July 29, 2011

Limburg town to refuse EU nationals without income

Filed under: Dutch first,General by Orangemaster @ 1:20 pm

Drielandenpunt (Vaalserberg), is where Belgium, Germany and the Netherlands meet, also the highest point of the Netherlands. Way back before 2002 you could pay your Dutch, German or Belgian fries (yes, three separate stands) with either Dutch guilders, German marks or Belgian francs.

The wee town of Vaals, Limburg, where back in the pre-euro days, my German friends from Aachen went shopping to buy Dutch food products, is now taking a firm stand on EU nationals eating up their welfare benefits. Vaals wants to refuse residency rights to those who do not have a job or enough income to support themselves as of September 2011.

Before critizing Vaals, let’s do the math. Vaals has a population of about 10,000 and claims that 40% of the 300 townspeople on welfare benefits (120 people) are from other EU countries. The town council says that’s a higher number than even Rotterdam, and is costing them a whopping €Â 400,000 a year. Out of every 100 people who want to live in Vaals, nine of them ask for benefits, mostly Poles and Romanians who do not yet speak the language.

Ironically, all this movement within the EU and within the Netherlands tends to expose all kinds of problems that nobody would have noticed if it wasn’t for EU nationals trying to work the system.

In nearby Plombières, Belgium, they’re already applying a European guideline to restrict residency for EU nationals without work or income. If and when Vaals does this, they will be the first Dutch town to do so.

(Link: www.volkskrant.nl.nl)

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May 7, 2011

What have the Nazis ever done for you?

Filed under: History by Branko Collin @ 11:48 am

I grew up in Blerick, a town with a town hall but without the political body to inhabit it. See, in 1940 the town was added to the neighbouring city of Venlo by the Nazi occupier, which made the possession of a town hall moot.

Interestingly the previous municipality that Blerick belonged to, Maasbree, once had three different town halls, and the council would rotate among them until in 1904 the Blerick town hall was made the permanent one.

In celebration of Liberation day, daily De Pers summed up 6 of the changes the Nazis made that stuck:

  1. Child support (the Nazis wanted the Arian race to flourish)
  2. Corporate tax (funnily enough, these days our low corporate taxes make us a tax haven, according to the Berserker of Abbottabad)
  3. Central European Time (before that, we had our own sliver of a time zone)
  4. The Frisian islands of Vlieland and Terschelling (formerly of Noord Holland)
  5. Rent control and renter protection (including the right to live in a house forever)
  6. Job protection (including the right to keep a job forever)

In a number of these cases the occupier made into law what was already on the books. In other cases the law was kept because it made sense. For instance, with housing shortages being rather prominent after the war, it made eminent sense to protect renters from price gouging. In such cases the Germans had unwittingly produced both the diseases and the cures.

(Photo of the Blerick town hall by Wikimedia user Torval, some rights reserved)

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April 22, 2011

Elephant parade in Heerlen for a good cause

Filed under: Animals,Art,Sustainability by Orangemaster @ 12:25 pm

Until 25 May these elephants will be adorning the city of Heerlen, Limburg, which can proudly be listed as a host of these works of art alongside big cities such as Rotterdam, Antwerp, Amsterdam, Copenhagen and London. The Elephant Parade can be admired in and around the city centre — have fun finding all 30 elephants, I found about 10. The elephants were designed by local, regional and Thai artists, as the goal is to eventually raise money with an auction for the Asian Elephant Foundation to help protect the Asian elephant. Convincing the foundation to set up the Elephant Parade in a small, lesser-known Dutch city was done by a group of local women who come up with ways to let their ‘problematic’ old mining city smile again. It worked for me.

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March 6, 2011

Children’s carnival parade in Heerlen

Filed under: Food & Drink,General,History,Music by Orangemaster @ 11:26 am

It’s carnival time again in the South provinces of the Netherlands and yesterday in Heerlen, Limburg they had their children’s parade with parents, prams and princes. The red-green-yellow scarf that doesn’t match the rest adorns the carnival colours, a must have for many.

Besides a good story I wanted to know if the kids on the floats threw sweets like they did in when attended carnival in Cologne, Germany a few years back. Just as I reached into my purse to get my camera, I got beaned by a waffle! And I collected enough for breakfast before writing this.

Eventually the children’s carnival Prince, ‘Martijn 1’, showed up in full dress, waving to the crowd. From what I’ve learned, picking the carnival Prince is done by a serious carnival association and is chosen from different schools alternately. They also have princesses, it is done months in advance and is kept secret until the very last minute, a very dear tradition in these parts.

