We're in the middle of what can only be described as a morass of Dutch religious holidays, the most recent of which was "Hemelvaartdag", or Ascension Day. We spent the day off making bibimbop and moving our golf clubs from the basement to the attic.
In reality, we could have used the carpenter version of Jesus over the weekend, since we started working in earnest on our home improvement list for the apartment.
You know that image you have in your head of moving to the Netherlands and sitting around in cafes and riding your bike everywhere and going to Prague for the weekend and drinking cheap but delicious wine and eating fancy cheese? Try massaging "installing clothing rods in the closet" into that list.
As much as I would like to expound on our two trips to the neighborhood "Doe Het Zelf" store, our three scary Dutch conversations with DHZ men about clothing-rod hardware, and the resulting bonanza of spiffing up the closets, I offer instead a holiday-appropriate distillation of our weekend adventures:
Hell
- Spending an entire afternoon trying to decipher Dutch telephone wiring in general, and in particular, the circuitous path of our only functional phone line from the basement to the third story of the house.
- Going on our fifth shopping trip in two days to buy more power strips.
- Hearing myself utter the words: "You know, it's too bad we can't just go to Home Depot...".
- Not directly related to home improvement, but hellish enough to make the list: after finally finding a microwave and buying microwave popcorn at the grocery store, realizing that we bought ZOET (sweet) popcorn, not ZOUT (salty) popcorn. Whose idea was it to tell the Dutch about kettle corn?
- Putting the finishing touches on our computer closet (a lovely, out-of-the-way spot for printers, routers, and our server), only to plug in our printer and discover that it is not, in fact, compatible with 220-volt electricity.
Heaven
- Figuring out how to use anchors in plaster walls that turn to dust as soon as one starts probing them. (On second thought, maybe that's more like purgatory.)
- Buying an espresso machine and then making it all the way home with it bungee-corded to the back of my bike.
- Having our downstairs neighbor come home while John was WD-40-ing our lock and cleaning the front of the door, causing her to exclaim that he must be a "goede huisman" — a.k.a. a good house-husband!
- Finding the hidden phone line after hours of searching, then successfully installing — hallelujah! — high-speed internet.
