Funniest thing. The phone company dropped off a note at our door, saying they tried to deliver the phone book, but noone was home to receive it. Let me explain. The Dutch have said No To Drugs Mailboxes. They only have that medieval crack in the door, so the phone book is too big to fit through it. So when it is the time of the year to deliver the phone book, they have to drive around door-to-door.

Anyway, I was so relieved to learn I can pick it up at the post office (just imagine the humongous stack of phone books they must have right now). *shrugs* I didn't even know we had a phone book in the house, never seen one. :/

My bank doesn't know my first name. Neither does the city. Or any business or institution I've dealt with. First names are not in apparently. It smacks of a sad attempt at personal privacy, but since they know everything else about us, what's the difference? You don't have to know a person's first name to hack into the bank and steal their money. The name isn't used for anything. And as such, it's not strictly necessary either. They use the initials of the first and middle name (if any), plus the last name. So if you have a kid, you can name him I. B. Clever. Or C. O. O. Lio. And if someone asks about the first name, you can tell them it's none of their business. Then you can give the kid a nickname for informal use.

First place I've ever been where no one wants your first name. :undecide:

Shopping in this country is so difficult that I might as well have a separate category for it on the blog. From food, to stationary, to bikes, to plants, to decor, to just about everything. Clothing seems to be decent, but that's an exception. So it's not without a certain skepticism I approached the first stab at Christmas gifts. Indeed the only thing I ended up buying was batteries on sale at Media Markt. Christmas gifts are tricky to begin with, cause there are no rules. Although I enjoy actually getting them and giving them, I don't enjoy the shopping process, wandering around trying to brainstorm. I mean Trondheim is a small town, it makes shopping hard. But Utrecht is the same kind of place, just that all the articles seem to be randomly spread and the kind of things I expect to find are not to be seen anywhere. I cruised around V&D and found their stationary department, which is pretty pathetic. I'm gonna make a note of getting stationary in Poland, where the culture for it is rich.

What you will find here is a bunch of stores very rarely found in Norway. Stores that have no defined role, they just sell completely random crap. Kruidvat is a chemist, but on the side they sell candy, cosmetics, photo equipment, CDs/DVDs, cheap clothing, children's toys, non-prescription drugs, and a bunch of things you will find there only once (like a tennis racket) by chance. This may sound disorganized, but HEMA seems to have no defined role at all, in there it's all random. This means if you want something in particular, you end up wandering through these stores on the off chance that they have what you need (which never seems to be the case). And it's not brand stores either, for clothes and media you know exactly where to go, but these "do you feel lucky?" stores make it impossible to know where to go for say a mirror, or a thermometer.

And I'm not the only one to think shopping here is awful, it seems to be a fairly well established claim.

So this week I started another course and I was pretty excited about it. The subject sounds interesting and it's definitely something I want to know more about. In a sense a regret from my previous college that we barely touched on it. But in fact, I'm rarely this excited about starting a new course, so I wanted to take the opportunity to get right into it. The course website lists a total of 17 books, one of which is the textbook, 4 of which are locked up in a special room and not-for-loan and 2 are in Dutch. That still leaves 10 books that are supposed to be in the library, not bad. I never do this, but I thought that for once I would do some extra reading aside from what is assigned, just to satisfy my own curiosity on the subject.

So I print the list and head down to the library. The building has seen some major reconstruction the last few months and they library has just reopened, which shows. The book shelves look normal, but the reception area is a bit of a mess. I get stuck behind some person trying to borrow an overhead projector, which easily takes 15 minutes of chit chat, interrupted by phone calls to the reception desk, trying to find stuff and figure out how to do that. When it's finally my turn, the distressed librarian, with a hint of impatience, tells me I don't have to ask at the reception desk, I can look the book up myself. So she walks over to one of the computers, marked "staff only" and moves the mouse. The screen remains black, even though the machine is on. Beside the linux machine is a Windows box, also marked "staff only". She moves the mouse, a login window appears. She logs in and waits. After about 30 seconds of the login still being processed, she turns back and looks it up on her own computer at her desk. The book I'm after turns out.... not to be in the library. In between more phone calls to the reception desk. I ask if there's a web interface for this and apparently there is. The whole process of trying to find this one book took about 40 minutes and accomplished nothing.

When I finally found the web interface for the library, it turns out only 3 of the 10 books are actually in the library. They can be ordered online, but again I couldn't log into the library system, it's not accepting my password. :lazy:

Btw, what is with those not-for-loan books? It's like visiting a prisoner in jail. It's not even that much of a problem when the library is a big building and you just can't take the book out. But in my building there's a little room where all of these books and and it's locked, possibly open by appointment only. It's like a doctor's waiting room. Who would sit in that little room for hours on end reading a book of hundreds of pages? And you won't be done in a day, you'll have to keep coming back, like a doctor visiting his patients.

Last time I went up, I forgot my pencil case coming back and so right now I'm rather low on stationary. Not that I use it much, I so rarely write by hand anymore. But for school it's nice to have the most basic supplies just to take a few notes or what have you. So I made a special point of taking a 40 minute detour coming home from school via the city center to stop by the biggest bookstore in town. How the hell does a bookstore not sell stationary?!? :wth: It's bizzarre. In Norway bookstores are the place to go for all kinds of paper goods. They sell books, magazines, all kinds of stationary, wrapping paper, organizers, office supplies, greeting cards, even movies if they're one of the bigger ones. But here, not a single pencil. So I go to two _stationary stores_ and walk out with nothing there either. The stationary here is seriously crap.

Norway has a fairly rich stationary culture, kids get all excited about new pens and stuff for school, there's a wide selection and they usually have what you want. Over here, meanwhile, the closest thing I found today was a selection of fancy pens, which is just the furthest away from regular stationary. Those expensive pens belong on the list of the most useless articles in retail. First of all, what kind of sucker will buy a fancy, expensive pen and expect it to last forever? Secondly, they're usually less good for writing than the regular pens (because they're 'designer' pens, focusing on the look not the function). A fancy pen is the kind of thing you get your dad for his birthday when you're completely out of ideas. Then you pick up a Hallmark card and say "happy birthday, dad! I hope you like this paperweight pen." You have to write that, otherwise he's gonna wonder who lost the pen that somehow found itself into his gift by accident.