Last week Starbucks opened a branch here in Utrecht, which didn’t go unnoticed. I’m not one of those people who are completely nuts about coffee, but I am quite fond of it. I went by Central Station, but the line was much too long. I like coffee, but I’m not going to stand in line like it’s Michael Jackson tickets.

Meanwhile, Greg debunks the idea that chains actually have a consistent product and asks why would people flock to Starbucks when they could be having better coffee at a local outlet? The obvious answer is: preconception. Much could probably be attributed to MacDonalds, who have forever maintained that they serve you the same food no matter where you are. Starbucks doesn’t really have to do anything to push that idea, it’s already been implanted.

But the deeper reason is that this country doesn’t really have a coffee culture. Yet. When I moved here I was pleased to find out that koffie is part of the fabric of this society. It isn’t a “new” thing like it is in, say, Poland, where tea has always been the dominant beverage. But the Dutch koffie predates the cawfee of today. In countries like Poland and Norway, without a strong existing coffee culture, the yuppie caffè latte gimmick has been a big hit in recent years. (Although in Norway, to “our” credit, most of the coffee places are local entrepreneurs, not foreign chains, and provide considerably better ambiance than sitting in a Starbucks.)  Not so here. With an existing “coffee infrastructure”, Holland has not been quite the fertile ground, and the coffee revolution that has placed a coffee place on every corner hasn’t happened. Coffee is still, by and large, the traditional sit down experience, and an unremarkable, humble one at that.

You won’t find a lot of cafés that serve a caffè latte, or even a solid espresso. Around these parts coffee is still, much of the time, “just coffee”. Not the fast food inspired, to-go in a paper cup with a selection of 30 different drinks.

The Netherlands, a paradise for bikers. Twelve million bikes on seventeen thousand kilometers of dedicated bike paths. And a country so flat that you’ll never be pushing your bike uphill because the hill is too steep – there is no hill. There’s basically no corner of the country that isn’t accessible to a biker, the place sometimes looks like a bike track with a country attached to it.

And yet, something is wrong. Very wrong.

You might think “Hey the Dutch are nuts about biking, I bet they have great bikes over there!”. You’d be wrong. The bikes in use in this country are something out of an old Soviet factory. Single speed, pedal brake, black paint (or painted a bright color to conceal rampant corrosion), with a regular chain for locking. Often you can hear them coming, wheels spinning unevenly on the axle because the rims are slightly bent, lights fastened poorly and about to fall off, crank screeching against the panel that conceals the chain. Not surprisingly, bike repair is a thriving business in this country, repair shops are everywhere.

In fact, these old bikes are so dominant that it’s difficult to find a bike that isn’t one of these historical exhibits. Furthermore, bike theft is so widespread that people don’t even want to own anything worth stealing. (A guy once told me he loses roughly one bike per year to theft.) Dutch people love to joke that the lock usually is worth more than the bike is. That’s true, I just don’t see why that is supposed to be funny. I wouldn’t want to live in a house where the lock on the front door is worth more than the house itself.

Then there are the bike lanes. Yes, they are dedicated to bikes, and yes they are separate from motorized traffic. What you probably don’t expect, however, is just how boring it is to ride on them. They are completely flat, they have their own traffic lights, and even indicators for traffic going in different directions. It’s no wonder bikes don’t have any gears, there’s no way you could build up any speed before you have to stop at the next light. It is the experience of urban biking with the added bureaucracy of driving a car

Not only that, traffic regulations for bikers not only exist, they are enforced. That means you have tax collecting traffic cops just waiting to write you a ticket for any number of trivialities, like riding on the sidewalk (even when it’s void of pedestrians), riding a light when there’s no traffic, or riding without lights. Lights which, of course, will be stolen unless you obsessively remove them every time you park the bike. (Unless the whole bike gets stolen instead.) It’s almost a wonder you don’t have to fill in a form every time.

