Countries and habits

So I recently re-ordered my collection of cards that I have received through Postcrossing (almost 400). I had them stacked in chronological order, but ever since my post on the stamps, I had been thinking about ordering them by country (I've also started to send out nicer, special stamps instead of the boring standard ones, because now that I realise how much fun it is to get a real, beautiful stamp, I want to send them out as well). As they are now arranged in a way that I can actually say some generalising things about countries and their Postcrossing habits, I thought I would actually do so. I'm only including countries from which I have received at least 5 cards, otherwise it is hard to draw conclusions (even though I realise I am generalising from a very, very small sample size). I'll discuss the front of the card, the handwriting, and the stamps.

Some general things I noticed:
- Some countries practically only send touristy cards with the place names written very clearly up front, while others have a wider variety. As I don't ask for tourist viewcards in particular, I assume that the ones I receive are from senders who cannot find any other cards. This goes mainly for Brazil and Portugal.
- You can see a clear difference between 'westerners' writing in Latin script and 'Asians' writing in Latin script. The latter's cards are often much easier to read, and some have beautiful handwriting.
- Some countries have one 'abroad' stamps and most people use these (Germany, the US). In others, people can choose from various 'abroad' stamps, but still only use one. Finally, others have to come up with special combinations to reach the required amount, and these usually have several stamps with a wide variety.

Belarus (15 cards)
Mainly cards of buildings, parks, or natural vistas. Some paintings/drawings, no hand-made.
Very curly handwriting, with all the words written together, usually in blue ball-point pen.
Use a loooot of different, very small stamps, usually with flowers or animals. Recently I've been receiving quite some grey-and-red official stamps, which are more boring.

Belgium (7 cards)
Wide variety, from touristy to drawings to nature scenes.
Also a wide variety in handwriting, loose and illegible versus neat and small. All blue ball-point.
Many different stamps, some Belgium-related (beer, chocolates). Difference between Wallonian and Flemish stamps.

Brazil (6 cards)
All touristy cards with sights or buildings.
Very small, straight letters so that a lot of text fits on the card, except for one. Mainly blue ball-point.
Several different stamps, interesting Christmas-tree decoration-shaped ones, but mainly trumpets and shopping bags.

Canada (6 cards)
Mostly nature-views, one funny image and one book cover.
All written with separate letters. 4 in black pen, 1 in purple pen, 1 printed in black ink.
Mostly different stamps, including two beautiful Titanic memorial stamps, but also the general abroad stamp featuring reindeer in a stream.

China (20 cards)
Wide variety, touristy views and shop-bought cutesy penguins, Jetoy, and traditional clothing/fabrics. Several traditional watercolour artworks with Chinese characters, one home-made featuring the sender.
All written in separate letters, very thin and pointy, mostly in black ink, apart from 1 card written by a Frenchwoman living in China, whose handwriting is very 'western'.
Amazing variety of stamps, some very large, ranging from Mozart via landscapes to pandas and traditional drawings.

Czech Republic (6 cards)
4 drawings (ranging from a Klimt painting to a tv-show), 1 Easter card, one rainbow concoction.
All in separate letters and blue ball-point.
Beautiful variety of stamps, including animals, landscapes, people, historic events, etc. In the 11 stamps there is not one duplicate.

Finland (28 cards)
Drawings (Moomins), touristic sights, paintings, nature views (many reindeer), and several hand-made.
Mainly written in separate letters in blue ball-point, three in pencil, three in black, and one printed text.
Usually the Aurora Borealis 'abroad' stamp, but some variety (an interesting glitter-stamp of a violin-playing fairy, for example). However, always only 1 stamp per card.

France (5 cards)
All different: 1 Eiffel tower, 1 baroque painting, 1 ad card, 1 Provence view, 1 Nouvelle Images.
Words generally written together, not in a schoolboy manner but quite sloppy, 3 in blue ball-point, 2 in black.
Stamps generally feature Marianne of France, in different colours (brown, grey, yellow).

Germany (48 cards)
Mainly tourist cards with the place name prominently on the card. Some art cards (including Rosina Wachmeister) and other drawings, one Bunny Suicides, several with a focus on books or reading.
Wide variety of handwritings, colours, and sizes.
Almost all have the standard 'abroad' stamp of the church in Regensburg, very few have small flower stamps.

