About a year ago i blogged about mini busses shuttling polish migrant workers from poland to holland and back. In that post i had attributed the use of mini buses over trains (and regular busses) at least in part the fact that the mini busses are much faster than other means of transport. apparently they are not fast enough anymore:

The agrarisch dagblad (‘agricultural daily’) reports that P&E people, a Dutch temporary work aganecy supplying eastern and central European workers to the dutch labour market has started shutteling workers with a weekly wizz-air flight from Katowice to Eindhoven and back (complete with connecting shuttle bus services from and to the airports). At the moment they are providing space for 8 workers per flight, but there seem to be plans to offer this service to all of their workforce in the future.

Came across this installation in front of a small internet cafe/phone shop in Psiri in the center of Athens yesterday:

When i took pictures of it a guy the indian shopkeeper of a mini market across the street came out of his shop and asked me why i was taking pictures of this ‘ugly piece of crap’. Before i could even answer him the owner of the internet cafe came out and responded to him that this was ‘creativity’ not crap, to which i agreed. During the resulting conversation with Rana (the owner) which for some reason centered on the fact that he liked Amsterdam a lot (no not because of the legal dope or any of the usual reasons people have for liking Amsterdam, but because he had perceived Amsterdam as a place without the racism he encounters in Athens, which given the xenophobic tendencies in Holland in the last couple of years i found quite remarkable) he mentioned that he was a Bengali from Kolkatta. This sparked another round of insults from the mini market shop keeper, who insisted that Rana was in fact not a Bengali but from Bangladesh adding extra flavor to the earlier complaint about racism in Greece.

Excellent headline from last Saturday’s NRC handelsblad!! (it roughly translates to ‘integration primarily a problem of the natives’ (bablefish suggests ‘autochthons‘ as a translation for autochtonen, but i think natives fits it better).

The article goes on to point out that according to a recent survey immigrants (allochtonen) do not consider integration as an important issue, while the native population (autochtonen) does perceive it as the 4th most important issue (the top three are the health-care system, criminality and cost of living).

It is not very often that those who are supposed to be the weakest members of a social group manage to slip through policies designed to exclude them from resources. Apparently though, this seems to be what is happening in the case of the stupid language tests that the Dutch government has imposed on would-be immigrants a while back. To recap, would-be immigrants have to do a basic dutch language test in their countries of origin before they get permission to come to the Netherlands even if they do qualify for a residence permit. Now these language tests are pretty basic and fully computerized and they are clearly designed to weed-out immigrants with lower education so that only ‘desirable highly-educated’ immigrants are let into the Netherlands.

Now apparently this policy is a complete failure. i recently talked to a couple of civil servants from the city of Amsterdam and they told me that the whole system does not work at all: According to them it is the low-skilled, lower educated immigrants who pass this language test and the high-skilled, highly-educated would-be immigrants who miserably fail to do so. Of course this was not really satisfactory from the view of the sick bureaucrats who came up with this stupid idea in the first place and consequently they ordered some research into this issue:

So it appears that people with relatively low education have ‘auditive memory‘ and are good in ‘instructive learning‘ while people with higher education levels seem to have predominatly ‘visual memory‘ and engage in ‘experimental learning‘.

What this comes down to, is that people with lower education are better at remembering phrases thrown at them and repeat them to a computer than people with higher education who do seem to get lost in this simple procedure partly because they get offended by the setup. The result is, that non-western people (of course in good old apartheid-style white western people do not have to take this test) with higher education currently seem to have an extremely hard time getting into this little arrogant country. Now this is not to the liking of those who came up with this system and those civil servants i talked to (who did not come up with this system) were pretty sure that within the next 6 months this policy will get canned. Let’s enjoy it while it lasts.

A little bit more than a year ago 11 people burned to death, locked up in a deportation prison on the premises of Amsterdam’s Schiphol airport. they had been locked-up there because their presence in the Netherlands had been deemed illegal by the xenophobic dutch government.

A while ago some organizations staged a poster competition that called for designs for a poster to commemorate the one-year anniversary of the blaze and today they revealed the winning design at ImagineIC (link is in dutch). while i really liked the initiative to have this poster competition i am rather puzzled by the outcome: all of the designs are extremely abstract and to be honest, i absolutely do not get the winning design:

Makes me see a Dutch flag and the words ‘sour’, ‘sweet’ and ‘bitter’. somebody better explain me what this has to do with 11 people burning to death as the closest association i have is that burned flesh does have a distinctive ‘sweet’ smell, but i am quite sure that is not what the designer had in mind.

Now one of the organizers told me that i do not get it because i am ‘a foreigner’ and apparently the the govenernement has recently described the economic situation in the Netherlands as having been ‘sour’ during the past four years and promised that from now the times would be ‘sweet’ (hint: there will be elections in about a month).

