Christmassy Day out in the Netherlands

As a quick follow up to my last post, and with Christmas just 1 month away...

If you are looking for a Christmassy day out with the kids in the Netherlands, the closest thing I've found to visiting Santa's grotto, is a trip to Intratuin (Garden centre).  They have a really great, big and beautiful Kerstmarkt (Christmas market), with a Christmas village my kids loved!

IKEA, helping the needy...especially in Holland

The population of the Netherlands is 16,570,613, tiny compared to the UK which has 60,209,500 people. So if the population of Netherlands is 27.5% of the size of the UK, how come, HOW COME, the Netherlands has 12 IKEAs, but the UK only has 15?

Map source: IKEA.nl and IKEA.co.uk


Nothing is different about the stores. In both countries IKEA follows the exact same store format, which guides you through the different rooms of a house upstairs, and then kitchen ware, rugs, lighting, pictures and plants downstairs. In both stores you need to queue for half an hour to pay for your shopping, but in the Netherlands of course that's because only 10% of the available cash tills are in service at any one time.

The only reason I can think of that might explain why there is a greater availability of IKEAs in Holland per person is that it is in fact a Dutch owned organisation. IKEA is registered as a foundation in the Netherlands, which basically gives it similar rights to a charity organisation and better tax rates etc. I guess the idea is that IKEA is creating low-cost furniture for the needy. Perhaps the Dutch are just more needy than the British.

The Dutch Equivalent of...#3: Bond Street

Continuing the shopping theme once again, this post is a comparison between the most expensive/luxury shopping streets in Amsterdam and London. These are:

Bond Street – London
Pieter Cornelisz Hooftstraat – Amsterdam

Where the street names come from
Pieter Corneliszoon Hooft was a seventieth century poet, playwright and historian.

Sir Thomas Bond was the head of a syndicate of developers who purchased a Piccadilly mansion called Clarendon House in 1683 and proceeded to demolish the house and develop the area (source Wikipedia). "Bond Street" doesn’t actually exist: as the street is divided into two parts known as Old Bond Street and New Bond Street.

Shopping
Most shops along Bond Street are fashion boutiques, including outlets of top designer brands such as Emporio Armani, Burberry, Dolce & Gabanna, Louis Vuitton, Ralph Lauren, Joseph, MaxMara and Prada. At the Old Bond Street end of the street there are also several jewelers including Bulgari and Cartier. Pascal bought my engagement ring from a tiny Bond Street jewelry shop called Moira, and both our wedding rings are also from that shop.

PC Hooftstraat is lined by pretty much the same list of boutiques. Gucci, Louis Vuitton, Bulgari, Cartier, Ralph Lauren, Dolce & Gabbana, Emporio Armani and Chanel are all here too.

The IT Crowd, and their cars
Both streets have pretty strict rules on parking, but you will usually see a large black Bentley or Porsche Cayenne parked up directly outside one of the shops. In England these cars will always have intriguing private number plates, which lead you to suspect you might know which famous person owns the car.

PC Hooftstraat is very popular for cruising in posh cars or SUVs. It’s a one-way street, but on a sunny day you’ll see many big cars pass slowly by several times with their roofs down, while the passengers check-out their surroundings, and more likely allow themselves to be checked out by pedestrians.

How expensive?
Here’s a shocking comparison for you…

Bond Street = Average of £650 per square foot per year for retailers (2006) (Source)
PC Hooftstraat = Between €800 and €1100 per square metre (2007) (Source)

This doesn’t sound so bad until you do the maths. By my calculations, this can be converted into the following Anglo/Euro friendly price lists

PC Hooftstraat Price List:

• Euro price for one square metre = 800 - 1100
• Pound price for one square metre = 542.30 – 745.67
• Pound price for one square foot = 165.33 – 227.34
• Euro price for one square foot = 243.90 – 335.37

Bond Street Price List:

• Euro price for one square metre = 3145.09
• Pound price for one square metre = 2132
• Pound price for one square foot = 650
• Euro price for one square foot = 958.87

I'm not rich enough to drink Ribena

I ran out of Ribena stock around about Easter time. My friends and family can no longer easily bring it to me in the plane from England for risk of being arrested as terrorists or having all their clothes dyed purple.

Local supermarkets don't really have an equilavent in Holland (see previous post: Things that cannot be bought at my local Albert Heijn) so I thought I'd check the Internet for any shops or online stores where I could order a new batch in.