Great Britain (6 cards)
5 touristy viewcards (including one from Thailand...) and one cute owl drawing.
Generally written in separate letters, quite sloppy and sometimes unreadable.
Wide variety, 6 different stamps, meaning always 1 stamp per card.

Japan (8 cards)
Some tourist viewcards, some traditional paintings, one angel card and 2 cat cards.
Separate letters, mainly in black ink, mostly very neat and tidy (but clearly 'Asian'), some very sloppy. ID number almost always in red.
Amazing variety of stamps, from Hello Kitty to lotus flowers to nature views.

Latvia (6 cards)
2 viewcards, 1 book cover, and 2 double cards.
Large, loopy letters, generally written together and in black ink.
Many different stamps, but several cards feature a small stamp with a stork, probably to get to the required postage amount.

Lithuania (8 cards)
2 viewcards, a library postcard, 3 drawings, a Banksy card, and a home-made recipe card.
Wide variety of handwritings and colours, also of legibility.
Also a wide variety of stamps, mainly featuring important historic figures.

Poland (20 cards)
Many touristy cards with place names, several animal cards (dogs, cats, penguins), a few art cards.
Generally very small and neat handwriting in blue pen.
Various combinations of 1 and 2 Zloty stamps, mainly featuring historic houses and monuments.

Portugal (7 cards)
All tourist viewcards with place names, one made out of cork.
3 written separately in blue ink, 2 written together in black ink, 2 printed texts.
4 cards with the same boat stamp, otherwise 2 art stamps and 1 science stamp.

Russia (31 cards)
A lot of paintings (of various quality, some famous, mostly not), some tourist viewcards, some animal cards (pigs, dogs), one handmade.
Generally very small writing, either neat, together, and curly, or very thin but high letters.
Generally at least 3 stamps per card, showing animals (bear, rabbit reindeer), buildings (the Kremlin) and scientific projects (mainly rockets).

Taiwan (27 cards)
Mostly tourist viewcards, but some paintings and quite a lot of cat cards. One 'happy new year of the dragon' card, two Beatrix Potter cards.
Again, typical Asian style writing, very neat and careful separate letters. Mainly in blue, but also many black ink cards.
The standard stamp shows yellow flowers on a purple background, but some other flowers and natural scenes too, including birds and insects.

Ukraine (14 cards)
Mostly tourist viewcards, but some drawings and one cat/book combo card.
Generally written together and quite curly, but some with separate letters and in various colours (green, black).
Many, many different stamps, at least 2 per postcard, featuring all possible subjects, mainly related to Ukrainian culture.

USA (38 cards)
Mostly tourist cards, but some art, animal, and home-made cards.
Almost all written in black ink and quite sloppy/illegible. 5 with printed-out texts, one pre-written for schoolchildren with only the name and age to be filled in.
Almost all use the standard 'abroad' stamp for the USA, which changed from a national park in Wyoming (98 cents) to Lancaster County in Pennsylvania (1$05) somewhere around New Year. Some cards have other stamps, including animals, nature, some people (including Katharine Hepburn and Mother Theresa on one card), an "American clock" and Hawaii shirts from Hawaii.

I will probably follow this up with some posts of the stamps of some separate countries (Japan, the UK), because I think they deserve more love :)

Fish painting

I finally have an example of one of my painting with clingfilm post (which proves to be one of the more popular) techniques to show you. I've been writing essays for the past two weeks, and am now waiting for someone to return a book that I really, really need to the library. To take my mind off things, I started to paint again.

Yes, crappy picture, I'm aware of it.

The photo does not show you the colours very well, but at least you can see some of it...
Now this painting was originally something else, which didn't work out, and then I turned it into a green sea-scape with one skeletal fish. I thought it might work well as a companion piece to the bird painting from my first paintings post, because they're kind of looking at each other...

Bird fish combo.

For those still interested in painting with clingfilm, this is what I did:
I first painted the background, let it dry, and then I drew a sort-of fish shape on a separate piece of paper. I scrunched up a bit of clingfilm, unscrunched it, pulled it flat across the paper, and with a small brush painted the fish figure on to the clingfilm. I then scrunched that a bit (not too much, or the paint would've run into each other even more, as it did with the first top 'rib') and put it on my canvas. I let it dry for about an hour before pulling it off.
Now I thought the white contrasted a bit too much with the rest of the painting, so I filled it in with some green, not too much, just a bit on the bottom. You can't really see it in the picture above, but here's a detail:

Even crappier picture, slightly out of focus.

