Wordless Wednesday – Pucker Up!

How to become a Better (NS) Train Commuter

 

We all hate rules, but in order to live peacefully amongst each other, for (thankfully) a short period of time each work-day, I’ve put together some simple rules to live by. No one expects you to live by these rules 100% (since I have also been known to break these rules from time to time), but giving a good effort will be appreciated by all.

General Common Courtesy

1. The easiest way to get on the train is to let people off first. Should be a no-brainer, people.
2. When you enter the train, it’s most likely that there are others getting on with you. Take one second to check that you are not slamming a door on someone’s face. Holding the door open is actually a nice thing to do, in case you are not aware.
3. You do not need to hurdle yourself into the seat you have chosen to occupy. Simply sit down like a normal person. Chances are, during rush hours, people are using the tray tables behind you and when you dive in for your spot, you’ve just catapulted a fellow passengers coffee off of the tray.
4. I realize it’s a modern world, and we all love our “equality” here in the Netherlands, but when it’s very busy, give up your seat for an older person or a pregnant woman or a mum with small children. It’s really just the decent thing to do.
5. Also in busy times – it’s pretty abnormal to stand directly on top of someone as if they don’t even exist. Fill up the space and let people also stand without your armpit in their mouth.
6. I hate to be the bearer of bad or surprising news, but I’ll be blunt: You are on public transport which means you are not special. If you were special, you would not be on the train. You would have a limo, a helicopter or your own plane to take you where you wanted to go. On the train you have paid for one seat. During rush hour don’t leave your stuff on the seat(s) next to you that someone who also paid for one seat could sit on.
7. Should you choose to keep your shit stuff on the seat next to you and someone asks to sit there, do not tut or sigh or act like you are being totally inconvenienced. I’ll repeat: You are NOT special; unless you can prove you paid for another seat just for your shit you can move it.
8. Sit like a normal human being (if you are a normal human being), not sprawled out so that the person next to you cannot sit down normally. This includes crossing your leg so that your foot is resting against my leg. Unless of course you don’t mind me hacking your foot off and shoving it down your throat.
9. Letting your children run through a busy rush hour train is not funny or cute. 72% (totally made up percentage, but it sounds about right) of the passengers in the train are contemplating how to abduct your children and cook them for dinner.
10. Your trash = yours. Don’t leave it for someone else. Put it in the bin, provided in the train, or take it with you. When you leave it loads of different things can happen. People can trip and fall over bottles, your coffee you decided not to finish is now all over the floor and consequently my bag or shoes, the stinking tin of salmon you scooped out with your fingers and ate is now permeating the entire carriage. Your mum is not coming round to pick up after you.
11. Here’s a novel idea: If someone should fall, why not help them up? Do you really think it’s ok to just leave someone on the ground while you rush in to get a seat?
12. Your folding bike is meant to stay folded until you are OUT of the train. Just a FYI: if you own a folding bike, most people hate you and I’ll tell you why. There is nothing worse than tripping over a folding bike, or getting hit in the back of the legs or feet with one, or to be cut off by a folding bike as you are trying to get on or off the train. And no, you cannot store your folding bike in front of the seat next to you to avoid having someone sit next to you. It was also never intended that you ride your bike down a very busy train platform either. The bike is for commuting – not wreaking havoc in and around the trains. There is a network of hitmen waiting to get the call to assassinate you and destroy your bike into 30 bazillion tiny pieces.

Noise

1. Don’t talk in the morning before 8 am on the train. Not on the phone and not to your co-commuter or colleague.  Most people are still trying to wake up, some are sleeping, but mostly no one wants to hear your loud voice making shitchat before 8am.
2. This includes the telephone. Your ring tone of the latest Tiesto remix just caused three older people who were sleeping to have a heart attack.
3. Don’t talk on your mobile phone for your entire journey. I’m pretty sure that the mobile phone was never intended for you to have a 40 – 60 minute conversation about the weather, your hair, what you did on the weekend and the latest reason you need to see your gynecologist.
4. If your music is loud enough that 82% (totally made up percentage, but it sounds about right) of the passengers can name that tune and/or sing along, it’s too loud.
5. Listening to music is also supposed to be with headphones. Not with the speaker on your crappy Samsung phone. If you are playing music on a phone speaker, chances are 100% likely that no one wants to hear that crap. We can already see you have bad taste; we don’t need to hear it as well.
6. Letting your kids scream or sing at the top of their lungs is not cool either. Teach them about the “inside” and the “outside” voice. Inside the train is considered, well, “inside”. Again, not funny or cute.
7. If you have a cold, please make sure you have tissues with you. Listening to you sniffle the entire train journey and then snorting and swallowing what you can’t blow (since you have no tissues) is disgusting and off-putting.

