The Importance of Not Being Idle

Two months ago I was packing three big suitcases, for the first time in my life. Together with my girlfriend, we decided to move in together, change jobs, and move to the Netherlands.

This was not an easy decision, but for a long while I had felt as it was an inescapable one. Greece, certainly one of the countries with the most beautiful pieces of this planet, is in decline. This is common knowledge. There is currently a census underway, and knowing that the last one was in 2011, one year after the country signed its first Memorandum it will be interesting to see how the population has changed. I expect to see a noticeable absence of people in ages 25-45.

Booking a ticket to the Netherlands was easy. Booking a hotel for the first couple of weeks was quick. Saying goodbyes was tough. Finding an apartment was challenging.

The apartments/houses here are basically for crazy people. The rent can easily take more than 50% of your net salary for a one-bedroom 50m^2^ 100-year-old mouse-friendly, mold-full spot in Amsterdam. Bring your own floors too (in some cases)! No, really, houses are up for rent without a floor. And possibly the previous tenant got into the same situation and left with the floor, since he was the one who put it in.

The job search wasn’t ideal either. I made the mistake of applying for a position advertised by a recruitment agency and had to endure subtle ridicule, unsolicited phone calls, and pushy people for the whole summer. Most companies I applied directly to, though, were ok on average.

I applied to a total of 32 positions, as a mid-level DevOps Engineer, for similarly titled positions. In the end, I was rejected 17 times (only 2 of them told me why - 1 because of high salary expectations, 1 because of inadequate coding expertise), I declined 9 of them (for reasons such as compensation, actual day-to-day work, bad behavior during interview), got 3 offers (I guess I could have got ~5 if I hadn’t declined a couple more earlier in the process), accepted 2, had a fight with one of those (I did not initiate it) and signed the other.

We miss the sun. We miss our friends. We miss going out and seeing people ad-hoc. Here, everyone is (mostly) strictly minding their own business and (mostly) only talk to you in the street if they want you to move/stand aside. We miss the food. Do the Dutch cook on a daily basis? I guess not, otherwise there should be more traditional dishes, and I definitely don’t count the bitterballen bullshit as traditional, or as food. Deep-frying everything is not food and won’t count as traditional for sure…

We are getting used to living here - slowly.