It occurred to me today that, in her short young life, Eloïse has travelled by plane, train, boat, car and bicycle. Not bad for a girl who has yet to celebrate her fourth month on Earth.
The Belastingdienst (the Dutch inland revenue authority) frightened me today by sending me one of their dreaded blue envelopes. It turned out to be Wiesje’s SoFi-nummer (social security number or social fiscal number, as it’s called here). I didn’t think that one would be automatically allocated to her, since she wasn’t born here, but for some reason, enrolling her on the population register was enough to trigger the process. I’m not complaining, of course, as it saves me a trip to their offices to pick one up for her.
I also received a Dutch credit card today, so I can now rack up expenses in Euros and not have to resort to my American plastic, with its crappy exchange rate. On the other hand, all of the money in my Dutch bank account comes from a wire transfer from one of my American accounts, so I lose either way, I suppose. Almost all of our money is still in good old devalued greenbacks.
Another thing that arrived today was the pass-card for my Greenwheels car-sharing subscription. Greenwheels is a great idea. All over the city — all over the country, in fact — Greenwheels has cars parked across each of the various neighbourhoods. If you find you need a car, you simply reserve one either on the Net or via the telephone reservation system. You tell them from which location you want to pick it up (usually the closest pick-up spot to your house), then you use your pass-card to get into the car and drive it until your rental period expires. If you find you need the car for longer than originally planned, you simply call while on the road and extend the rental period (so long as no-one else has reserved the car immediately after your original slot).
Obviously, this system only works well if you just need a car for a few hours and that’s all it’s intended for, really: the running of awkward errands. You also have to return the car to its original spot, since each car only has a parking permit for the neighbourhood in which it is registered.
You can fill the tank at any petrol station in The Netherlands, using the pass-card. You don’t actually pay at this stage, though. Instead, you run your card through a special machine in the petrol station, tell it the number of kilometres that the car has driven, and then you are invoiced later for the number of kilometres you have driven.
Apart from that, the only fee is a monthly subscription fee, but that can be as low as €5, depending on the package you choose.
I think this is a great idea. Given that Greenwheels has been smart enough to position some of its cars outside all of the major train stations in this country, it’s extremely easy to go from one end of the country to the other and find a car waiting for you right outside the station. You can even take the car abroad.
I’m not ruling out owning our own car later on, but this will be a great solution for now, as we’re bound to want to buy a television, baby furniture, a temporary table or two from IKEA, etc. In fact, we already need all of those things.
Sarah bought Wiesje a few fairy-tale books today from the second-hand baby shop in our street. I’m looking forward to reading those to her.
On the way back from lunch, we were lucky enough to be able to pick up a new charging base for our Sonicare electric toothbrushes. The bases we brought from the US use the wrong voltage, but it just so happened that the Witte Tanden Winkel in the Runstraat had some old bases lying around for our model of toothbrush, which is an old one. €10 is all it cost to be able to use our brushes again.
On a similar note, we received a new adaptor for Sarah’s breast-pump in the post today. Again, the US adaptor is useless here, but the complicating factor here is that Sarah’s model of breast-pump hasn’t yet been released onto the Dutch market. Nevertheless, Medela had an advance model at their office, and they were kind enough to sell us the adapter from it. Sarah hasn’t even started pumping yet, but she’ll need to when her Dutch course starts in a couple of weeks. I’m going to have to be left alone with Wiesje for a few hours each week, so I’m going to need to be able to feed her. Lacking the correct biological apparatus, it’s going to have to be a bottle full of pumped milk.
And so ended another fun-packed day in the life of the world’s most exciting family. And you thought that the Osbournes were wild?