Odors

1. Just because you can’t hear it, because your music is so loud, doesn’t mean it’s ok to fart. This rule can also be applied under the “noise” section.
2. The following foods should not be allowed in the train during rush hour: Hema Worst, fries with curry-ketchup (or onions or anything else actually), doner kebab, McDonald’s, anything from Febo. Eating tuna or salmon out of a tin with your fingers is an immediate punishable offence. Like in front of a firing squad punishable.
3. If you think you have body odor, you probably do and it’s most likely much worse than how you perceive it. Take a shower or at least purchase some deodorant.
4. Smoking is never allowed in the train. It’s fine if you want to kill yourself. Do it in the areas where it’s allowed. This includes smoking joints as well. No one wants to smell you smoking a doob at 7.30 in the morning.
5. Don’t blow your smoke IN the train as you are getting on it. Chances are you just blew in the faces of other commuters. Not very nice at all.
6. Same goes for consuming beer. If you are not an alcoholic, you probably know how disgusting and unappealing this is at 7.30am. (I’m all for beer drinking, but not on my way to work, thanks.) I’m guessing you aren’t really going to work if you are drinking EuroShopper beer this early anyway, but other people are, in fact going to their place of employment.
7. Leave your shoes on. Honestly I don’t care how clean you think you are, there is too much risk for a stench to rise up from your feet and not everyone loves the smell of old, moldy parmesan cheese.

 

Thanks to my lovely contributors to this list – you know who you are! Now I’m going to start a Facebook group called “I bet I can find at least 64 people in the Netherlands who agree with my commuting rules”. Or not.

Wordless Wednesday – Bark at the Moon

The Cheek!

Seems like someone else had the same idea I and my Twitter mates had! A Tweetup in Utrecht – coincidentally at Stairway to Heaven… also where we went!!

source is here

‘Tweeps’ verzamelen bij Stairway to Heaven
AMSTERDAM – De organisator van Twittershizzle rekent erop dat er dinsdag 9 februari vijfhonderd mensen op zijn evenement afkomen. Zaterdag waren er al meer dan driehonderd aanmeldingen voor de bijeenkomst, in het Utrechtse café Stairway to Heaven.
Mensen die normaliter met elkaar in contact staan via Twitter kunnen elkaar daar offline ontmoeten. De organisatie ziet Twittershizzle als een tegengeluid op de verkiezing van Twitteraar van het jaar.

Via Twitter kunnen tweeps, digitale vrienden, met elkaar communiceren in teksten van maximaal 140 tekens. Shizzle is een internetwoord voor dingen op het internet.

and badly translated by google (but you’ll get the gist)

“Tweep ‘gathering in Stairway to Heaven
AMSTERDAM – The organizer of Twitter Shizzle expects that Tuesday, February 9th on his event attracted five hundred people. Saturday there were more than three hundred applications for the meeting, in the Utrecht cafe Stairway to Heaven.
People normally in contact with each other via Twitter can meet each other as offline. Shizzle The organization sees Twitter as an opposing the election of Twitteraar of the year.

Via Twitter can tweep, digital friends with each other in texts of up to 140 characters. Shizzle is an internet word for things on the internet.

1) they completely copied us!
2) Shizzle is NOT an internet word for things on the internet
3) I just found on the net there are WAITING lists for Tweetup Meetup Groups – WTF? Just organise it amongst your Tweeps!
4) I think I’ll stick with the few nice tweeps I’ve been in contact with, thanks
5) as Alison said “I wonder if the food will be delivered next month and really REALLY cold. “- yes the food took long and was lukewarm, but we were all about to eat our hands so it was sufficient at the time. I feel sorry for them if 300-500 people show up!

Wordless Wednesday – A Double Dose of Dutch

Since I missed last week, here are two for your viewing pleasure:

Speaking of Social Media

These are the ones I am loving right now.  With all my heart and soul.  In no order (because I can’t “Top 5 or 10″ these, it’s impossible) and in fact there are so many others, but I’m sure I’ll drive everyone away if I make a huge laundry list…

A Vapid Blonde

The Bloggess

Two Fit Chicks and a Microphone podcasts

*Bitch Cakes*
and her other blogs, mentioned on her site

My mates on Twitter, Lisa and Rod and a few others that crack me up daily
NL Tweeps
Friends
WL Tweeps

My blogging expat friends, that you can see in my side bar

My Flickr friends

You definitely rock my world at the moment!

The Power of Social Media

I have to say I’ve met a LOT of people from the internet.

A LOT.

