Day-Lefth...

Tuesday 19th September 3:10 pm

It’s cold and windy outside. I’m with Sadia in the comforts of our boudoir. My husband is in class since 8 am this morning. It’ll be another long night. By 9 pm only he’ll be back.

Come this Thursday, it’ll be two weeks long my family and I have been in Delft (DAY-LEFTH, as the locals say it, with a slight ‘H’ inflection like ‘Twelfth’), Netherlands. Oh yeah, it’s wrong to say Holland since Holland comprises only a region of the country – Netherlands. With my husband having classes a few days after we arrived, the first week was ‘make-it-or-break-it’ moment for me. However, the long respite of hot weather last week lent support to my adjustment period.

Now, the weather has turned cold (didn’t I say that before?). Yes, cold. And dreary. I shouldn’t complain though. It was cold and rainy when we touched down in Schiphol airport during the wee hours of the morning on 7th September. Against the chilly rain and with Sadia in my arms, I had to sprint (or you could safely say – walk briskly) to the van taxi that would bring us to Delft. Lo and behold, we got stuck in the morning rush hour which contributed to an exorbitant taxi cost of Euro103! Of course, we couldn’t lug all four gigantic bags into the train (Hopefully, come touristy time, we’d be able to travel light). The protracted car ride coupled with lethargy from the 13-hour transcontinental flight also set off an inconsolable cry by Sadia in the taxi. She cried her heart out much to our helplessness, until she fell asleep on my shoulder. Who wouldn’t cry coming out from one compact space into another?

The first day, my husband booked us into Johannes Vermeer Hotel, which cost around Euro125 a night. It is a quaint place with replicas of Dutch famous painter’s works on display in every room (or ‘Kamer’ as they say it in Dutch), hallway and in the lobby where a small bussel desk cum receptionist and a glass cabinet encasing Vermeer-esque paraphernalia are located. Funny thing is the hotel has this Do-It-Yourself kind of setting where you have to take your own bags upstairs to the room (it doesn’t have any lift!), you go downstairs to retrieve your free WIFI password and you help yourself to cutlery and plates for breakfast (Luckily, the lobby also has a small store where we store our big luggage!). Also, the room doesn’t come with its own miniature fridge but instead you are given a key to a big glass ‘fridge’ – the one you can easily find at 7-Eleven – situated at a common landing area, to get your own sodas and other beverages. You then tick which beverage(s) you have taken in a form provided inside your room, which in turn indicates how much you have to pay upon check-out. All fridge-relatd activities are under the watchful eye of a CCTV!!! This Spartan-like service must be owing to the fact the place is co-owned by this lanky blonde woman – who I might add became rather standoffish when I asked too many questions (Hehe – I have that effect any where in the world).

My husband scurried to his university after depositing us in our Kamer to rest and knock our shoes off. By that time, my facial skin had begun to flake off and to make matters worse, I had caught the flu bug possibly from a family member in Malaysia (or was it from the lady sitting in front of us in the flight who kept sneezing?). After our beauty sleep at the hotel, he came back gushing over the soon-to-be-ours apartment that he had the pleasure of viewing. I’m quite surprised my husband has all this energy left to go around and run errands that could have waited until we stretched our legs in the hotel room. I guess he is used to it from his travels. And partly, it is in his nature to get things settled first before he can relax. As for me, I was travel-weary and jet-lagged. We later had our first real meal (if you could call fast food REAL) in McD, filet-o-fish set for lunch and by 4pm we had snoozed off until 2 in the morning! Jet-lagged big time!

The next day, following DIY breakfast, we moved into our apartment. The lift was broken however, so my husband had to divvy up the clothes and other knick-knack from those big luggage into a smaller bag before hauling them up the narrowed stairs. Yes, we live on the second floor where access is only (save for the lift) by way these spiraling rickety wooden stairs which can accommodate one person at a time on each of its step. Yep, it’s that tiny so you cannot walk up hand in hand if the occasion EVER happens to call for it.

The apartment itself – well, I already saw it briefly with the family the day before, following our McD excursion – is a showcase of IKEA furniture and fittings, not unlike our house in Ampang. However, this apartment parts company from the one in Ampang due to 1) its heavy reliance on IKEA items and 2) its too modern, minimalist concept. Linen, curtains, placemats, glasses, plates, dinner table and chairs, lamps, coffee tables, kitchen towels, bath towels, rugs. Speaking of rugs, the living room’s has this sisal-like texture which the coffee tables stand. The upstairs houses, amongst others, the bedroom, side tables, a wardrobe and the only bathroom in the apartment. To go up is yet another set of spiraled and narrowed set of small steps. The entire floor of the boudoir is covered in the aforesaid sisal-like carpeting which can be quite painful on the feet if you are lucky enough to trudge on its random splinter ends (We have yet to buy house slippers or flip-flops to contain this problem).

One marvelous feature of the second floor is its unique gable look with wooden beams hanging above the bed’s foot, laid out in a triangular fashion from the floor and extended all the way up to the bathroom’s door. In fact, it is the first distinctive thing that you see when you reach the top of the steps. The bedroom also has two skylights and a small diagonally-angled window (or attic window) which overlooks the building next door, particularly its inviting ‘alfresco’ top floor with flower pots and summery lawn chairs. As anyone can guess, this furnished apartment comes at a price and a housekeeper who cleans the place once a week (ours is either Tuesday or Wednesday). I already had some incidences and grievances with her - a hybrid of a brunette Ingrid Bergman and an Auschwitz prison guard - even with only twice housekeeping duties. Perhaps I’m being too hard on her – she did give us a babycot cum playpen from the storeroom when we first arrived, which originally didn’t come with the apartment. Hmm, let’s see how things pan out in the next few weeks and whether she will be extra nice and won’t lord over me when my husband is around.

Anyway, I will further expatiate on the first week of life here in my next blog entry. Till then, DAAG!