Number of days in Amsterdam – 50
Number of days without a bike theft – 46
Days since it last rained – 0
Days since I rode in a car – 45 0
It wasn’t as if I made a conscious effort to avoid cars, they’re just not necessary here. For the most part, so are trams. You can literally bike anywhere if you have enough time, and most anything remotely near is faster to get to by bike than by car or tram.
Today, though, we had to make a longer trip for a five-minute visit. Today, we became official, and picked up our resident’s ID.
It was actually pretty anticlimactic. We’d already jumped through a ton of hoops both in the states and here, assembling a wide variety of documents back home and even paying a visit to the Dutch Embassy here in Chicago. Here, we’d had our photo taken, visited two different government offices, had visas placed in our passports, and got a letter saying things were processing and again when it was done (the Dutch do seem to love bureaucracy), and so by the time we took the taxi to the offices to pick everything up, we just walked in, showed our passports, and walked out again with our new ID. And we’re here and we’re set (for 10 months or so, anyway, when we start the renewal process…).
And then life went on. When you have an ID in your pocket that says you are an expat resident of the Netherlands, the only thing that changes is that you don’t need to carry your passport everywhere.
Well that, plus the fact that you can stay longer than 90 days.
But getting back to the subject of cars, there are only something like 100,000 cars in this city of 700,000 people, because you don’t need them, they’re a slow method of transportation, and they’re very expensive to keep and park.
Especially parking. This news story just pointed out that Amsterdam is the fourth most expensive city in the world to park a car, at a cost of nearly €40 just to park a car. In fact, it’s a commonly made statement here (that I have not verified) that it’s less expensive to park a boat – even a houseboat – than a car in the ‘Dam.
Aside from this being our first day with official ID, this was also our first day of baby class.
Our baby class is an expat-oriented one, a class of pregnant couples from outside of the Netherlands looking for info on the medical system here, as well as all the general birthing info that comes from a class. This week, we mainly introduced ourselves (and the class has couples from Sweden, Finland, the States, Australia, Italy, and places I’m sure I’m forgetting) and then talked about our expectations for birth and had a brief overview of the Dutch philosophy of childbirth.
It really makes sense, too.
Essentially, it’s summed up with the idea that pregnancy is NOT an illness. It’s NOT a medical condition. It’s a natural part of life that has been going on for millions of years. So why does it require medical intervention?
This is why midwives deliver all routine births. This is why so many births here happen at home.
It’s an interesting thought, because as a philosophy it makes sense – why has giving birth become such a production for routine births? While some argue that we’ve developed all this medical technology, why not use it? But then again, we spent the last few decades developing chemicals and pesticides for agriculture that we’re now doing our best to get away from. Sometimes, we need to just not mess with stuff that works fine naturally. Science can be used to solve many problems, but perhaps we are guilty of trying to use science and medicine to also fix things that ain’t broke in the first place.
In The Happiest Baby On The Block, Dr. Harvey Karp talks about this a bit, not in relation to the birthing process here, but in basic childraising techniques for infants. It’s appropriate either way:
Technology is a blessing, but today we are relearning the value of living in harmony with nature; it’s just common sense.
A funny part of our expat class was that, minus one couple, everyone was against having their baby at home. Even the one couple open to the idea wasn’t planning on it. It just didn’t sound reasonable, should anything go wrong.
The midwife running the class said that was fine, although assured us that part of a midwife’s training is to be aware if something is not going right, and to get the mother into an ambulance immediately if need be.
Even so, another situation we found out about that applied to some of our situations – in the event of a home birth going wrong in a 4th story walkup, the ambulance will arrive with a cherrypicker in order to extract the mother from the window. Now I KNOW we’ll just go to the hospital when the time comes!
The class went from 19:00-21:00 (7PM-9PM), and by the end, Nicole and I were starving, tired of sitting and ready to go. That’s when I glance at Nicole’s stomach – it was moving all over the place. Kitten was apparently as sick of sitting there as we were! She was BORED, and she was squirming all over the place. OK, this is very much our daughter, but she’s going to be a handful of trouble at times I think! I’ll do my best to keep her entertained.
If You Go:
As long as you’re staying in the city, don’t rent a car. They’re more trouble than they’re worth. Rent a bike instead.
Hey Ryan,
Great site for tourists! I’m reading the archives and enjoying the updates, despite living here for 6 years already.
Cool to see you guys have the same positive attitude to pregnancy and birth as the Netherlands. When I was first pregnant I was given a lot of horror stories (how people love to share them), mainly from expats with different expectations of the whole process.
I think managing expectations and being really informed about the way the body works during birth are the biggest things we can do for ourselves, regardless of which country we give birth in.
From a fellow blogger and expat to another – if there’s any information you or your wife need or baby stuff that I can help with let me know!