May 21, 2019

New, international wall murals in Amsterdam East

Filed under: Art by Orangemaster @ 2:12 pm

Artists Kaspar van Leek, 35, from Studio Giftig and Niels van Swaemen, 37, painted one of the 10 wall murals that can be found in Amsterdam East on the Platanenweg. Their mural, 10 metres by 15 metres, depicts a floating woman surrounded by doves [scroll down a bit]. “The dove is a symbol for freedom and also for Amsterdam,” says Van Leek, while floating here represents complete freedom.

Amsterdam Street Art (ASA) had a hand in organising most of it, a collective that has been around for 10 years, pleading for the acceptance of street art as an art form.

Flat residents were asked for their opinion, something ASA makes a point of, and the art was created at the same time as renovations happened, the ideal time for something new. The only things the residents did not want was sex and anything morbid. Dan Kitchener, an artist from English who painted the wall mural in the photo above, went for a geisha, which doesn’t really fit the theme, but they made an exception for Kitchener.

The neighbourhood has been spruced up and why not visit it if you can.

(Link and photo: ad.nl)

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May 17, 2019

Airbnb rents out illegally placed containers, doesn’t check

Filed under: Weird by Orangemaster @ 11:23 am

Airbnb, the rent-out-your-place chain that local politician for housing Laurens Ivens keep saying he’ll teach them a lesson, but constantly fails to do so (in Dutch) (and then goes on Twitter and blames foreigners), always makes the news in a bad way. For starters, people who rent through airbnb are supposed to rent for no more than 30 days, but Ivens has done nothing to make that concrete, and so places end up being rented for a total of 60 days and that now includes sea containers because nobody checks but the tourists being duped.

In Amsterdam, two illegally placed sea containers on the side of the road were casually put up for rent in the Spaarndammerstraat and Pauwenpad, downtown Amsterdam. The containers had some beds on the floor and that’s it. The ridiculous offer was pointed out by Dutch Twitter account Pretpark Amsterdam (Pretpark means amusement park), a group that campaigns against the negative effects of tourism in the city.

“Employees of the municipality of Amsterdam dragged the ‘hotel’ away on Sunday morning. After complaints from local residents, it turned out that the city district had not issued a permit for placing a container.”

According to Statistic Netherlands, the city of Amsterdam has 863.202 residents as of 1st January 2019, and will surpass its highest amount of residents in its history soon enough, if that’s not already the case. Sadly, this means that all kinds of people will try and trick tourists out of money and that Ivens will continue to be shocked about it, sympathise, and proceed to do nothing but talk and blame foreigners like the novice bigots that his socialist party is aspiring to be.

(Link: .tellerreport.com, Photo: containers that students actually live in, in Amsterdam North)

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May 15, 2019

Amsterdam Central Station builds huge underwater bike stall

Filed under: Bicycles by Orangemaster @ 8:36 pm

According to Mark Wagenbuur, the Cycling Ambassador for the Dutch Cycling Embassy at Bicycle Dutch, Amsterdam is building an underground, underwater parking facility for 7,000 bicycles at Amsterdam Central Station.

Folks online were wondering if there was a way to follow the construction by way of a webcam, and lo and behold there is! The project is call De Entree (‘The Entrance’) and it’s really big and disruptive if you need to get around Central Station, but that’s life.

And according to Wikipedia, Amsterdam Central Station is the largest railway station of Amsterdam and is used by 162,000 passengers a day, making it the second busiest railway station in the country after Utrecht Central Station, which deals with 176,000 passengers a day. Amsterdam Central Station is the most visited national monument of the Netherlands and boast a royal waiting room you can finally see partially from the outside.

(Link: wijnemenjemee.nl by Flickr user UggBoy hearts UggGirl, some rights reserved)

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May 10, 2019

Amsterdam marketing appropriates another castle

Filed under: History by Orangemaster @ 4:53 pm

Back in 2013, Muiderslot (Muiden Castle) was rebranded to Amsterdam Castle Muiderslot, which is 16 kilometres from Amsterdam Central Station, closer if you leave from the East of Amsterdam, and most people here thought it was ridiculous.

And now, in the spirit of peeing on something and claiming it is part of your territory, Het Loo Palace near Apeldoorn, Gelderland, 88 kilometres from Amsterdam, is being branded as the ‘Versailles of Amsterdam’.

Just what Amsterdam needs, to be compared to Paris. Even Versailles is in the city of Versailles, not Paris. It’s been ages and I’m still miffed that one of the classic songs about Amsterdam, ‘Geef mij maar Amsterdam’ talks more about Paris than Amsterdam, but that’s because many people Dutch or otherwise don’t know all the lyrics.

