never ship goods to Amsterdam

After a long wait (4-8 weeks longer than originally estimated), Tuesday was moving day. The (British) movers were supposed to arrive at "lunchtime," and we told the Turkish family to come at 3, since all they had to do was hoist two items (a dresser and a bookcase).

At 2:15 our Turkish friend showed up (his role was to translate to the Turkish family, who spoke only Turkish and a small amount of Dutch).

At 2:30 the movers showed up... sans stuff, which was parked on the other side of the river, because they couldn't fit their ENORMOUS TRACTOR TRAILER onto our street. Specifically, around the corners to get onto our street, which was plenty wide itself. So they parked as close as they could, in view of our apartment but with a river in the way.

So, we called the Turkish family (thankfully our translator friend was early) and told them to come an hour later. Apparently they were displeased. Then there was a series of phone calls to the department secretary and the city (to see if they could remove a post from the bike path... but to get a worker out to remove the post, you have to APPLY WEEKS IN ADVANCE; the city just told us to drive the wrong way on the one-way street, which the driver refused to do). I ran through some other possibilities in my head... Was there an unused boat nearby? How much could my bicycle carry? Both ideas sounded possibly disastrous.

So we had to rent a van, which I had no idea how to say in Dutch. Eventually I found a place that spoke good enough English that they could help us find another place that did rent vans, and also that the movers could get to, so that they could load up the van. (This plan was devised by Casey, who was using my cell phone to talk to the movers' UK headquarters at the same time that I was going through the car rental section in the phone book.)

The movers, by the way, came over on the ferry from England at 4am Tuesday, had one move in Leiden (~an hour away), then another job somewhere else, then ours, then two or three more Tuesday night, then one Wednesday morning, then they had to go to Belgium for a few more that day, and Germany on Thursday. At one point the dispatcher in the UK told me that they were going to go on to their next job, and I somehow convinced her that we were on the verge of figuring this all out.

Back to the van rental. Casey and I aren't legal to drive in Europe, we think, and also the vans were stick shift, which Casey can't drive. No problem, the truck driver's well qualified! Except that by the time they finished filling out all the paperwork for the car rental, they only had an hour before the police had told them they had to be out of the city limits (at 6pm)... So WE had to carry most of the stuff up the stairs (including our friend who was only supposed to be here to translate).

In the meantime the Turkish family had announced that they had another job and couldn't come back later. So I had frantically called Casey's department secretary for suggestions, and she eventually found two astronomers in the department (!) who were Dutch and therefore had used the pulley system, and also a rental place for this stuff around the corner. In the meantime I emailed an alleged mover on Craig's List. I considered moving the stuff into Casey's office until we could find a way to get it up the stairs. Ultimately the Turkish family called back and said that they'd do it, but for 2.5 times what they'd asked for originally. Fine. They'd be there at 7.

Even with the movers AND the three of us taking stuff upstairs, the movers didn't have time to return the van. Of the three of us left (Casey, our friend, and me), I was the only one who knew how to drive a stick shift. Which meant that I had to return the van. I had to DRIVE A VAN through Amsterdam. I was not on the rental contract, so I really don't think it was legal for me to drive, aside from the license and insurance issues. Plus I had no idea what half of the pictogram street signs meant. Like the sign for "one way: do not enter".. luckily Casey did. (It's a car. THAT'S the sign.)

By this time it was rush hour. I stayed in 1st and 2nd gears the whole way, because there were so many bicycles... and also because I was concerned about where 3rd gear was. Thankfully Casey had found a branch of the rental company that was not far at all (~10 min run), but with all the unexpected one-way streets, it felt like aeons. I'm very glad my aunt taught me how to drive stick (10 or so years ago).

We returned the van, and while Casey was waiting to sign more paperwork, I ran home. The Turkish family was early, so we started attaching the pulley and cables. We'd actually left a lot more than two items for them, since the impossibly strong movers didn't have enough time to take much of the stuff up the stairs. Today's photo is of one of the brothers preparing to guide a load onto our balcony. There's a thin diagonal cable coming off the load, which ran down to Casey, who was standing in the street so as to pull the load away from the neighbor's balcony while not adding any weight to the load. (The thin horizontal line is a street light.) Several neighbors came out to watch the spectacle, too.

Somewhere in all that, our neighbor's cat disappeared. I'm worried it ran outside while nobody was looking (we had to go through his upstairs part to get to the hook, and his upstairs part shares a hallway with our apartment, which was totally open to the outside, and for a while everyone was paying attention to the hook/pulley system and not to the front door). Our neighbor kept appearing when I wasn't expecting him, shaking a container of dry cat food with the intention of flushing out his hiding cat. (SO alarming.) It's probably fine; cats aren't stupid. But still, we were huge nuisances to him and it sucks that his cat disappeared.

So now our stuff is all inside. The movers were supposed to unpack it and take away all the boxes and paper, I think. At the very least they were supposed to unwrap the furniture and take away THAT paper (four-ply, one plastic-coated). And there's A LOT. Apparently there's a reality show here called "Environmental Police" (but in Dutch), and these police go around and give 50 euro tickets to people who improperly dispose of garbage. And apparently the bulk of the program is people who have just moved in and who throw out their packing material before garbage day. Which means we had to keep these mountains of paper and boxes until Wednesday night, at which point we were afraid to push it, and only threw out an armload. We'll see how long it takes us to make a dent in these piles. We did find someone who's moving soon and can use some boxes and packing material from inside the boxes, but not all of it survived well. And the furniture paper can't be reused.

Incidentally, we used the most highly recommended international forwarders in the US. I'll close with a snippet from an IM conversation from Tuesday night:

S-A says: (10:25:29 PM)
I shall remember this story as further proof of what you said before -- never take your stuff if moving to Europe.

Jessica says: (10:25:40 PM)
never.

Jessica says: (10:26:06 PM)
although i can recommend a cheap turkish family who's quite skilled with the pulley.