Moving house
The time has come to move out of the appartment in the Staalmeesterslaan, which I only moved in to last summer. Myself and a few of the guys I was sharing with had hoped we could take the lease over from the woman we were subletting it from, but this plan fell through when it turned out that I would need to be earning €45000 per year to be eligible to be a tenant. Frankly, if I earned that much I would not be living in a tower block in Slotervaart, but there you go.
Since we will be departing on foreign adventures quite soon, I haved decided to try and save a little cash by staying at my studio for the next month or so. This is not really allowed on the lease, so I will have to make sure that the anti-squat company doesn’t find out (I do hope that they don’t know about this website).
Other more immediate difficulties are that there is no proper heating and no shower. Also, I was sitting in my armchair the other day when I saw a small, scurrying thing dart across the darkness at the back of the room – a mouse, of course. And naturally they are rarely alone. In fact, he has already become less timid in the last few days, daring to dash right past my foot as I filled the kettle for a cup of tea.
What strikes me as quite stupid about our having to exit the old flat is that according to the rental agreement everything had to be thrown away, even the carpets and laminate flooring. Whoever comes next will have to replace all this. It just seems a totally senseless and wasteful way of managing property, and very much against the grain of the otherwise environmentally-aware Dutch way of doing things. Not only that, but the guy from the rental agency who came to inspect the scene of gaping emptiness which the place has become informed me that they don’t actually have anybody to take it over, and in fact have numerous empty apartments. Given the silly requirements mentioned above, this does not surprise me at all.
