Wade wrote: > http://www.slate.com/id/2124561/entry/2124562/ > > Nice little series by Seth Stevenson for Americans daydreaming about > emigration. Somewhere, anywhere ... maybe Amsterdam? > > I've never been to the Netherlands myself, but it sounds very > civilized. > > Extra Python connection, besides the obvious one: Is "gezellig" related > to the Zen of Python? ( > http://wordcraft.infopop.cc/eve/ubb.x/a/tpc/f/6351024471/m/2041067571/r/3901049571 > ) > > -- Wade Leftwich > Ithaca, NY >
Well I dunno, I was born in Germany moved to the Netherlands and been quit around in the country. Personally I don't like city life, however from where I live I am within the hour in the center of Rotterdam, Den Haag, Utrecht, if you add half an hour I'm at the heart of Amsterdam. While coming back at home at a small but flourishing village. Of course this is all done with public transport and/or bike, not without reason. Personal transportation sucks in the Netherlands, if you live in the Randstad (the area of the above mentioned cities) and you have to travel across the Randstad, you go with the bike and/or bus/tram/metro/train because that is the fastest way of transportation. By the way, the big cities are notorious for losing your bike fast. That doesn't mean that public transportation is good, no actual since the public transportation is commercialized it sucks too. But it beats the hell out of being in the traffic jam every day for at least an hour wherever you want to go, not entirely true, between 11.00-15.00 and 21.00-05.00 then it's clear enough to switch lanes. Just don't plan to get anywhere special with public transportation after 2300h. Still you might want to go earlier if you go by car, perhaps then you can find that one parking spot close enough to your destination that you don't need to take the bus/tram/metro after all to finish the last 5 miles. Well politics, in the Netherlands is like politics in the rest of Western-Europe North-Atlantic-coast countries, excluding UK & Ireland. Most of the time these politicians are social caring about everybody in the country including non-voters, non-payers and fanatic-believers of-whatever-you-can-imagine. Although that social caring is mostly out of a dark personal agenda or plain dumbness. In the Netherlands even the most right-winged (of any mattering size) parties are still liberal socialist in the US viewpoint. Somehow I think that if you want to become a politician you have to be able to shutdown at least 75% percent of you brain while making decisions and reactivate them when you have to find an excuse for the misstep, well at least the last part is true for the Netherlands, from what I see of US politics even that is not a requirement. In the Netherlands we still have (but watering away) tradition that people are responsible for their own deeds and do not sue some unrelated company when spilling hot coffee or microwaving your puppy or washing you baby in the wash machine. Most people in here are non-believers or so lightly believers that you won't know the difference between them and the non-believers. The biggest part of the remaining believers are realistic and value life, moral and norms without compromising public safety, of course fanatics are every where in the world including the Netherlands. We had some very difficult years but the economics is picking up again and because we made some serious budget cuts in social security and public health it is on a more stable bases then that of Germany and France. The only serious downsize is that in the Randstad the house prices are too high, the only way you can buy a reasonable row house house (3 bedrooms, average room = 4x3 meters) in a not too bad side of the city is when you and you partner work full time and are not planning to raise your kid(s) all by your self. Still I don't want to live anywhere else, Holland is big enough to find some country side with a slower pace of living (but still having adsl), if you prefer that like me. And with a bit of searching you can build up a social and work environment not filled with shallow and/or dumbed down people. All of the above is of course my viewpoint YMMV. -- mph -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
