Oma's Pages #24

Oma’s Pages #24

One year ago today when we arrived in the Netherlands and drove to where we were going to live in Groningen, this is what our street looked like right by our apartment on Albertine Agnesstraat. If you look very closely you can see that the road is made of bricks. Each brick is put into place one at a time. The road was under construction. It was not very wide and with the construction it made it even smaller. We had to drive very carefully. I have included pictures of how the roads are replaced one brick at a time. 

Have any of you ever seen a road that cars drive on that is made of bricks?

Oma's Pages #23

Oma’s Pages #23

From our apartment we can see the apartments across the small road. As you can see none of the people across the way drive cars. They ride bicycles. You can go anyplace in this town faster on a bicycle than you can in a car. The brown thing you can see is a baby carrier on the front of the mom’s bicycle. 

Things are very different here than they are at home. How do Mom’s carry their babies around where you are? Do they have bicycle carriers like this one?

Oma's Pages #22

Oma’s Pages #22

After we got our big bed and some pots and pans, things began to settle down a little bit and I thought maybe we were getting into a kind of settled routine. We were still looking for another place to live and it was freezing cold in our apartment, but I was getting used to all the little nitty natty details and they did not bother me so much.

Getting comfortable as a Senior Couple missionary for me must not be allowed because as soon as I think things are finally going along okay.... something happens.

What happened this time was Opa and I had been out working all day. We were at JoVo”s until very late at night. We came home to find no place to park so we had to park over by a flooring store and shopping center. We had to walk about half a kilometer home in freezing wind. The road we had to walk home on went up a small hill and then down under a bridge, so it was very slippery. And I always have to wear church clothes so I also have to wear Church shoes that are hard to walk in even when the  weather is good.

It was nearly 1:00 am when we finally got back to the apartment. We were both exhausted. By the time we got everything put away and knelt down by our bed to say our prayers it was 2:15 am. We leaned on the bed and started to pray......

All of a sudden..... Boom..... The bed caved in on the side where we were praying. We now had a slippery slide for a bed. OH Darn!!!!!!   We were sooooo tired and it was sooo cold kneeling on that cold floor..... and the bed we were going to finally be able to sleep in, just broke. We both just dropped down on our behinds and started to laugh. 

Opa looked around the apartment. We had no tools to fix the bed with. Now that was a first... Opa with no tools! We had no bed, no tools, and no heat. It was 2:30 in the morning and we were to tired to think of anything else to do.

We each grabbed an end of the mattress, pulled, shoved, and pushed it into the living room. That mattress took up every bit of space we had in the living room and that was after we pushed all the furniture flat against the wall. Opa left a small space at the bottom of the bed so we could walk past the bed to get to the toilet. I put an extra pair of socks on my feet. We pulled our dek bed (duvet) over us and fell asleep.

The next day we had to find a home improvement store so Opa could buy the tools and parts he needed to fix our bed. The underneath part (like the springs part, or the box springs) of our bed is made out of bowed boards. We do not have box springs or springs of any kind like you have in your beds. Have any of you had your bed fall apart just when you wanted to go to bed?

Oma's Pages #21

Oma’s Pages #21

And then there was the door to the apartment. There was not any door nob like we have at home.

On the outside of the door it looks like a regular door nob but it does not turn. It is just a handle to hold onto. Below the door nob is where you put your key, hold the door nob, pull back and turn the key.... most of the time it worked. Occasionally Opa’s key would not work so then I would take my key and take a turn at opening it. I had to turn it all the way around until I felt it click. 

It reminded me of the old post office in Garland when I was growing up. I could barely reach the Buchanan post box. I remember turning the nob until I heard it click and then I could turn the small nob to open it. That is the way my door in Holland opened.

Just below the door nob was our mail post slot. We could receive anything that would fit through the slot. If it was bigger a man would come to our door. If we were not home, he would leave us a message and we had to go to a store that had a mail desk to get our package. 

On the inside of the door there was no door nob at all. Instead of a door nob there was a sideways latch with a pull string on it. You can actually lock yourself into your house from the inside. We know of mothers who lock their children in their house when they leave so the children do not go outside where it is not safe. Things are a lot different here than at home.

Oma's Pages #20

Oma’s Pages #20

The garbage was another interesting adventure. Some people in Groningen can put out garbage cans like we do in Utah, but mostly that is something only for businesses. The rest of the people have to take their garbage to a garbage location. There is usually one somewhere on the street close to where you live.