Het Loo is nowhere near Amsterdam and it’s beautiful enough not to need any Amsterdam stamp of approval. As well, calling everything Amsterdam is incorrect and incredibly arrogant, a Dutch cardinal sin if there ever was one. We’ve already had to deal with the world-famous Keukenhof being referred to Amsterdam Flowers, Zandvoort as Amsterdam Beach and a whole bunch of other idiotic rebranding ideas, all of it in English as well.

It’s bad enough Holland is used as a synonym for the Netherlands, why is this even necessary? Make it stop.

(Link: waarmaarraar.nl , Photo by Wikipedia, some rights reserved)

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May 1, 2019

Dutch designed play area at Singapore airport

Filed under: Architecture,Aviation by Orangemaster @ 9:18 pm

At Jewel Changi International Airport in Singapore at Terminal 1, Canopy Park, you’ll find a play area for all ages, with four very big slides, designed by Dutch engineers and street furniture designers Carve from Amsterdam. The official opening is on 10 June, and everyone will be able to see how the first children and parents will enjoy the play area.

Carve’s Discovery slides look very much like jewellery you can play on. “The rubber patterns on the floor are designed in such a way that they create spiral-shaped dynamic reflections on the surface of the slides, which will surely end up all over instagram.” They are installed at the highest point of the airport and provide a spectacular view. There are four slides: a family wide slide, a free fall slide and two spiral-shaped tunnel slides.

For anyone in The Netherlands and not in Singapore, you can climb onto Carve installations in Amsterdam’s Oosterpark, the Zuiderzee Museum in Enkhuizen, the Ark Park pavilion in Utrecht, the Strijp S grounds in Eindhoven and the red fence square in The Hague.

(Links: bright.nl, Photo: businesstraveller)

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April 9, 2019

Amsterdam cafe changes names to stop threats

Filed under: Food & Drink,History by Orangemaster @ 4:52 pm

Have Social Justice Warriors (SJWs) made it to the Netherlands? I thought we were still good for a while, but I’m calling it: anything with any politically incorrect attachment to the Netherlands’ colonial past is going to have to watch out.

Of course, things need to change for the better and a European country like the Netherlands still grappling with the reality of its colonial past is painfully aware of this, but threatening people is not the way to go. Threats are the new norm, which is scary, as they suppress any possible consensus reaching, something this country was also built on.

The VOC Café (VOC = Dutch East India Company) in downtown Amsterdam located in the Schreierstoren (Schreier tower) is going to change its name purely to stop the barrage of threats the owners keeps receiving. Why now and not ages ago, I can only imagine, although it has a strong SJW flavour to it. The owners are scared and are giving in.

The café has been around since 1995 with ‘VOC’ in the name and nobody said squat. The easy accessibility to social media has to have made a difference in sending threats. The owners have said they have been receiving threats for years now, but it has escalated enough to make them change their name, a costly endeavour.

“Our business is called VOC Café because from here Henry Hudson set sail to Manhattan, where New Amsterdam was founded, later called New York.” By the way, it’s a beautiful cafe, that I can tell you. The owners also completely understand that names of streets, which are being scrutinised, need to change, but believe it take some time. SJW often want everything to happen instantaneously, and their impatience makes them dangerous and volatile.

(Link: parool.nl, Photo of The Schreierstoren by Massimo Catarinella, some rights reserved)

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March 3, 2019

Crime is down, but a lot of it is in Limburg

Filed under: General by Orangemaster @ 4:29 pm

While I was in a tram this morning riding along a crime scene today in East Amsterdam, I started thinking about crime. Apparently, the top 10 cities with the most crime in the Netherlands includes four municipalities from the province of Limburg: Heerlen (4th place), Maastricht (5th place), Sittard-Geleen (7th place) and Roermond (9th place).

Amsterdam remains the city with the most crime, followed by Eindhoven and Rotterdam. A city next to Amsterdam, Diemen, has gone from 26th place to number 8, as some gang was quite busy with break-ins, but finally got rolled up.

Rounding off the top 10, there’s The Hague in 6th place and Schiedam in 10th place, both together with Rotterdam representing the province of South Holland. Amsterdam and Diemen are in North Holland, with Eindhoven in Noord-Brabant.

All in all crime is down, including pickpocketing, a classic in cities with a lot of tourists.

(Links: binnenlandsbestuur.nl, ad.nl, Photo: Dutch police officers politie.nl)

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January 29, 2019

Amsterdam ferry named after mayor, a first

Filed under: Dutch first by Orangemaster @ 3:19 pm

VanderLaan2

Yesterday, Femke van der Laan, widow of deceased Amsterdam mayor Eberhard van der Laan, was present at an unveiling of a wall of Amsterdam’s new IJ river ferry number 63, showing that the ferry was renamed after Eberhard van der Laan. This is the first time that Amsterdam’s transport company GVB has named any kind of transport after a person.

