Lessons Learned – Credit cards, fruit, and where not to sit

Whenever you visit a new country, you expect that things are going to be different.  Some surprises are good (this chocolate is amazing!) and some are bad (what do you mean you don’t take Visa?).  Here’s what we’ve learned in our first few days in the Netherlands.

The Dutch don’t use credit cards

If you plan to travel to areas that aren’t super touristy, you’re going to need a lot of cash.  Unlike pretty much everywhere else I’ve visited in Europe, it is very difficult to use a credit card here.  Even my Chase Sapphire Preferred Visa card that is marketed as the best travel credit card ever is rarely accepted.  When you go to pay for things, it looks like they take credit cards because you see the little machine to stick your card in to, but pretty much every time, the card is rejected.  The Dutch have special debit cards they use to make purchases.  So much for racking up a lot of credit card rewards points.

It’s expensive to get cash

Since we can hardly use our credit cards, we need to use a lot of cash.  I normally carry $10-$20 in my wallet, so I hate walking around with a lot of cash – it makes me feel vulnerable.  When you withdraw cash from foreign ATMs, you have to pay a foreign transaction fee.  At our bank it’s 3%.  If this was only a 1-2 week trip, this wouldn’t be that big of a deal.  We’d suck it up and accept the fact we’re going to loose the equivalent of a dinner out in foreign transaction fees.  But a 2 month trip?  Ugh.  We definitely should have brought a bunch of cash with us and exchanged it for Euros at a bank here.  That would have saved us money in the long run.  A call to our bank last night confirmed we are screwed.

I miss my kitchen

I really like to cook.  But it’s turned me in to kind of a high maintenance chef.  Dutch houses are small, so in turn, Dutch kitchens are small.  They don’t have the space we are used to in the U.S. so there is minimal counter space for prepping food.  The refrigerator is small.  The oven is smaller.  The freezer is separate and on the 3rd floor of the house.  There’s no garbage disposal, no utensil that resembles my favorite rubber spatula and the burners on the stove all seem way hotter than I am used to.  I really want some Pyrex storage containers, bigger cereal bowls, and larger drinking glasses.  The water glasses are like shot glasses.  In a nostalgic way, they remind me of the ones my grandparents used to have at their house.  I have to fill mine up 100 times a day.

What is going on with the produce in the U.S.? 

Produce in the U.S. is on steroids.  Seriously.  When we arrived at our house, the family had bought a few kiwis and a pineapple for us.  My first thought was “that’s a small pineapple”.  Then we went to the grocery store.  Everything is small.  The pineapples, strawberries, grapes, watermelons, pretty much every fruit is about half the size it is in the U.S.   We eat a whole cantaloupe for dinner.  Why is U.S. fruit so big?  Do I even want to know?

Not all cobblestones are created equal

This morning we took a tour of the big tower in the center of town.  We biked there, parked our bikes and I took out two bananas to feed the kids before we started climbing 300+ steps to the top.  There was a little patch of cobblestone area near the bikes that was in the shade, so Jack, Ben and I sat there while Brian locked up the bikes.  All seemed good.  We took the tour and climbed the tower.  After the tour, the guide says to me “Don’t sit on that part of the plaza.  That circle part is a urinal at night.”.  Seriously?  Ewwwww!!!  We had a picnic in (or nearby?) a urinal.  I have no idea how we were supposed to know that – it looks completely normal during the day.  I’m going to have to check this out at night to see just how grossed out I should be right now.

We need to be more welcoming to people who don’t speak our language

I’m jealous of the family we’re exchanging homes with.  They are visiting the U.S. for the first time, but already speak fluent English.  They are going to be able to make friends and communicate with other people way better than we are.  They sent us a message saying a family they met at the park invited them to dinner later this week.  How cool is that?  Way to be welcoming, Madison!  It’s not the same here for us.  A lot of people try to talk to us when we’re out (I think they are trying to tell us Ben is cute…people love toddlers), but when we respond in English we get a lot of blank stares.  It’s isolating to not speak the same language, and it gives me a great respect for those people trying to navigate the U.S. with little or no English.  We’ve been using Google translator a lot to help decipher menus, grocery store labels, and printed materials, but it only gets it right about 50% of the time.  For a hyper-social person like Brian, the limited number of English speaking people is tough.  And Jack continues to approach pretty much every kid at the park with “How old are you?” and they stare at him like he’s an alien.

We have way too much stuff

I like minimalism.  I read Marie Kondo’s book The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up and implemented a lot of her principles at our house.  I donated several bags of clothing, shoes and housewares that we never used.  I try to control the flow of stuff into our house.  But it’s still not enough.  We could all probably get rid of half of what we own and we’d be fine.  The Dutch live a much simpler life and, I assume, are equally happy.  The family we’re staying with lives in a 1,300 sq. ft. house with 4 people.  There is no basement.  No giant garage for storage.  No walk-in closets in the bedrooms and no closet in the bathroom.  Yet their house looks cute, tidy and organized.  There isn’t stuff everywhere because they just don’t have that much stuff.  All the kids toys are in one spot in the living room.  They have one TV in the living room, not five TVs in every room of the house.

We need to design our cities for people, not cars

There will be a much longer post on this someday.  But our cities are designed so backwards.  This is quickly becoming a passion of mine.  I love that bikes get to park right by the front door and the cars are in parking ramps 1-2 blocks away from many destinations.  I love that the buildings abut the sidewalks, not the parking lots.  When you look around, you see more people walking and biking than cars driving.  The city feels alive, connected, welcoming.