Instemmingen that feel like Alcoholic Anonymous meetings, humiliating rejection, buckets of water poured on your head from flatmates above..
. yup, that’s student housing in Delft, the ups and downs of which are just like riding in the E. Du Perronlaan’s slow, stinky elevator!
Market research is a common research activity at TU Delft, but it’s not so much fun when you come from abroad and have to do such research to look for a new house. You can be lucky like me, and suddenly get to live in a cute Dutch house in the city center, or you can be unlucky and pay a lot for a Rolland Hostland box.
Of course for lucky me, the beautiful times in my gezellig huisje (cosy little house) eventually ended when my sub-renting period expired and I was forced to attend those marvellous instemmingen. Forced, I say, because I wanted to live among Dutch people and feel a bit integrated here.
Instemmingen… just no other way for desperate people with the insatiable desire of finding a room, but yet feeling at the same time as if you’re attending one of those Anonymous Addicts meetings where you have to introduce yourself to strangers: “Hi, my name is Bea and I’m a choco-holic!”
Every instemming is an adventure. At first, when you don’t speak any Dutch and find yourself in a place full of guys, you can sometimes catch words like ‘FIFA’ and figure out that they’re talking about football! But when it was my turn to speak, I never felt more girlish than when talking about food and stuff. And sometimes . ugh! – you have to go through several phases until you won the room… or not!
Depending on your gender, maybe country, if you speak Dutch or not, your cooking-skills (important)… you’ll have more or less chance to get chosen in a Dutch atmosphere. After two instemmingen without success, I went to my third one just to keep getting used to them, but then I was chosen at E. Du Perronlaan. I lived in that overwhelmingly high building of 18 floors, was able to create my own world in those 20 square meters of room, found out ways of overcoming cultural differences and had some really nice times with my huisgenoten (flatmates).
But that’s not to say I didn’t extremely hate the way home on those windy-rainy days, and I really could just bite those flatmates who threw water on my head as I sat on my terrace on sunny days. Yes, this was a very hip thing to do in this building, and on the first sunny days you had to keep looking upwards… or else! But yet justice was served sometimes by the police, and nice fines of 50 euros paid by the water bucket boys and girls!
Crazywoman
We all know that everybody likes to complain, so who am I to miss this opportunity! The second ‘funny’ thing about the E. Du Perronlaan building was the elevator! Nobody wanted to be in it. Apart from the crypt-like silence that ruled inside the elevator, waiting and waiting for the damn door to close when somebody got out or in was pure hell – really, I think I even developed a crazywoman ‘tick’ in my eye while waiting for the elevator to finally move!
But ever the resourceful humans, people developed certain techniques to ensure the elevator wouldn’t stop at every one of the 18 floors. The technique was this: when entering the elevator, the first person to press the button had more chances of going directly to their own floor. For the rest of the elevator riders, they had to figure out if they should go one floor up or one floor down, and whether to just not press their own floor button and get out where the first person got out and then take the stairs the rest of the way.
And this feeling of just wanting to get the hell out of the elevator wherever it stopped was much stronger because the elevator really stunk! I think everything gross and unprintable in this newspaper had happened in those elevators.
But not everything was that bad at E. Du Perronlaan. Because people were constantly moving out, you could always find some nice furniture that had been thrown away downstairs and was just perfect for your own room! I got almost everything I needed from the street outside! And well, watching sunsets from the 18th floor was something to enjoy too.
But not surprisingly, the time came when it was time for me to move. A foreigner in Delft should feel the real native feeling of living in an old soulful Dutch house at least once. And when I eventually found my old wonderful house in Delft center, my life really did change for the better. It’s a perfect place. I don’t have to bike so much anymore. I don’t take stinky elevators anymore. The only thing I have to deal with are some dangerous 90-degree sloping stairs, but even they make your butt firmer!
So now you can find me sitting on the roof of my new house, happily watching the boats passing by while waving ‘Hi’ with my right hand, like I’m Beatrix the queen of Holland!