Has the tradition changed over the years? Well, I’m sure some things have, but a few things have definitely remained the same according to a former junior carnival Prince, vintage 1981.

Notice the ship-like float the junior carnival Prince and Princess were standing on here back in 1981? Well, they still use it today, the Blauw Sjuut in local dialect.

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February 18, 2011

It’s a matter of playing the cultural card at the right time

Filed under: General,Music by Orangemaster @ 2:37 pm

The once very popular Christian Democratic Appeal (CDA) party has been losing a lot of ground particularly in provinces such as Limburg, to make a long story short. Interestingly, many prominent politicians such as Maxime Verhagen (right), currently Deputy Prime Minister (and first Dutch politician to Twitter) comes from Limburg, speaks dialect, especially as of late when asked to because it’s election time for the Dutch Senate.

Picture your favourite American or British band yelling ‘we love [fill in city or country of your choice]’ to woo the audience. And it works. In this case, Maxime loses points for not being able to fill in the blanks of a hugely popular song by Rowwen Hèze, Limburg’s number one ‘export’ who play American TexMex style music mainly in Limburgs dialect and have been around for some 20 years.

Presentator Twan Huys also from Limburg decided to see if Maxime wasn’t just ‘talking nonsense’ and made him switch to Maastricht dialect. At least he was able to fill that in. You could hear the sound of the students’ hearts strings twanging when ‘one of their own’ spoke their language.

The chorus of the song ‘Kwestie van Geduld’ (‘A Matter of Patience’) is in ‘standard’ Dutch on purpose.

” ‘t Is een kwestie van geduld,
rustig wachten op de dag,
dat heel Holland Limburgs lult,
dat heel Holland Limburgs lult.”

(’tis a matter of patience, waiting quietly for the day,
that all of Holland ‘yaps’ in Limburgs,
that all of Holland ‘yaps’ in Limburgs.)

The verb ‘lullen’ means ‘to bullshit’ or ‘talk nonsense’, but is much more neutral, so I went with ‘yapping’.

Holland is a large part of the Netherlands, South Holland and North Holland, a differentiation made by Limburgers to point out their cultural differences, especially their use of dialects in daily life instead of the ‘standard’ Dutch language.

No one give me a lesson on all of this, I’ve been hearing it for 12 years from my Limburg co-blogger.

(Link: limburger.nl)

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December 22, 2010

Free beer for girls in Limburg town

Filed under: Food & Drink,General,Religion by Orangemaster @ 12:28 pm

The owners of a few pubs in Weert, Limburg have decided to give free beer, wine and even kir (how classy) on the house to girls, so that boys stay away from those illegal beer-serving non-pubs called ‘zuipketens‘, modern-day Dutch speakeasies that have apparently increased in popularity since the smoking ban. By stay away I do mean come to their pubs instead because they have tipsy girls in them.

Free drinks are sure to get a few more girls into the pub, but at a cost and not on the long run. And then there’s the morally questionable idea of getting girls to drink more, knowing they get drunk more quickly, and all that jazz. The drinking age in the Netherlands is 16, an age when kids are not legally responsbile adults, which is also a major problem in smaller communities where there’s not much to do but drink — like in Weert, Limburg.

Back in 2008 we wrote about beer confiscation in Urk, a very religious town in Flevoland whose youth is drinking their youth away because there’s nothing to do there.

(Link: telegraaf.nl, Photo: me at Oktoberfest. If the Telegraaf can use a German picture for a Dutch article, so can we.)

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November 9, 2010

Visiting a neighbourhood built by Hitler

Filed under: Architecture,History by Orangemaster @ 7:00 am

Built in 1941, but only completed after WWII in 1947, the Maria Christina neighbourhood in Heerlen, Limburg, was designed by German architects Karl Gonser and Hans-Georg Oechler by order of Hitler and has been protected heritage since 2008. The locals have long referred to this neighbourhood as the ‘Hermann Göring’ neighbourhood, as the story goes that he actually visited the area before construction started. Although thousands of houses were originally planned, the neighbourhood ended up with 240 homes of different sizes, clearly meant for families with many children (many small rooms upstairs and big gardens by local standards), in this case German mine workers that were to take over the mines from the Dutch.

A plaque I read while visiting the neighbourhood explains that the houses with big attics had saddle roofs masoned with rare bricks called ‘vechtsteen’, bricks made of clay that came from the region along the river Vecht. There is also a rumour that houses were broken down in the province of Zeeland, all the way across the country just to building these houses, which is plausible considering that there was ‘vechtsteen’ to be had in Zeeland.