I'm quite happy with how it turned out, even though it does give me a bit of a Greenpeace / save-the-seas / we-humans-are-destroying-the-planet feel. I feel like I could have added some yellow or something, but I didn't, and it turned out a bit darker than I would have anticipated, but maybe that's okay.

Anyway, I've been working on two non-vague, non-abstract, figurative things, which hopefully will be done before my essays are due, because I happen to paint better when I should actually be doing something else. Weird, I know. So, to be continued...

Lay-out stuff revisited

Okay, okay, so it took a little bit longer than I had hoped (given that my first post was on the 31st of May...), but my new lay-out is finally here! Again, background picture is one I took myself, only yesterday, and I realise it is out of focus, but let's call it artistic licence. I may change the purple in the links, because it's hard to find a colour that works in contrast wit all the backgrounds, but we'll see. I think this one will stay for a while though!

Carrot cake

So this was the first Saturday in a while I didn't have to spend moving someone or going to a theme park or writing essays (although technically I do have to write 2 essays, but I'm ignoring those for the weekend), so I decided to bake something. As Sunday is the final match of our team in Euro 2012 (unless some statistic miracle happens), I decided to bake something orange to eat when we were watching the match. Naturally, that means carrot cake.
Now I'd already made carrot cupcakes about a month ago, but this time I was going for the real deal. Although that immediately fell apart when the supermarket didn't have any cream cheese and I had to go for mon chou (which also calls itself "fresh cream cheese") instead, but as I've already seen time and again, that is simply how it works. Also, this is the point at which I rediscovered that the battery in my kitchen scales had died, so when I say that I used X grams of something, it was more of an educated guess (I think I used about 400 g of carrots, to be honest). Finally, I have literally no idea where this recipe comes from, I found it on a handwritten piece of paper inside my cookbook. It may be a simplification of another recipe, it may be something copied from the Internet, it may be a combination of several recipes, I have no idea.
Anyway, here we go then:

Ingredients:
300 g self-raising flour
200 g brown sugar
250 ml sunflower oil
4 eggs
2 teaspoons cinnamon
1 teaspoon ground ginger
1 tablespoon lemon zest (which I then forgot to add, so you can do without)
200 g carrots
100 g chopped walnuts

Line your tin with baking parchment, not only the bottom but also the sides.
Grate your carrots in a kitchen machine (you really really do not want to do this by hand. Really!). Change to the mixer and add the sugar, flour, spices, and lemon zest.
Combine the eggs and oil in a separate bowl.
While letting the machine run, pour in the oil-mixture bit by bit until you have a soft dough.
Add the chopped walnuts and mix for a little longer.
Spoon the mixture into your tin and bake for about 1 hour and 20 minutes at 150 degrees C, until firm but still springy to the touch. Let cool inside the oven with the door open, then take it out and cool further on a wire rack.

My risen cake collapsed somewhat when I opened the oven door...

For the icing, I would normally use cream cheese, but as there was only mon chou, I changed to the following:
50 g butter (room temperature)
100 g mon chou
50-100 g icing sugar (depending on how sweet you want this)
1 tablespoon lemon zest (optional, I compensated for the zest I forgot to put in the batter)

Mix the butter until it is soft and smooth. Beat in the mon chou, and finally beat in the icing sugar. Spread it out on top of the cake (make sure it is completely cooled!), trying to make it look pretty.

Dense, moist, nutty, spicy, what more do you need?

Icing does always make a cake look better, doesn't it? You can't see all the ugly lumps that appeared when my beautifully risen cake collapsed when it came into contact with the colder air. Ah well, it's supposed to be dense and moist, which it was, and you can still see some of the air bubbles as proof that it actually had risen. The ginger adds a bit of spice, while the nuts give it some more structure than the carrot cupcakes had. I think it is a success, even though it is not as orange as a true football supporter may have liked!