Given this the poster still does not make sense to me. my best guess is that the Dutch must see some contradiction between their national flag and the ‘bitterness’ resulting from the Schiphol blaze. Given that most Dutch people that i know seem to have chosen to ignore the transformation into a xenophobic, paranoid, racist society which their country has undergone in the last 5 years and still believe that the Netherlands (and its flag) stand for feel-good liberalism, tolerance and openness, it might very well be the case that they perceive this poster as inherently contradictory.

Now it might have to do with the fact that i was indeed raised and born in Germany (and thus ‘a foreigner’) that i see any national flag pretty much representing exactly those chauvinistic attitudes that support murderous policies carried out against foreigners all over europe. For me this poster looks like a dutch flag with some arbitrary words on it (which first made me think of the amsterdam club called bitterzoet) and i seriously wonder how many foreigners in this country will be susceptible to the presumed irony of this design.

Ok, cant go on being abusive of other people her like in the last couple of posts. does not really add too much to the whole and apparently it will be held against me by some prospective employer in the future anyway. Speaking about employment: it is no secret that the dutch economy (especially the construction, cleaning and agricultural sectors employ a huge number of (temporary) workers from Poland and other Eastern European countries (ironically germany seems to become an Eastern European country as well at least in this aspect if one is to believe the mdr (google cache).

Many of these migrants combine working in the the Netherlands (or western Europe for that matter) with living in Poland. these pendular migration strategies are made possible by the vastly improved transportation facilities between the east and the west. When reading about ‘improved transprotation’ images of high speed trains and low cost airlines come to mind, but these migration patterns seem to fundamentally rely on a parallel transportation infrastrcuture:

In my thesis i had already mentioned this parallel infrastructure (without giving much thought to it then):

A trip from Perlejewo to Brussels and back costs approximately 80 dollars, and the increased competition among coach companies is reducing the cost of such fares even more. The trip lasts approximately 24 hours, and there are even ‘door to door’ transport services. (Frejka et al. as cited on p. 53)

Last weekend i drove back from Berlin to Amsterdam relatively early on Sunday morning, and this provided me with an opportunity to see these transport services in action. A significant amount of the cars traveling west on the A2 were minibuses registered in Poland (and either displaying signs of polish tour operators or even more tellingly of Dutch temporary work agencies). Some of them traveling alone some of them traveling in convoys of 3 or 4 vehicles. in total i think i saw at least 60 or so of these vehicles of more than 40 companies, which as we are traveling at at approximately the same speed most likely is only a small share of the total traffic on that day. That translates into a lot of people commuting from Poland to work in NL on that Sunday.

In the last 3 years i have travelled a lot between Berlin and Amsterdam, but almost exclusively by train and while the direct trains from Berlin to Amsterdam originate in poland i have never really noticed polish workers using the train to commute to Holland. This is probably due to the exorbitant prices of railway tickets nowadays (a standard return ticket berlin amsterdam is €184) but having seen these minibuses in action there is obviously another advantage to them. most of them were traveling at 140KM/h or more and if one combines this with the fact that these buses seem to offer door to door services, this probably translates into enormous time savings especially when one assumes that most of the trips taken by these pendular migrants are from small rural places to small rural places (which tend to have lousy public transport connectivity). In any case i was quite impressed by this almost hidden, highly flexible parallel transport infrastructure.

Looks like the football world cup has begun today. Unfortunately i am traveling to berlin on this very same day (by train via Arnhem/Duesseldorf), which means that you have to share the slightly overcrowded train with about 300 english football supporters and lots of bottles of more or less warm beer (i never loved my sound-canceling headphones more). However it also means that the authorities are freaking out in the name of security and decide to stop the train at the border station (where it usually does not stop) in order to let a posse of badly dressed, short-haired idiots wearing reflective vests on board of the train to check everybody’s passport.

Now everyone including the train staff assumed they would board the train and then do the checking while the train is moving. Instead the well-dressed gentlemen who was in charge of the whole operation had the brilliant idea to stop the train for the entire duration of the operation.

When asked them if he thought that this was a good idea his even less intelligent sidekick (with a much bette taste in facial hairdo though) told us that the stop was not related to their activities, but due to the trains engine having to be changed at the border. Now this is the biggest bullshit i have heard in a long time as there was (a) no stop scheduled and (b) the ICE3 does not even have a separate engine but rather a number of electrical motors under all the carriages. He also told us ‘to shut up as it was none of our businesses’

Now, to make matters worse, the 20-or-so cops decided that it was most efficient if they would walk through the entire train in one big group instead of splitting up in smaller groups. the result: the aisle clotted by a slowly moving mass of cops who were permanently bumping into each other (i guess that is why they were wearing kevlar vests) and stepped on each others feet while shouting personal data of everyone looking remotely British or non-european into their mobile phones.

All in all this truly impressive display of collective intelligence took more than 30 minutes. No terrorists where apprehended, the English supporters got their first good laugh at the German police and everybody missed their connections (which on a Friday afternoon is a bit of a pain in the neck).

