almere. On Monday Viking said it sold 75,000 pairs of skates, almost selling everything it had in stock.

The last two weeks were extremely busy days at Viking. Even on Monday, when the thaw set it, they were still selling skates. The buzz is that sometime around Thursday it is going to freeze again and we can all go out skating. I do hope so because I had a lot of fun skating on the canal. The picture above depicts my *ahem* custom-made French Canadian figure skates, which cost a bundle back when I was training at 5:30 am in the morning three times a week. Yes, I fell once already, thank you. However, if you want to buy Viking skates, you’ll have to wait until summer when they will make more.

Even finding a place to get my skates sharpened was not easy, but thanks to Twitter, I found a bike shop down the street that sharpens skates.

In the meantime, there’s always that huge Indoor skating rink they opened in Enschede.

(Link: z24.nl, Photo: Jeroen)

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January 11, 2009

Thaw to set in

Filed under: General,Sports by Branko Collin @ 2:29 pm

No Elfstedentocht for now. National weather institute KNMI predicts that Monday a period of thaw will set in, with wind coming from the South and from the South West. That also means that the country will not have had an official cold wave, which in the Netherlands is defined as at least five consecutive days of frost of which three dip below -10 degrees.

Somebody who won’t be skating for a while anyway is Eimer van Middelkoop: the defense minister broke his wrist during a 30 kilometer skating tour between Bleiswijk and Zevenhuizen, according to Nu.nl (Dutch).

Skating madness held the country in its grip the past weeks, but with the temperature dipping the lowest in the South, the madness spilled over to Belgium. The spokesperson for Vereniging De Friesche Elf Steden, the organizer of the Elfstedentocht, told BN/De Stem (Dutch) that most foreign journalistic attention stems from our Southern neighbours. One fanatic Belgian skater and past participant in the Elfstedentocht, Henri Jaecques, argues in Het Nieuwsblad (Dutch) that Flanders should have its own mythical skate race. “From Sluis to Ieper, 200 kilometer, and perfectly skateable.” The first part of that trajectory, a 16 kilometer strip from Sluis to Brugge, was declared officially open to skaters this weekend, according to De Telegraaf (Dutch).

Photo top: a chair in IJburg, Amsterdam awaiting the next novice skater or an ever grimmer fate.

Photo bottom: a frozen Noorderamsterkanaal.

Link: Weer.nl (Dutch).

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