The story vs the words

So yesterday I got into a bit of an argument with my uncle about books. It was my mother's birthday, and my aunt and uncle had just given her a book (Breaking Dawn, in Dutch, which amused me to no end as my mother will never ever be anywhere near the stereotypical Twilight Saga reader, also, she hadn't heard of or read about any of it before...) Anyway, my uncle turned to me and said something along the lines of "it's so sad, giving people books as presents". Why, I asked him. Because you read them once and then are done with them, he said. (Ironic, since his preferred birthday presents are bottles of alcoholic substances, which rarely make it through the evening, but there you are.) I was to amazed to respond, but my aunt added; "yeah, I always read my books once, and then I'm done with them, so then I give them away." I found my voice, and said something like "the book I'm reading now I've already read 10 times before and will probably still read when I'm 50", to which my uncle snorted and said that he found that hard to believe. I then said that it all depends on what type of book you read; with some books, you are done with them after you've read them, because you know all there is to know (crime novels are a good example). But some books, which are generally called Literature, you can read over and over again, because its not about the story, its about the whole thing, the language, the message, the themes, the setting, the references, the words, the way the sentences flow, the characters, the psychology, and the story.

I think they got a bit angry after that, as if I was writing down the books they read.

But honestly, it's not as if I'm being snobbish about this. I've also read loads of books you just read once, then you know what it's all about, and then you don't have to ever read them again. Dan Brown's books are a good example: I read all of those, but only once, and I wouldn't read them again anytime soon. Once you get the plot, the whodunit, and the intended message, you're done. I've read some books for courses, some African and American and Indian literature, which I thoroughly enjoyed, but will probably never read again. I just don't get any more out of it than I already have (which is mainly due to the difference in background and literary culture, which is a shame, but it happens). This does not make these books any better or worse than 'literary novels', it just has a different purpose. (The irony here of course is that the books my aunt and uncle like to read are called "literary thrillers", which makes it seem as if they have any literary potential, while they really don't.)
I've read some books 10 times, and still don't 'get' them entirely. Atonement is a good example. Once you've read that, you know the trick, the thing, the extra surprise at the ending (which I won't spoil for you here). But that does not make you go 'owww, know I know what it was all along, I can just toss it out', it makes you go 'I have to read this again! Now that I know what it's really like, I can see the whole thing in a different light...'. And the second time you read it you discover all kinds of themes that weren't there the first time, and foreshadowing, and lines running through the novel which connect it from beginning to end even though it exists in four different parts. And then you read it again, and you discover even more... With other authors its about the use of language. Neil Gaiman is a good example here; his stories are also multi-layered, but they generally end up with the good guys winning (generally a girl) and the bad guys losing. You know this when you start. But his language, the proverbs, the little stories, the in-jokes, the references, everything is just so funny but thought provoking at the same time, that you can read it several times and still not 'get' everything out of it.
And now I'm just talking about contemporary authors, not even the great classical writers like Dickens Chekhov or Woolf or <fill-in-your-preferred-author>. Nothing much can happen in their stories, but still they are considered great authors, because it's not only about 'what happens'.

I know I've studied literature for four years, so I'm bound to look at it differently than your average 'pleasure reader', but I know there are many people out there without a degree in literature who think the same. Or experience the same, rather. And again, it's not that one type of book is better than the other, it's about what you need or want in a book, how you look at it, what it is supposed to do for you. If all you want is to be told a story, to be amused, to think about what will happen next and feel clever when you'd figured it out just a few pages before the protagonist does, then great, read on, dear friend. I would love to tell you that you're missing out, that other books could give you so much more, but if that's not the thing you're looking for (or have time for, or have the mindset for) then it won't do for you what it does for me. So we can both be happy reading what we're reading, even though we don't understand the other's choices. That's the great thing about books; you can escape in them.