“Eberhard van der Laan was a mayor who poured his heart and soul into the city, a leader that built bridges and looked for connections between Amsterdam residents.” Since the picture of him about was shot at a meet and greet he did in my neighbourhood addressing people’s problems, I tend to agree with the image people have of him. Although different, much of the same has also been said of former Amsterdam mayor Job Cohen who is still living. Van der Laan died of lung cancer in 2017.

As well, the new ferry is one of four bigger, quieter and cleaner ferries that go across the IJ river and is part of the road infrastructure, which means it is free of charge. The new ferries are 33,60 metres long and 9 meters wide, able to transport 310 people. Although not emissions-free, the GVB says it will equip its fleet with fully electric motors when the time comes.

(Link: gvb.nl)

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January 27, 2019

Why Volendam has a disease named after it

Filed under: Health,History,Music by Orangemaster @ 3:55 pm

Volendam

Recently I was in Amsterdam’s famous Jordaan neighbourhood and decided to pop into an old brown café to have a drink. One of the bar staff was new, and she told me she was from Volendam, which only has 22,000 or so residents. Her comment also brought with it an inevitable discussion about ‘palingpop’ (‘eel pop’, typically Volendam music sung by the likes of Jantje Smit and Nick & Simon, which she’s not a fan of) and hereditary diseases.

Referred to as the ‘Volendam sickness’ and known more properly as ‘Volendam neurodegenerative disease’, this one village is know for “Pontocerebellar hypoplasia type 2 (PCH-2), a heterogeneous group of rare neurodegenerative disorders caused by genetic mutations and characterised by progressive atrophy of various parts of the brain such as the cerebellum or brainstem (particularly the pons) for which there is no cure”. Any child born with this disease will die before they reach 10. According to Dutch wikipedia, one out of every seven residents of Volendam is a carrier, and the chance of PCH-2 is one out of 250 births, while for the Dutch population it is one out of 180,000.

The bar woman talked about it being standard fare for her family members and their partners who wanted to have children to be tested for diseases, as the chances of being a carrier is high. Research has shown that European patients who contract the disease are all related 10 to 12 generations back to the same ancestor, and quick Google search tells me that the entire village of Volendam stem from about seven ancestors. People from Volendam are a very tight tribe, as told by my bar woman who said that when she came to live in Amsterdam it caused quite a stir in her family. And if someone from Volendam does marry an ‘outsider’, you can bet they will try and push for the new couple to live in Volendam.

Nonetheless, it’s a beautiful village full of tourists, and I’m sure it has a lot more stories to tell.

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January 11, 2019

KPN axes Dutch Internet provider XS4ALL

Filed under: History,IT by Orangemaster @ 3:09 pm

It’s the end of an era: Owned by KPN, Dutch Internet pioneer XS4LL (a play on words of the pronunciation of ‘access for all’ by Dutch folks (the ‘x’ sounds like ‘ex’ and not ‘ax’ in Dutch, so ‘excess’ for all the non-Dutch) was founded back in 1993 and has very loyal clients. I write this knowing a lot of their clients, including my co-blogger Branko, and a lot of friends who either work or have worked there.

By loyal clients, I also mean they will not stay on with KPN after XS4ALL ceases to exist, but have also launched a petition to keep XS4ALL, which is not something you see everyday for a profit-making company. Chances are, it won’t change anything, but it will give you an idea of how much people care about the company.

And why is that? Well, XS4ALL was Internet-savvy before having Internet was a thing in the Netherlands. Apparently, it’s the third oldest Internet service provider (ISP) in the country, after NLnet and SURFnet. According to Wikipedia, XS4ALL was the second company to offer Internet access to private individuals, which was not a given when the Internet started to be a telecommunications staple. One of its founder is Rop Gonggrijp, a well-known hacktivist in international circles.

In the mid 2000s, XS4ALL was big, and one of the main reasons was because they gave really good service. You were talking to people who were all Internet fans, not just working stiffs with stupid answers. They helped win the battle against spam back when you would get 100 to 200 spam mails a day and fought a lot of other battles as well, winning quite a few.

XS4ALL was bought by KPN (the big Dutch provider) in December 1998, but stayed in its bubble to a certain extent until this year. KPN is now trying to convince its XS4ALL clients that ‘only the name will change’ and there’s nobody buying that, to the point were many loyal clients will change providers out of principle.

If you feel strongly enough about it, you can also sign the petition (in Dutch).

(Link: tweakers.net, Photo of XS4ALL head office by Pachango, some rights reserved)

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