Our apartment in Groningen: 4 pics

When you enter our apartment, you see the bedroom from the door, right next to you.



There is small storage room on the right (not shown in pics). Then if you turn left, you get into a passage-way to the living room.



The passage contains entrances to toilet (first glowing light), then the bathroom (second glowing light, and mat outside the door). Then it opens into a huge living-cum-dining room.



This living room opens in a balcony. It has two large windows as shown above, and two others which you can not see (they are on the wall on the right).

As you view this pic, the passage way (that we came in from) is to the left behind. Right behind us is the kitchen, which looks like below:



As of today, the pic is old. we now have a garbage bin, cleaner kitchen dash board, and more accessories.

So, I hope get a good picture of the apartment. There is also luggage space + cycle parking below.

Next time I will share our pics inside the apartment, Inshallah!
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Learning Dutch

I attended my first Dutch lesson today. I had missed the first lesson of this semester, by someone called H. Every Monday we meet for an hour, speak a little Dutch, learn something and refresh the earlier lessons.

This is similar to French lessons I had with Alliance Francaise. In fact, Dutch are similar to French, in that they dislike English. Both would agree that English is not a "logical" language, and would show how English just has twisted rules from more logical 'main-land' languages.

Anyway, we had some numbers, beginner's words, such as "Who are you?" and "What is your name/ game?" etc. Later, I had some casual chat with H, who wanted to know a little bit about my background, and my details on some official papers.

She was impressed with my pronouncation and quick sentence-building activity. I told her that I had taken 8 months of French lessons, and Dutch was easy to learn. She said, "Of course. In 6 month I learn you Dutch, I promise".

I guess while she teaches me Dutch, I would have to fix her English.

"Plopp... kind of"

When I was handed over the keys to my apartment, I was asked if I wanted the dirty tiles of bathroom and toilet changed. I said, "Yes", after confirming that it was the owner paying for it.

The maintenance fellow did not know how to speak English. So, when I told him to select faint blue color for wall tiles, he had to call his boss to translate it.

Then I explained to him that I wanted him to fix American commode in the toilet. This is so, because the locally they use a strange, shallow commode bowl in toilet, a German custom perhaps. Naturally I wanted to change the toilet commode to how Indians have it.

I tried explaining the fellow about what I wanted: 1) that the flush hole should be in the rear (unlike in the foto in the link above); 2) bowl should be deep, unlike common ones found here (see the link again).

After two minutes his eyes shone, as he exclaimed: "Ah, you want the plopp kind of commode", thus providing the title (and material) of this post.

The latest is that they will finish the repairs in 5 days (WED-TUE), just in time for Maha!

WTF in Groningen

I am setting up our apartment in Groningen, in case you missed the declaration on tweeter and gmail. So, after a weekend of set-up and fixing, i walked around in Groningen to see three WTFs of this week.

1. Divine Disco : organised by Soc. Stud. Cath. (albertus.nl). I believe this is society of Catholic students. They appeared all young to fit this description.
2. Folkingstraat: a red-light street in Groningen. I wish they had dropped 'l' in that name.
3. Rottinghuis : house repairing agency, they repaired my bathroom shower, and will fix the toilet.