Progress and Observations

Good news - this week has resulted in quite a bit of progress on our move. We basically had three things left to do: 1) get our residence cards (these are an important form of ID here in the Netherlands and are required for things like health insurance), 2) get health insurance (see comment about needing the residence card) and 3) exchange our driver's licenses for Dutch licenses (also requires a residence card).

As of last night all three of us have residence permits! Maybe now we are a step closer to being Dutch. Mike and I were able to get ours last week and Alex got his yesterday.

Because we have residence permits we were able to register for Dutch health insurance. It is much less expensive here. Where we would pay ~$4400/month for the top tier insurance in the states (and another $200/month for dental), here it is $440/month. And that includes dental! We haven't engaged with the health care system yet, so we don't know how that will compare, but it is nice to not have to pay so much in insurance.

We are here on the Dutch American Friendship Treaty (DAFT) visa. One of the benefits of the DAFT visa is we are able to "exchange" our California driver's licenses for Dutch driver's licenses. With other visa types we would have to get approval from a driving school before we could take the driving test and then take a driving test (slight hint of scam...). With the DAFT we don't have to do that.

Yesterday Mike and I were able to turn in our California licenses and start the process (everything is a process here) to get our Dutch driver's licenses. We turned in our US licenses and were informed it would be 2-4 weeks before we'd receive an answer, and that we were not legal to drive in that time because they had taken our California licenses. We then drove home.

One observation through all of these hurdles - it feels like interactions through the internet are comparable to where the US was in approximately 2006. It's like everything works 85% correctly and they don't really worry that it isn't quite right.

Two examples of this from the last week...

We received an email that our residence cards were available to pick up. The email had a link to make an appointment to get them. When I clicked on the link, it had a table where you look up the city where you live and find which office is holding your residence permit. I made an appointment at the corresponding office. A week later I got an email canceling my appointment with an explanation that our permits were not at that office, but were at the expat office instead.

The percent of permits that are for expats is probably quite small, but it seems like a small fix to let someone know that their permit is at a different place (and we ended up waiting a week longer than we needed to before getting our permits because the system gave us bad information about where they were).

The second example was with health insurance. We applied online for the health insurance and a couple of days later I got an email saying we had been approved. The email said that almost all interactions with the health insurance company happen in the company's app. So, I downloaded and installed the app. Every time I tried to login, the app crashed. I called the health insurance company and found out that I hadn't been "fully approved" yet - they still needed my employment contract before they could approve me - and I couldn't login to the app until I had been fully approved. It seems like in the US the original email would have told me 1) I was not fully approved yet and 2) I couldn't login to the app until I was fully approved. Instead, I had to wonder what I was doing wrong that was crashing the app.

This is a country of 19M people, so maybe it is hard to get close to a 100% user experience on these things, but it is interesting to me that I feel like I have to kind of fumble my way through these things without much explanation/help to get things done.

I'd be interested if people think this is still the case in the US as well. I feel like this is how things worked 10-15 years ago (internet interactions were kind of clunky), but there is now an expectation that, in general, things will work.