Life in a day

In January 2011, Life in a Day came out. Youtube put it online for free in October 2011, which is when I first saw it. For those of you who do not know it; watch it. It is a film consisting of video clips shot by ordinary people from around the world, blended together to show life in a day. It truly does show life in a day; from births to deaths, from weddings to funerals, the mundane and the special, from city life to nature, from the joyful to the bereaved. There are some questions that are asked, and some stories come back several times, but otherwise it is a more or less chronological blend of events. The film is about 1.5 hours long, and I did not look at the clock or think about other things for the whole duration. There are not many things in this life which will keep your attention for 1.5 hours, but apparently, people just living their lives and sharing it with others will do it.
Yesterday evening, Britain in a Day came out, as part of the run-up to the British Olympics (there is a Youtube channel, but as far as I can see, you can't access it online yet). It is also 1.5 hours, and once again I watched everything without thinking too much about the outside world. Again, some stories come back several times, and some events, such as a football match between England and Spain, are shown from several angles; people inside the stadium, people watching it on tv, a man turning on the tv and his wife bickering about turning it of, etc. However, there were some fundamental differences with Life in a Day. Because it is only shot in Britain, you don't get the experience of seeing the sun come up in New Zealand while the day has not even started for most of the world, you don't see women pounding corn in Africa interspersed with our too-fast technology-crazy western world, and it does not end on the high, philosophical note as the original, with an American teenager crying in her car because her life was so ordinary for the day. Also, everything is in English, and even though there are many different religions and other culturally different groups in it, you don't get that feeling of diversity that Life in a Day gives you. You don't get the "this is what life is really like" but the "this is what Britain is really like" feeling. Which is exactly the point, and as I love British culture, this did not really matter.
But Life in a Day is definitely better. I think that we would all understand, appreciate, and accept each other and life in general more if everybody took 1.5 hours out of their day to watch it. It shows how we are all fundamentally united in our human lives. And looking at the comments on the Youtube film, I'm clearly not the only one who thinks this is a positive thing.

Finding yourself

Yesterday I had a quick chat with a friend I hadn't heard from for a while, and he was talking about how he had found his "path" and was now on the way to "search for himself". I've always had trouble with this kind of thing; taking a step back from your life, going to sit in a room, and then muse about yourself. If I may just quote John Lennon here: Life is what happens while you're busy making other plans. While you're sitting there thinking about your life, your not living your life. Also, if you were living your life (by which I mean, if you were busy enough), you wouldn't have time to spend worrying about how to live your life. You'd simply be doing it.
It was a funny coincidence, actually, because just this Friday we had a class discussion about Angels in America, and we tried to determine whether the characters were busy searching for themselves or trying to accept themselves. I think there is a big difference, and I think that most people who are "trying discover who they really are" are actually trying to accept who they really are. I can see how it is annoying when you'd always thought that you would be this adventurous world traveller, busy meeting new people and immersing yourself in new cultures, but you actually turn out to be an unmotivated software developer who never really goes out much. By saying that you're "searching for yourself", you're actually saying that you're "trying to find out why you're not who you thought you would be". This happens to a lot of people. It happens to me: I'd always hoped I would become a celebrated author/biologist living abroad and travelling a lot. It did not happen; my life is actually pretty suburbian, except for the travels abroad twice a year. However, I do accept this. I do not complain or think that I should go search for where things went wrong; I choose this life and I stand by that choice. This is who I am, at this point in time.
As we can see from the growing use of violence and antidepressants, most people get grumpy and annoyed with what their life turned out to be, and take it out on the soccer field or their children. A small group tries to search for themselves, tries to find out who they "really are" (I'm sorry, but honestly, who you "really" are is who you are right now. There is no hidden bottom drawer, or other persona, or hidden spirit, or whatever. You are you, end of story). I think both these options do not really work. There are two other things you can do: accept yourself (which is ironically what the "search yourself" people say they're trying to achieve, although generally they are talking about how they would rather live their life being more in harmony with themselves or nature or others or whatever, or be more spiritual, or accepting, which is not accepting yourself or the situation), or change the situation. Quit your job, sell your house, go travel around the world, start your own company, study something you do want to do, break up your poisonous relationship, do something. Make a change.
This is very radical, and most people say it is too much of a hassle. Fine by me, but then you should stop complaining and accept things as they are. As I mentioned before, I am not living the life I'd imagined for myself, but I still accept the situation. When I really wanted things to change, I would change them; move abroad or travel or quit my job or whatever. I realise that this becomes harder as you get older and more strings (partners, children, elderly parents, houses, work obligations) are attached, but most of the people I know who are "searching for themselves" are guys under 30, who are generally not in a relationship or very fixed job. So I would like to say to them; stop searching for yourself, you are who you are, your life is what it is, accept it and move on or change what you don't like. It's your life.