I found an online shop: Thomas Green's. The downside is I'd need to pay 8 Euros per 1 litre bottle. If I restocked for 6 months worth of supply I'd be kissing goodbye to 100 Euros or so.

I'm not sure it's worth it. I'd be better off drinking posh wine all the time.

The Dutch equivalent of…#2: Oxford Street

The main, affordable, shopping streets in London and Amsterdam are:

• Amsterdam - Kalverstraat
• London - Oxford Street

This post is about these two streets...

Shopping:
Oxford Street has more than 300 shops, I’m not sure how many there are on Kalverstraat. Never-the-less there are many shops which you can find at least one of on both streets including: River Island, Zara, H&M, Esprit, Mexx, Morgan, Miss Sixty, O’Neill, Nike, Foot Locker, Waterstones and stinking old Lush. Although this sounds like good news for an English girl in a foreign land, the Amsterdam versions of the shops are normally tiny in comparison to the size of the London ones.

History:
Oxford Street follows the route of a Roman road which linked Hampshire with Colchester and became one of the major routes in and out of London.

The oldest documented reference to ‘die Calverstraete’ dates from the January 1393. The name “Klaverstraat” refers to the previous trading in cows, oxen and calves which took place in the street until 1629. After the disappearance of the cattle-market, the Kalverstraat turned into a shopping street with broader appeal.

Opening hours:
Amazingly most of the shops on the Kalverstraat are open on Sundays, which is very unusual for Holland. During the week they all close at 6pm, except on Thursdays for late night shopping until 10pm. Most Oxford Street shops are open on Sundays too, and John Lewis opens at 11:30 for browsing until you’re legally allowed to buy things at 12noon. Most shops on Oxford Street are open until 8pm during the week and later on Thursdays.

Other interesting facts that don’t deserve headings of their own:
Kalverstraat is the equivalent of Mayfair on the Monopoly board, making it sound far more upmarket than it actually is. Oxford Street is part of the green set of streets on the British Monopoly board together with Regent Street and Bond Street. In Holland the green streets are represented by streets in Rotterdam, presumably because there are not enough interesting Amsterdam streets to fill an entire board (god knows what they do about getting hold of four famous stations).

Both streets have live webcams. The Kalverstraat one updates freakishly often – it’s almost like live TV (big brother strikes again). The Oxford Street webcam is provided by Transport for London and is normally not working.

• Kalverstraat webcam: http://kalverstraat.webcam.nl/
• Oxford Street webcam: http://www.camvista.com/england/london/oxfordstreet.php

Things that cannot be bought at my local Albert Heijn

Albert Heijn (AH) classify their size of store from 1-5 (1 being the smallest, 5 being the biggest). The store nearest me is categorised as a size 4, so you’d expect it to be pretty big and stock pretty much everything you’d need or want. Not so.

Here’s a list of things I’m not able to find in my local Albert Heijn:

Lamb
No Lamb of any variety: no minced lamb, diced lamb, lamb steak, lamb chops. Nothing. Amsterdam is full of Turks, you’d think they would want to buy some lamb? Oh I forgot, everyone in Holland has the time to traipse around the butchers, bakers and candlestick maker’s shops every single day to get their groceries.

Limes
My Albert Heijn always stock lemons, oranges, mangoes and pomegranates, but no limes.

Fruit Squash / Ribena
I don’t understand what kids drink here. Parents have the option of buying either really expensive fruit juices, or carbonated drinks for their kids. The other option, which I wouldn’t go near, is something like the French Diablo, which the Dutch call Sirop, and is pure sugar in a tin. I guess they just rely on good old fashion milk, and chocolate milk (also full of sugar).

Double or Single Cream
There’s only whipping cream, sour cream and crème fraiche here in the Netherlands it seems. And you’d never pour whipping cream on an apple pie, as that would be sacrilege, you MUST whip it first. (Oh yes and rather hilariously whipped cream translates into Dutch as "slagroom"!)

Pantene Hair Products
I was truly astounded at this one. Procter and Gamble what are you doing to me? The hair product aisle in my category 4 Albert Heijn is four shelves high by about 8 products wide and includes L’Oreal, Dove and something called Andrélon (made by Unilever) which dominates the shelf in garish purple packaging. Compare this to the hair product range in my old Tesco in London which was about 10 metres wide and had every product under the sun, except Andrélon.