(Illustration: Beatriz Fernandez Garcia, MSc IDE, Spain)
Instemmingen that feel like Alcoholic Anonymous meetings, humiliating rejection, buckets of water poured on your head from flatmates above… yup, that’s student housing in Delft, the ups and downs of which are just like riding in the E. Du Perronlaan’s slow, stinky elevator!
Market research is a common research activity at TU Delft, but it’s not so much fun when you come from abroad and have to do such research to look for a new house. You can be lucky like me, and suddenly get to live in a cute Dutch house in the city center, or you can be unlucky and pay a lot for a Rolland Hostland box.
Of course for lucky me, the beautiful times in my gezellig huisje (cosy little house) eventually ended when my sub-renting period expired and I was forced to attend those marvellous instemmingen. Forced, I say, because I wanted to live among Dutch people and feel a bit integrated here.
Instemmingen… just no other way for desperate people with the insatiable desire of finding a room, but yet feeling at the same time as if you’re attending one of those Anonymous Addicts meetings where you have to introduce yourself to strangers: “Hi, my name is Bea and I’m a choco-holic!”
Every instemming is an adventure. At first, when you don’t speak any Dutch and find yourself in a place full of guys, you can sometimes catch words like ‘FIFA’ and figure out that they’re talking about football! But when it was my turn to speak, I never felt more girlish than when talking about food and stuff. And sometimes . ugh! – you have to go through several phases until you won the room… or not!
Depending on your gender, maybe country, if you speak Dutch or not, your cooking-skills (important)… you’ll have more or less chance to get chosen in a Dutch atmosphere. After two instemmingen without success, I went to my third one just to keep getting used to them, but then I was chosen at E. Du Perronlaan. I lived in that overwhelmingly high building of 18 floors, was able to create my own world in those 20 square meters of room, found out ways of overcoming cultural differences and had some really nice times with my huisgenoten (flatmates).
But that’s not to say I didn’t extremely hate the way home on those windy-rainy days, and I really could just bite those flatmates who threw water on my head as I sat on my terrace on sunny days. Yes, this was a very hip thing to do in this building, and on the first sunny days you had to keep looking upwards… or else! But yet justice was served sometimes by the police, and nice fines of 50 euros paid by the water bucket boys and girls!
Crazywoman
We all know that everybody likes to complain, so who am I to miss this opportunity! The second ‘funny’ thing about the E. Du Perronlaan building was the elevator! Nobody wanted to be in it. Apart from the crypt-like silence that ruled inside the elevator, waiting and waiting for the damn door to close when somebody got out or in was pure hell – really, I think I even developed a crazywoman ‘tick’ in my eye while waiting for the elevator to finally move!
But ever the resourceful humans, people developed certain techniques to ensure the elevator wouldn’t stop at every one of the 18 floors. The technique was this: when entering the elevator, the first person to press the button had more chances of going directly to their own floor. For the rest of the elevator riders, they had to figure out if they should go one floor up or one floor down, and whether to just not press their own floor button and get out where the first person got out and then take the stairs the rest of the way.
And this feeling of just wanting to get the hell out of the elevator wherever it stopped was much stronger because the elevator really stunk! I think everything gross and unprintable in this newspaper had happened in those elevators.
But not everything was that bad at E. Du Perronlaan. Because people were constantly moving out, you could always find some nice furniture that had been thrown away downstairs and was just perfect for your own room! I got almost everything I needed from the street outside! And well, watching sunsets from the 18th floor was something to enjoy too.
But not surprisingly, the time came when it was time for me to move. A foreigner in Delft should feel the real native feeling of living in an old soulful Dutch house at least once. And when I eventually found my old wonderful house in Delft center, my life really did change for the better. It’s a perfect place. I don’t have to bike so much anymore. I don’t take stinky elevators anymore. The only thing I have to deal with are some dangerous 90-degree sloping stairs, but even they make your butt firmer!
So now you can find me sitting on the roof of my new house, happily watching the boats passing by while waving ‘Hi’ with my right hand, like I’m Beatrix the queen of Holland!
(Illustration: Beatriz Fernandez Garcia, MSc IDE, Spain)
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