Also shortly before Duisburg the bar ran out of beer which is a bit embarrassing as the Deutsche Bahn is one of the main sponsors o the wold cup and has been running ads depicting happy supporters on trains for quite awhile now. Somebody at market research should have told them that happy football supporters consume more beer than average train passengers.

So everybody who knows me a bit will know that i am not particularly fond of all things white and liquid. basically i hate all white milk based products (except mozzarella cheese & ice cream) to the extend that i get physically sick just by being to cose to them or thinking about them. the stuff makes me literally shiver…

Now the dutch are particularily fond of milk! they seem to eat large amounts of cheese, produce one of the moost awful substances in the whole universe (‘vla’) and even think that it is ok to have a glass of milk for lunch (for adults!!). they seem to be so fond of all things milk that they commission art-works for public space that cherish diary products: on a playground along my route to work there is a giant milk-bottle sculpture. needless to say this thing used to give me the creeps every time i cycled past it. now some kind soul seems to have had mercy and has added a message that i can wholeheartedly support:

Still makes me wonder what the original sculpture was meant to say: kids in africa a worse off [ :( ]because they do not get a bottle of milk every day? and the dutch kids need to internalize this while enjoying themselves on the playground?

During Thursdays Anniek van Hardeveld memorial race i was doing a checkppoint (yes i know i am getting lazy and slow these days…) on the head of java island. The checkpoint was at the memorial for the employees of the N.V. Nederlandse Scheepvaartmaatschapij who had died ‘at sea or wherever on the shore’ while defending the ‘liberty of their country’.

The memorial is a rather simple one made from stone. It has a 3 meter-or-so high stone base on top of which there is a 3 meter high sculpture of a sailor gazing to the west (into the sunset? after his dead comrades? at Amsterdam central station?). The base of the monument is covered by plates of shiny black marble (or something like that). Inscribed in gold on these plates are the names of the employees who died between 1940 and 1945.

Now while waiting for the first racers to arrive i started to read the names and was stuck by the fact that every second of them sounded non-dutch to me (which of course is not strange at al as we are talking about sailors here who have always been a motley crue). Took me a while to figure out that i was in fact looking at the section of the monument that lists non-dutch people. that’s right, when they set up this monument these freedom-lovin’, injustice-hatin’ Dutch people decided not to mix then names of the Dutch people and foreigners who had sailed, fought and died together. Instead they decided to list them in separate sections of the monument, The dutch with first and last names and the others only with what seems to be their last names/nick names:

Now the monument was set up in 1950, and lots of people have argued that it was ok for the Dutch to be a little bit racist back then (like it was ok that the first thing the Dutch did after being liberated was sending troops to indonesia to make sure they could go on repressing the locals some more). Guess the times were indeed a bit different then, but the fact that nobody bothers to change this fuck-up while once a year an official delegation comes along to lay down flowers also tells a fair bit about our times. So this post is dedicated to the memory of:

alimin bin alisin, abdoelatip, asan, asikin, alidjojo, astro, adoel, ardjosari, ardjiman, assan, birhasan, boewang, darboes, dasoekie, djokomarie, doelsenen, doelmanan, djojo, djin, gani, haje, ahmat emery, jamin, kadir, ladin, mat, maodin, martalie, marliat, madani, matalie, mail, moein, martiman, moeljo, moebin, matalowie, mohamad ramli, maohamad moein, moekasim, moenawie, oesman, odder, noh, oesin, ossin, rabanie, ridoean, roen, saian, safie, sanoesie, saharie, sakiman, saimin, sarie, sarmadie, satie, seehan, seger, soek, soekie, soemo, soerio, tahir & tarip

(To me this also looks a bit like they ran out of space and decided not to honour people with names in the u to z range…)

So officially queensday is to celebrate the birthday of the Queen of the netherlands, but in reality it is just an excuse to wear extremely silly orange hats, listen to bad cover bands in overcrowded streets, buy stuff that you would not buy on any other day and most importantly to get really really drunk in public and embarrass the shit out of yourself (of course if you are dutch you wont find any of this embarrassing). In order to get drunk queensday-style you must absolutely do so by drinking beer from cans (only other thing that may be consumed in between beers is oranje-bitter).

The fact that queensday is about drinking beer and nothing else becomes most obvious on the day after, when the streets are littered with green beer cans and when the supermarkets that have been open during the previous day look like they have been looted by a mob that only had one think on it’s mind (beer?). Smack in the middle of the annual madness is the Albert Heijn super market behind the palace on dam-square in Amsterdam.

The following pictures have been taken when i went there for breakfast shopping on the morning after Q-D. Albert heijn never being shy to squeeze the last cent out of every possible chauvinist occasion had literally crammed a beer display into every unused square inch of floor space.

[Note that all pictures depict seperate piles of beer found in the store. I have refrained from taking shots of the piles from different points of view]