When we first arrived at Albertine Agnesstraat there was garbage in the kitchen garbage can so I asked a man who was helping us how to get rid of the garbage. He looked around a bit and then said, “Just bag it up and put it in the shed behind your apartment and forget about it.”

At the Church you have to walk down the street about a block, then turn the corner and walk halfway up another street to get to the garbage place.

As you can see in the picture, the garbage place thingy is closed and you cannot get into it unless you have a pass card.

Part of your expenses for living in a city is to have one of the pass cards so you can get rid of your garbage. But even that is not exactly correct. Here in Groningen you cannot put anything that is glass in the garbage. If you get caught putting glass in the garbage you will be fined 65 euros which is $92.00 in US money. You have to take your glass to a glass garbage place. You can find a glass garbage place near by some of the grocery stores or shopping centers. At the glass garbage place you have to sort your glass by green, brown, or clear glass and put your glass in the appropriate slot.

Your city garbage pass allows you to put garbage in the containers 200 times in one year. This is about twice a week. You can only put one large bag in the container at a time. All of this is very different from how it is in the USA.

Do you help do the garbage at your house? What do you do to help?

Oma's Pages #19, November 11, 2011

Oma’s Pages #19

The biggest problem we had in this apartment was not the cold showers, not the small living space, not the missing kitchen table, not the fact that we have no place to put anything. The biggest problem we had was the parking. 

We began to know the cars we saw by the names we gave them. There was Mr. Salmon and Mr. Orange, and Miss Pink. Every day I would look to see where they were parked. Most of the cars never moved. There were not enough places for everybody to park so about 5 or 6:00 pm all the parking places were gone. Because of our work with the Young Adults and the people we had to visit in Leeuwarden we never got home early. So we never had a place to park near our apartment.

There is saying in Groningen that no matter which way you go, the wind is always against you and that is the truth. No matter where we parked, it was freezing cold with a fierce wind. We felt like popsicles by the time we got into the apartment. The ground where we walked was usually covered with ice so it was also slick. Sometimes we had to park about half a mile away from where we lived. A lot of nights it was midnight before we got home so it was also kind of scary to walk home that late in the cold wind on slick roads and walkways.

Because most of the cars never moved there were only about ten or twenty spots each day that opened up for people to park in. We began to notice that the car we named “Old Saab” NEVER moved. Every day I looked to see if it moved. As the snow came it froze on it and then more snow piled on top of that. This car was an old restored Saab. We began to say that it really wasn’t restored.... it just had never been driven so it had not aged... That was a joke but we never saw it move.


One day we even found a parking space right behind Old Saab. It was like I could feel that car's spirit.... if cars can have spirits.... I don't know, but I really liked that car.

Then one day we came home in the middle of the day and as we drove around the corner by our apartment we saw Old Saab driving out of the neighborhood. We never saw it again. I was glad we got to see it leave since it had become my friend. I would talk to it whenever we walked by it on our to and from wherever we had parked our car. We have driven back to that neighborhood several times to see if we could find Old Saab, but we have never seen it again since the day we watched it drive away.

Oma's Pages #18, November 5, 2011

Oma’s Pages #18

When we arrived it was almost Christmas. Do you remember that we had Saint Nicholas Day on the Sunday we were still in the Mission Training Center. We still had to go almost another week before we left for Holland on Friday. We arrived in Holland on December 11, 2010. For the first few days everything was crazy. We came with very bad colds, so we were sick. We were trying to learn all the things we had to do, and it felt like we could never do everything.

We had to keep the apartment totally clean, spotless, and with everything out of sight and put away every time we walked out of it. We had to do laundry at night because we could not hang it up during the day. We had to learn how to drive in the country again, and we had to learn how to drive this very strange car. It was very very hard.

One day I looked up and thought, it is going to be Christmas and we don’t have one thing in this apartment to remind us of this holiday. We had been told we would be moving soon so we did not want to buy a tree. Besides if we bought a tree we would have to buy something to put on the tree, and what would we do with that stuff when Christmas was over. We did not have room for the things we brought with us. We did not want to add anything more to our mess.

I had sent myself boxes of things that we would need after we arrived. I decided those boxes would be our Christmas gifts. Some of them had been sent several months before and I could not remember what was in them. Opa had no idea what was in any of them so it would be a surprise for all of us.

We gathered up the boxes from the Steinvoorte’s and built ourselves a Christmas tree with them. I put all the pictures I had on the tree. They were pictures of all of you guys and of Jesus Christ. And isn’t that what Christmas is all about anyway, Jesus Christ and Family.... So we were set!