Maybe that sounds strange, but where I’m coming from it’s not.  I know a lot of people who have met their partners on the internet.  That’s significant other or boyfriend or girlfriend or wife or husband, whatever you want to define it as.  Remember back in the day (I’m allowed to say that, now that I’m well over 40 *wink*) when meeting someone online was like asking to meet the weirdest people ever?  Like, you’d see their photo and think “Hey, she’s hot!” and you meet up in a café and she is like the total opposite of the photo (It reminds me of both versions of The Office).  Or worse, right?  He or she turns out to be a stalker or a sociopath or god forbid a wanted criminal?

When I first moved to the Netherlands, I had no internet.  I guess Al Gore hadn’t come up with it yet.   I think it was around 1998 when I had my first Hotmail address and started figuring out the basics of the interwebs.  Honestly though?  I think I joined a Depeche Mode list and a little bit later a Weight Watchers group on Yahoo.  And that’s when I started meeting people.

I went to a couple of Depeche Mode conventions and met a few people from the list.  We even had t-shirts made up to identify ourselves in Basildon at the convention.  I also joined a Dutch-American couples group (because then I was in a different relationship with a Dutch guy)and  met some people from that group too.  In fact, I met at least one couple that I became very good friends with. Then there was another sort of club where I met my friend Julia, and eventually took over her couples group dinner club when she and her Dutch husband (whom she met online) moved to California.   I met a couple of girls from my WW group, two women from the UK.  Then I joined an expat group situated mostly in Den Haag/Leiden/Delft and Rotterdam and I even started co-coordinating events, pub quizzes, movies, nights out, parties, even chili cook-offs and just about anything else you can imagine doing with a group of friends.  I even met a girl from that diet forum I love who knew a guy in Den Haag that I met as well, who now has his own expat group called Legal Aliens.  And in the international arena, I’ve met people from various online forums who I became friends with, some who I still have contact with.   That was it, these people were my friends, and I met them all on the internet.

And not one of these people was a psychopath.  Not one a murderer.  Or a rapist. OK, I may have met one or two people with anger issues, but that doesn’t mean they were people who I was truly afraid of.  Not one stalker.  Not one person I knew who had a stalker.  Most people were good people I shared drinks with, stories, went to museums, sang at their wedding, traveled with, and generally made several years of my life really, really good.

I’ve mentioned it before, but I’ll say it again – when you meet expats, there is a chance they will go home.  Or go somewhere else.  People change and move on.  People also find that after a few years those people they met from the internet don’t completely fulfill their lives.  They move on.  They get married.  Or they get jobs and have something else that takes up their time.  Sometimes they even break up with the person they came here to  be with in the Netherlands.  Or sometimes their lives just fall apart in all areas and they lose touch with you.

For the last year or so, I’ve been more active again in social media.  Now it’s called “social media”, before it was just called an online forum or group, ICQ, AOL, etc.  Before it was kind of embarrassing to say you were meeting online “friends”.  As if these people weren’t real at all.  They couldn’t possibly be “friends” because you only know them from the internet.  You certainly didn’t tell your parents, or those conservative friends you have since you were in elementary school.  What would they think? 

It started with MySpace really.  I actually met a few people from MySpace which makes total sense because I’m very much into my music.  It’s hard to go wrong really when you are meeting people who are interested in 80’s electronic music – we’re all too old to stalk; we just want to meet up at a gig and drink beer and talk about how much better it was in 1985.   And I did meet some very fine people from there, specifically for a Yazoo show we went to see in Glasgow.  On top of that, I met some Rockabilly fans here as well, but (and please don’t be offended if you are Dutch) they were all Dutch and I found it very difficult to break into their circle (though they were all very nice to me, I was still an outsider). 

Then there was Facebook.  The novelty was great at first, but slowly I’m getting bored with all the friend requests from people I went to high school with who I didn’t really know anyway (or who thought they knew me).  I had all sorts of applications to play with and I even had my own farm.  Too bad I couldn’t have Vampire Wars between the corn husks.  So Facebook for me is really for people I know now – though I do admit, 220 is a pretty big number of “friends”  for me – they are not all in my heart kind of friends.  I did however meet three amazingly fun and friendly people this summer because of Facebook – people who I now see and speak to on a regular basis.  So even Facebook is good for meeting new people.

Which leads me to Twitter.  Last year I joined Twitter but didn’t use it much.  I mean, I was updating my status on Facebook enough, what could I possibly have to say?   Then I found someone on Twitter.  Someone I wondered about for over 20 years.  So I started tweeting.  Simple as that. He left Twitter just like he left 20 years ago, without saying goodbye.  That’s cool though, I forgive you, if you are reading *wink*.