Modern theatre

As many of you will know by now, I am taking a class in modern theatre. This means I've been studying Ibsen, Strindberg, and Chekhov, Beckett, Miller, and Williams, and Albee, Churchill, and Kushner. I've enjoyed most of their plays, and seeing how they influenced each other, and were influenced by society and other literary movements. I know most of the plays I studied were "classic" modernist plays, plays on which most of our contemporary and experimental theatre is built. So when the program for the new theatre season came out, I was curious to see whether I could maybe see one or two adaptations of plays that I'd read.
It turned out that I could.
Even more, it turned out that every single play that I've read for the past semester, with the exception of Ibsen's Hedda Gabler, will be performed next year. Most of these performances will be in Dutch, and very few will be "modernised" (per the description, I am unsure how you "modernise" a "modernist" play, but there you go), but on the whole, I can just see the entire course pass me by on stage.

Now that made me think. I mean, I know most of Shakespeare's plays are still being performed (I can go see Othello and Macbeth), but these are generally modernised and show some interpretation of the play (such as the Hamlet production I saw last year, where they changed the whole thing so that Hamlet is in a psychiatric asylum and experiences the whole play inside his head, very creative). But why would we keep repeating all the "old masters" of modern theatre, without changing them? (This obviously does not concern plays in which the copyright holders forbid any productions that do not follow the original texts to the letter, such as in the case of Waiting for Godot, but those are extreme cases.)
Are they still relevant? I'm not sure if watching Death of a Salesman in Groningen in 2013 will give you the same insights about 1950s America as it did 60 years ago. Do we not have any inspiration? Not true, the adaptation of Shakespeare's plays clearly shows that things can be done with these plays, and that other interpretations are possible. Do we have too much reference for these great theatre masters that we do not dare to adapt their plays? Well, Shakespeare is even more the "grand maister" of theatre, so this can't be true either.
What is it then?
I think that people are just playing safe. If you translate a play from Norwegian or Russian or even English, you've already done 'something' to it. Even more, most of these plays take place in some Russian or Irish country house or French landscape or whatever, so maybe for us Dutchies, that is already so strange and unfamiliar that changing even more would become dangerous. Or even worse, maybe most people don't know these plays (I have to admit I didn't know them before I took this course, although I had heard about most of them, but then I didn't go to the theatre to watch plays before this course, and people who go to the theatre to watch plays generally know something about theatre). If you don't know the classic version, then the contemporary interpretation won't make any sense either.
Now I could say "this worries me" and pretend to be some cultural conservativist person, but that's not how I feel about this. It's not that I'm worried, I'm just surprised. I am very happy I get to see all these plays performed, even if it is in Dutch (generally, Dutch translations of plays tend to be not so great), and I'm happy to see them in their original forms because I haven't seen them that way yet. But I do think that 130 years after something was first performed, we could have done more with it, really. And I would just as happily go see a 'modern' interpretation of Hedda Gabler where Hedda is trying to do her research and her husband is being bored and tried to seduce the female judge hanging around their house. Either way is fine with me, I'm just happy I get to see them at all. But still, it makes you wonder...

Housing stuff

So we have been looking for a new place to live. This is nothing new, we started looking about 3 years ago, when my boyfriend moved into the one-person-household house that I lived in, effectively converting it to a 2-person-and-2-cats-household house.
There is not enough room.
I know there might be enough room if I did not have about 200 books and we didn't need two desks in the living room, but as we're not willing to throw either out, moving is the only option. Up until then, we've got a small (and very moist) basement full of stuff, piles of papers everywhere, a wardrobe closet filled with photographs, cameras, and other non-clothing stuff, and we have to hang the laundry in the middle of the living room, as there is no spare room or space for a dryer.
This works fine, most of the time, but sometimes one of us gets really annoyed (usually when we're trying to stuff another pile of papers or books or camera things on top of another big pile) and goes on the web to Search for Our New Home.