As you can see in both pictures, some houses have a 17th century Dutch bell gable. The first picture shows a row of houses with prominent bell gable houses, while on other streets, the bell gable house is in the middle of the row. My personal impression was that I was looking at row houses in Ireland, and that I was not in the Netherlands.

Many houses on either side of the bell gable house in the second picture are for sale and surprising inexpensive: 135,000 euro on average for 125m2 of living space. To give you an idea of how affordable that is, neigbours of mine in Amsterdam, the country’s most expensive city only rivalled by Utrecht, are trying to sell their 110m2 house for 335,000 euro, down from 349,000.

(Links: rijckheyt and nrcnext)

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March 12, 2010

First ever Dutch beaver tunnel opens

Filed under: Animals,Architecture,Dutch first,Nature by Orangemaster @ 5:08 pm
beaver

Driving down the Dutch highway I have seen overpasses for deers and I have heard of frog overpasses and tunnels, but this is a first for me too: the very first beaver tunnel in the country.

Yes, as of today, the wee village of Panheel (189 villagers) in Limburg has opened a 30-metre-long tube, 70 centimetres in diameter so that beavers don’t wobble down a busy street and get turned into road pizza. Not only have many beavers died, but they damage cars when then do because they are bigger and bulkier than they look.

The people and animal lovers involved believe that other small woodland creatures will use this tunnel as well. It cost 40,000 euro and was paid with contributions as well as tax money.

I have only respect for beavers, and OK, this one is darn cute. I spent part of my youth at summer camp tearing down their dams only to see them fully rebuilt days later. It was either portaging (carrying a canoe over your head because of lack of water or obstacles), with two 9-year-old girls lifting an aluminium canoe of 45 kg over their heads with backpacks for 2 kilometers through the woods being eaten by mosquitoes or tearing down a beaver dam that grows back like weeds and canoe on the water like normal kids.

(Link: nrc.nl, Photo of beaver by stevehdc, some rights reserved)

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January 31, 2010

25 years of Tex-Mex in the province: Rowwen Hèze

Filed under: Music by Branko Collin @ 2:47 pm

For a long time the band Normaal symbolised music from the sticks, the ZZ Top of the Achterhoek (literally: back corner) sang in their local dialect about beer, women, and any combination of the two. Then in 1985, the Limburg band Rowwen Hèze was founded, and suddenly people were speaking of a trend.

Like Normaal, Rowwen Hèze makes good party music, based oddly enough on the continental immigrant music of the United States: Tex-Mex, polka, fanfare, Irish folk. They take standards (or songs that sound like they ought to be) and add silly local texts to them: Enselma becomes Bestel Mar (order up), and Ay Te Dejo En San becomes Kroenenberg (a place name). Of course, when they sing Los Lobos’ and Flaco Jimenez’ songs, they invite these guys onto stage too.

The other side of Rowwen Hèze (named after a local tramp) is introspective:

Saint Anthony was said to know
— dear friend, he wrote, it is true —
it can be better to lose something beautiful
than to never having had it before

(Link: AD.nl)

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January 3, 2010

Bosnian war survivor writes own dictionary

Filed under: History,Literature by Orangemaster @ 1:50 pm
1564265494_35c7a32213

Husein Mujagić survived the Omarska camp in the Bosnian war and now lives in the Dutch province of Limburg. To help him deal with his memories, he wrote a Dutch-Bosnian/Serbian/Croatian dictionary. This description didn’t come over as straightforward, so I will elaborate. Roughly, Bosnian is what people speak in Bosnia and Herzegovina, Serbian is spoken by Serbs and Croatian by Croatians. It’s way more complex, as Serbo-Croatian was long taught as one language, but that is slowly being spilt apart for cultural reasons. Yes, everybody understands each other, but there were reasons why the country split up into so many parts.

Mujagić was a math teacher in his own country and since he could not easily find work without speaking good Dutch, he worked as a janitor at a school. He’s always wanted to help children learn, and this two-part dictionary was his way of helping them do so, as he started with words his children would know. Both his sons are well-employed and are doing well, something Mujagić is very proud of.

After 10 years, his dictionary has more than 3,000 pages, but he only had some 100 copies printed for friends and family, Bosnian and Dutch. He alo reassures the Dutch that with his dictionary, they can make themselves understood in Bosnia and Herzegovina, Montenegro, Croatia and Serbia, now all seperate countries.

Different but yet similar, last year we posted about a Dutch missionary in Malawi who wrote a English-Chichewa dictionary.

(Link: wereldjournalisten.nl, Photo of Mostar, Bosnia Herzegovina by Pablo Pecora, some rights reserved.

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