I decided at that point to check out the expats-in-the-Netherlands realm again.  Everyone was tweeting! So I found some really cool blogs – not just expats but cool people, funny people, and just when I needed it – weight loss blogs.  With Twitter it was so much easier to keep up with new blog posts and since I’m traveling so much to and from work I actually have the time to check out the updates from my favourite bloggers.

And this is how my internet life has developed for the last 10+ years.  It’s come down to blogs and Twitter.  My first Twitter friend that I met was Rod and we got on like a house on fire.  Like he said last week – it was awkward for about 42 seconds and then we realised we were just going to have fun together (and how wrong can you go meeting for coffee and then going for beers and burgers?).  I also met Amanda and Texaantje at a work event.  And last Thursday, I had the absolute pleasure of having dinner and drinks with Pam, Alison, Lisa and Rod in Utrecht.  I know it’s early days, but it just felt good to go out and be social and have fun with people.  From the Internet! I had SUCH a great night last Thursday and I only cursed myself on Friday evening when I was exhausted and feeling hung over.  (And Rod, yes, the next one is still on you!!)

I do realise that’s a lot of words to say “I had a TweetUp!” but I was just thinking about the whole history of my social connections. Social Media has been the reason I actually have the beginnings of new friendships.  There are people who think Twitter or Facebook are stupid or a waste of time – those are the people who either don’t care about having a social life, or have the same friends since they were three years old.  That’s not me.  I’m an International Girl in the Netherlands and this is what I do!

Wordless Wednesday – The Talented Mr. McPie

Life Slows to a Snail’s Pace

It’s weather madness here, people.  Even *I* am amazed!

Last week Wednesday we had such a snowstorm in Amsterdam (but only Amsterdam!) that traffic was backed up for something like 8 hours!  We watched the huge snowflakes fall from the office windows on the second floor of our building and decided going home early could be a good idea.  So we headed outside and waited for our 4.15 bus (which showed up late) and had a snowball fight (only the ones who dared).  The snow was PERFECT for making snowballs and snowmen (we didn’t get that far) and a couple of us who weren’t afraid of the cold or getting wet were taking full advantage!

Finally the bus arrived around 4.30 and we all piled on – it was very warm and cosy and we were all chattering and giggling about how fun it was, in the snow.  That is, at least for the first 30 minutes… after that it started to get boring.  We were going NO WHERE and reality was setting in… were we going to be able to get home? Was this bus ever going to turn the corner?

About 1 hour into the trip (and already getting the idea from 3 colleagues who got off way earlier, whom we thought were completely mad) a few of us decided to get off the bus and walk the rest of the way.  20 minutes walking through the snow – but it was absolutely beautiful! The trees were covered and the snow was thick on the ground! And it kept falling! I felt quite sentimental walking to the station – it just reminded me of real winters back “home” (take your pick, Chicago or New Mexico) and it made me smile.

When I arrived at the station the trains were running, albeit late, which meant I could catch a direct train home.  For me, it was fine.  There was no snow falling anywhere else and my train was headed East, not North of Amsterdam, which was probably the worst hit by delayed or cancelled train service.

The rest of the week has been snowy, cold, icy, and has morphed into BITTER cold, windy, and definitely NOT the kind of weather you want to even TRY to go outside in.  Yesterday I went out on my bike, to the gym, and then later into town and it felt like I was being slapped with a cold hard metallic object.  My cheeks were still stinging at the end of the day!

Only the hardcore ice-skating and skiing fools are going outside now;  the Dutch tradition of canal-skating is in full force in some areas of the Netherlands, and we now have our very own Ski Pistes in Limburg.  Who needs Switzerland, France and Italy now for winter sports?

I feel like I want to wrap myself up in a cocoon of blankets and am actually using my (new!) Uggs as slippers.  I wonder how long this will last?  On the one hand I love it, but on the other, it’s kind of wreaking havoc on my desire to go outside and run (no jogging here on the ice;  Me + Ice = accident begging to happen).  I’m feeling slow and sluggish and wanting to nap on the couch.

With this weather and the pace I’m at, I have to say: Bears definitely have the right idea to hibernate in the winter.

(Not Completely) Wordless Wednesday

In light of the fact that I have a new camera, on Wednesdays I’ll upload a photo instead of a post. Lots of people do it, and, while I don’t particularly HAVE to be like everyone else, photos are nice and much more personable. Also, this gets me out of my little zone and more “out there” which is something I would like to do this year. You know, grow some ‘nads, get some cajones, that sort of thing.

The hubs took this photos Sunday; it’s what I’ve got to offer for today!