Now we have 3 options:
- Renting at a social housing agency. This is what we are doing now. There is a website you have to subscribe to, and then you get one point for each month you're subscribed, and when you have about 100 points, you can get a house. This sounds ludicrous, and it is, but it is really true. Only the very small houses (like this one) or the really crappy ones (like this one) or the ones in unsafe neighbourhoods (like this one) go for something around 50 points, but for most of them you have to be subscribed for about 8 years. Safe to say, we have not been subscribed that long, so this is quite a long shot. Also, the housing agencies are selling off a lot of their ex-rentals, so there are less houses available while the demand has gone up. Ironically, by the time we will actually qualify to rent one, our income will exceed the 34,000 Euros it can be maximum, so we won't be allowed to. So, on to option 2:
- Renting. This is just plain old renting a house, which is not rent-controlled and for which you won't get any subsidies (not that we're getting them now, but hey). There are many, many houses on offer in Groningen at the moment. Most of them have been on offer for a while. The city is tearing down some of the older boroughs and replacing them with new ones consisting of both rentals and houses you can actually buy. These are very fancy, and there is a lot on offer, but demand is quite low. However, all of them want you to have a yearly income of at least 30,000, some of them shooting up to 48,000. Needless to say, we are not making that amount of money. Also, if I were making that amount of money, I would not rent a 2-room apartment on the edge of town, I would actually buy a house. Which is the third option:
- Buying. Yes, that is not going to happen any time soon. Houses are expensive, nobody is willing to give anybody a mortgage at the moment, so everything is stuck. Also, for the same money you get a small, badly insulated, 2-room house in Groningen, you can actually get a 5-bedroom house with a garden in some of the smaller villages around here. So I'd rather go for that option. If I had any money, which I don't, or anybody to lend me the money, which they won't, so this is a no go.

So it looks like we're stuck here. Until we make enough money to get into a rental, at which point we will probably buy something, because buying is cheap and if you make enough money people will give you a loan.

And in a way, we're exemplar for the whole housing situation in the Netherlands; nobody can sell their house because those who want to buy it can't get a mortgage, those people stay stuck in the (older) rentals, thus making the companies ask ludicrous amounts of rent and income statements to make sure they make money, thus keeping us stuck in the social housing, thus keeping students stuck in their students' rooms. Added to that is that houses have been overrated in the past decades, and now the prices are going back to normal levels, a lot of people are losing money. And people have been getting mortgages which exceed the actual value of their house, and now they can't pay it back, and all is going down the drain.

In a sense, we're lucky here. We don't have a house, or obligations, or debts. We can just sit it out and wait for the prices to drop so we can immediately buy a house and skip the whole non-social housing rent phase. But in the meantime, we have a very small house, and money to spend, and we would like to get the system moving by helping out. But I don't see that happening any time soon...

Springwatch

I am a big, biiiig fan of Springwatch (and Autumnwatch, and Lambing live, and any other live nature program the BBC will throw at me). The biologist in me, who usually stays hidden under the editor and the literature fanatic, comes to the fore and starts spilling out all kinds of random biological facts, usually in response to a question or remark by my boyfriend. Generally, the presenters of the program (clearly 2 biologists and one woman needed to fill the women quota) will provide the same information about 10 seconds after I'm done, which just goes to show that we're all the same, kind of.
The program is on Monday to Thursday, with the additional Unsprung on Thursday evenings, which is kind of a mishmash of quizzes and guests and documentaries and questions and letters and overall happy chaos. I love every minute of it.

But now I've discovered the webcams. I generally try to stay away from such things, especially as there was this nuthatch family with one small runt bird who was clearly struggling, and I didn't want to see him die right before my eyes (he did die, sadly, but such is nature (and the loads of watchers complaining that Springwatch didn't intervene and didn't hand raise the young are completely deluded as to what nature is really like)). But today, the other nuthatches were fledging. I saw the last one go, hanging on to the side of the nestbox for a few seconds, looking directly into the camera, and then jumping off, into the wide world.
And now I'm hooked, of course.
They change the cameras every several hours, so where there were blue tits now you can watch the bats, or the barn owls. The chaffinches are about to go, I thought, because they are getting very restless (and a bit too big for their nest). The sanderling parents are close to the railway, and they keep moving away when a train goes past, but now there is a cuckoo hanging around their nest and this may turn out to be baaaad... Yes, it's a real life nature soap.

The real thing is always better, of course, and I love watching the little blackbird family in our garden, or the troops of blue tits that patrol our birch tree, or seeing the birds on the feeder in winter. And I love the program, because I recognise the presenter's drive to explain and show and make people see and love and enjoy nature. And today we were walking through the park, and it turn out that the city herd (yes, Groningen has one) was being sheared right then and there, and I love being close to the sheep and seeing and touching and smelling them (well, maybe not so much smelling them).
But still. You can't stop watching them.
Thankfully it's only one more week before they go away again, and I know there are many many more webcams out there, but as long as I don't know where, I'm okay. No need to get emotionally attached to even more animals. Also, I'm working on a really big essay at the moment, and staring at some wood warbler chicks for a couple of minutes will be a good relaxation. Or so I tell myself...