Then there is the terrain. When you’re not biking in a town, which is about as much fun as driving a car in heavy traffic, you will find yourself somewhere on the grid of bike lanes that connect towns, out in the great outdoors. What fun! Well, at least until you realize that every slice of the country looks almost exactly the same, and the only thing there is to see anywhere is grasslands with canals crossing them. If you’re lucky you might spot a forest, but they are very uncommon. And it’s completely flat, so not only is there nothing to see here, you’re well aware of the fact that 10km down the road there’s also nothing. Scenery wise, this country is as close as you get to a desert.

The Dutch response to all of this? “Biking was never supposed to be fun, it’s transport.” Well, there you have it, it doesn’t get more depressing than that. “Music an art form? We just needed a beat the soldiers could march to.”

Bikes gets stolen constantly and noone gives a shit. Check it.

I’m down three bikes so far, in two years. Starting with this one. I also had another bike vandalized once.

In two years in Holland I’ve been to a doctor twice. That’s probably even a bit above average compared to the numbers over the last decade or so. As I’m now cracking the two year mark I went again today. Over the holidays I caught this nasty flu that’s been pestering me for a week, with lots of coughing, not much sleep, and a general feeling of sluggishness.

I ended up going to this all night clinic after I went to the wrong location and got bounced around a little. I would have gone to the same place as the last two visits, but it’s across town and with my bike being stolen yet again, it’s just too far away. There is this place where they have a bunch of barracks (like at a construction site) and for some reason the all night clinic is located there. Odd place for a clinic. As I walk in I immediately get this strange sensation of having entered another dimension. There is a big plate of glass between me and the receptionist, with no holes and nothing that opens up. Only that little slot in the counter for passing stuff back and forth. It’s like I’m in a recording booth, because she has to press in a button while she’s talking to me for me to hear. In the back there are about 6 women sitting behind computers talking into headsets. Like people are calling in to order taxis and pizzas or something. This solid booth is the landing for anyone who enters the clinic. There is another solid door between it and the waiting room, with a lock on it. So if you don’t have an appointment or you can’t get along with the receptionist, she’s gonna keep you from getting in there.

The receptionist I got (out of the 6 who were in the room) wasn’t the most accommodating. She would ask questions in Dutch, I would answer in English, she would talk in Dutch again. When I didn’t understand, she would bite the bullet and speak English, and then immediately go Dutch again. Most people when faced with this situation decide to have it in just one language. I don’t have Dutch medical insurance, so I would “be paying”. Okay, how much? 77 euro. That is… for one visit? Yes. (Not for a coupon of a dozen tickets or something.) And it absolutely had to be in cash. You would think for a place that isolates its staff behind bomb proof glass they would be more comfortable with electronic transfers and not having any hard money on site. Okay, but I don’t have that kind of money on me. I haven’t carried around sums like that since… well, ever. The nearest ATM is pretty far away too. Utrecht is very densely populated, but it is mostly suburbia-like, not city. So I get an appointment made and I step on it to get back in 30 minutes.

My appointment was.. short, but brief (like an English teacher of mine once quipped about a presentation I’d given). It was only as long as it needed to be: 6 minutes. 77 bucks for 6 minutes, so that means I paid 988 euro/hour to see my doctor. Am I crazy or is that rather high? Then again, if I had renewed my Dutch medical insurance, that goes for 300/year. I’d rather pay 77 once or even twice a year.

So I get out of there, past the waiting room, and into the tiny-but-freezing all night pharmacy. This room isn’t even heated. There’s only one guy working there and he’s not especially fast, so just waiting for him to process one customer ahead of me took 10 minutes. Here too the sheet of glass. I was amazed by how small the place is. This is the pharmacy attached to the all night/weekends/holidays clinic, so whatever drugs you’d need at a regular pharmacy, you might need them here too, it’s the one place in town that stays open. And he’s only got one room with a bunch of shelves and filing cabinets.

I saw this note glued on the atm machine in the supermarket and it freaked me out. “Small amounts are also processed without charge.” If they just glued that on *now* wtf was the case until now???

Isn’t that a contradiction in terms, though? “Now you pay for free.” As opposed to “Until now you’ve been paying us for the privilege of paying us”?