Serious Breakfast Cereals
First, it’s impossible to by a box of cereal over 500g. It’s like buying mini cereal boxes from a Kellog’s selection pack. I need to buy two boxes to last the week. And talking of selection, don’t get me started on the range of cereals available in Holland. The narrow shelf here has Fruit and Fibre, “Cruseli”, Jordans Muesli (pronounced in the not-so Biggleswade/Bedfordshire accent of “Yoordaans”), Cornflakes, Special K and something based on sawdust. Weetabix, if available, only comes in boxes of 12 – that would last one person only six days – does everyone in Holland live alone?

Boodschappen Nightmare

Maybe it’s just me. Maybe I’ve been completely spoiled by the British half-wit attempt at good customer service, or maybe, just maybe, I’m not the only one that gets into a semi-panic every time I want to pack and pay for my grocery items at the Dutch supermarket Albert Heijn (AH). In reality, everything about the queuing system here is wrong, annoying or just down-right rude.

I’m told by my family here in Holland that if there are more than three people in a queue then good old AH promise they will open another till. I had hoped that this would be comparable to Tesco’s ‘One in Front’ campaign that successfully minimises waiting time for customers. But arrive at an Albert Heijn in the early evening and of the miserable five cash tills available only two will be open. There will, therefore, be lengthy queues at both – we’re talking seven or eight people. It turns out that the ‘Three in a line’ idea is a Dutch customer service fable.



Once in a blue moon, by some stroke of luck, one of the staff suddenly notices that they haven’t actually been doing anything useful for the last ten minutes and that they could help out by opening a till. Then, it seems, the people in the queue have no concept at all of ‘first come first served’ and instead it’s normally the tallest, youngest or fittest person that ends up the first at the newly opened till. This surprised me. The Dutch are normally such an overly-fair, almost socialist nation, but in queuing situations it’s everyman for himself.

My queuing experience normally goes something like this….

After about 15 minutes of queuing like a sheep, I finally reach the front and it’s my turn. It’s then I think to myself that I better set my stop watch for the time trial I’m about to face. The cashiers here have zero empathy with their customers, none what-so-ever. Maybe they think that because I’m so fed up queuing that I’m now so desperate to leave the shop that I now possess the super-human capability to pack my items at light speed. So they zap each item passed the scanner and my shopping passes down my slim half of the partitioned conveyor belt to the end. Then the next item quickly follows, then the next, the next, the next, the next. Until I’ve got such a big pile of shopping in front of me that the most recently scanned items are squashing the first items, to the extent that I can’t actually pack the first items anymore because they are so tightly jammed together. So much for my time-tested strategy of trying to pack the heavier, more resilient, items first. Instead I’m forced to pack the tomatoes, crisps and lettuces first, at the bottom of my bag, just because they are the only things free enough to physically remove from the pile.

The girl has now finished zapping my shopping, proud of her record attempt, and expects me to pay, NOW! Although I’ve only been able to pack one carton of orange juice, fabric conditioner, tomatoes, lettuce, crisps and four tins of tomatoes (in that order) I’ll get an evil glare if I don’t come back around, away from the carnage that has ensued at my end of the till, to face her and pay immediately. Even though the cashier is oblivious to them, I now become acutely aware of the long queue of people behind me, and so I quickly pay, so that she can make a start on zapping the next person’s groceries. Big mistake…because then the nightmare really begins…

Not only are my items squashed under their own weight, now the cashier needs to make room for the next persons shopping so she forces, shoves, pushes and wrenches the separating arm dividing the narrow conveyor belt against my shopping, packing it in even tighter. Push, shove, it won’t go, but she continues to zap and zip those items through regardless. The conveyor belt whizzes my neighbors’ shopping downhill, simultaneously forcing my shopping tighter and tighter against the end of the till too.

When I finally manage to separate my groceries from each other and pack them haphazardly into bags I’m exhausted, wishing never to return again. I normally leave muttering complaints and suggestions semi-loudly under my breath as I pass by the two idle AH staff sitting around at the cigarette and newspaper counter positioned near the exit.

It’s not that Albert Heijn is cheaper than the competition, it’s actually one of the more expensive supermarkets in Holland. So where does all the money go? They are obviously not investing in capable staff, or training, or logistical systems to help with their poor customer service. Tesco’s even go as far as to employ heat seeking cameras, which sense the number of customers entering a store and predict the checkouts that need to be open in an hour. If Albert Heijn were to do this I think the results would be skewed by the heat coming off the customers leaving the store in a sweat.