Birthday parties & my 2nd assignment

Birthdays of Shoshannah & my dad & lots of BBQs

A week ago both my dad and Shoshannah celebrated their birthday (together 80 years young). That weekend we celebrated Shosh her birthday three times: On Friday in Maastricht, on Saturday in Weert with friends and on Sunday at home with family. Great weather, good people and an awesome BBQ completed the party.
Shosh her university friends in Maastricht

Family BBQ on Sunday

The next weekend we had to re-celebrate her birthday in Utrecht with our friends over there. Since my place isn't very big, we decided to take the gamble and organize a BBQ in the Griftpark. Keeping an eye on the weather forecasts every day paid off since we had awesome weather on Saturday.


Later that night we ended up on the Neude for a small taste of the big "Festival aan de Werf" here in Utrecht.

At ING I am still enjoying my time. About a month ago I started at the Managed Services department within Operations & IT Banking which delivers workplace services to all employees within ING (desktops & laptops, mobile and fixed phones, user authorizations and so on). Basically everything technical you need when doing your job). Heavy cost cutting is going on everywhere throughout the organization and my job is to check out how we as a (workplace) service provider can cut back on costs without having a deteriorating service performance. This creates a challenging playing field since I have to deal with both suppliers and (end-)customers.

This department has nothing to do with banking really but when we deliver high quality it will contribute to the emplyees' feeling of satisfaction at work and hopefully improve productivity. Unfortunately almost everyone takes for granted that their email works 24/7 and that a broken mobile phone gets replaced within a matter of hours, so we don't get any compliments when this actually occurs. But oh my... when email traffic is down for just ten minutes or they can't have their cell phone for a day.......... ;-)

Like I said, an interesting and challenging place to work.

Talk to you soon!
Ruud

Volendam

Sightseeing :-)

The weather was good and we had nothing else to do, so Shosh and I decided to go visit something. And after some deliberation we decided that the something should be Volendam, a small place just northwest of Amsterdam. Famous among tourists, but often a bit ridiculed by Dutchies. We hopped on a train, switched to a bus and about an hour and a half later we arrived in picturesque Volendam. We walked around (but were done rather quickly) and decided to buy a couple of drinks, some food and enjoy the sunny weather from the docks.



Now another week of work and the coming weekend we'll celebrate both Shoshannah's (25th) and my dad's (55th) birthdays.

Mazzel,
Ruud

Queensday 2009

Night & Day...

The best day of the year is over... I have to wait another whole year before I can celebrate Queensday again. This year it was great! After being gone for the past couple of times, this time I was in the Netherland and that called for a proper celebration. On Wednesday evening (Queensnight) Shosh and my sister with her boyfriend came over to Utrecht. We dressed up in our orange outfits, called a couple of people and went into the city to pre-celebrate the birthday of our previous queens (a.k.a a good excuse to walk in the streets in orange clothing with a beer in your hand).

Unfortunately Piggy couldn't join us both of course we made sure he could also enjoy the orange feeling ;-)
The day after we had breakfast and took a train to Amsterdam (which simply is THE place to be for Queensday - but it sucks on Queensnight...). We started out in the Vondelpark where we witnessed the masses going through all the little stands with second-hand stuff and kids with innovative ideas to make some money.


Afterwards we went straight to the Museumplein where Radio 538 has a stage with a whole lot of famous artists. We met up with Thieu's brother and his girlfriend, got some more beer and enjoyed the happy crowd, good music and awesome weather! And of course I enjoyed all the compliments on my great orange "business" suit... haha :-)



The rest of the weekend we spent in Weert. Relaxing and watching a movie on Friday. Working in my sister's garden the entire Saturday and ending the day with sushi and a boardgame. And the Sunday was a day of relaxing and catching up with a friend from China (Marc Frencken) who is in Holland for a short period of time.

Groeten uit Holland!
Ruudje & Shosh

A lot of stuff...

But so far a bit quiet on the blogging front.
Finishing my first assignment, a Lean Six Sigma training and a couple of very nice weekends...


At ING I finished my assignment at the TANGO program (turning Postbank and ING Bank into ING) and the Cost Containment program (due to the financial mess the world seems to be in). All in all it went very well, I got a good evaluation and found another assignment I am very much looking forward to (more about that sometime soon). In these past 6 months I feel I learned a lot, but at the same time realize that the road is still long...

Last week I spent at the ING Business School for a Greenbelt training (Lean & Six Sigma combined). It was a great week! With 14 trainees we picked a couple of processes and used them to practice our newly acquired skills.

Two weekends ago I also praticipated in a Squash tournament organized by Accenture. At the Frans Otten stadium in Amsterdam about 40 people gathered to play some squash. It had been quite a while since I played last and after 5 games all my energy was gone... the days after my body hurt soooo bad ;-) But the day itself was great and my thanks to Accenture for organizing this fun event.


In the other weekends Shosh and I celebrated my grandma's 75th birthday, spent an evening in Amsterdam, dug out a couple of trees in my sister's backyard and went on a nice cycling trip (after which we rewarded ourselves with a couple of Belgian beers and a piece of vlaai).

And just one and a half week and it's time for the best day of the year: Queens Day!!!
Rodney... you should totally join us and forget about boring Berlin ;-)

De groeten,
Ruudje

Ruud the Builder

Or maybe better: the demolisher...

For the past few weeks I spent at least one day of each weekend to help my dad to strip the bathroom. Not just the furniture but everything had to come out. The reason is simple: my parents are redoing parts of the house. And this is how I looked week after week after a couple of hours of manual labor...
At work everything is going fine. Of course sometimes it is hard dealing with all the negative publicity (which I often do not agree with), but these challenging times also offer many opportunities. I have to decide which assigment I will be doing for the next 5 months and will have the evaluation of my current assignment coming Monday (pretty exciting...)! And the week after Easter I am going to do a Lean Six Sigma Greenbelt training at our Business School. Looking forward to that, because the method seems to be very efficient and fun to apply.

For now, I am enjoying the long days and the sun and making plans for how to spend my weekends best!

Mazzel,
Ruudje

Weekend trip to Deutschland

Trier, Cochem, Luxembourg & some small places in between

Last weekend my parents left for Egypt and that meant their car was all mine to use... Shosh and I decided this was a nice moment for a break and booked a small bungalow in Kröv in the Mosel region of Germany. After a short trip and some trouble finding the place in the dark we got there on Friday evening at around 20.00. Unpacked our stuff and sat down with a couple of Germany's fine brews :-)

On Saturday we went to see Trier, Germany's oldest city (one of the buildings even reads that "Trier was built 1200 years before Rome"). We checked out the Porta Nigra, the old buildings such as the Ratskeller and Red House, the Roman amphitheater and some of the many churches. Luckily the weather cooperated and during our entire trip we had totally decent weather! On the way back we took a detour and drove the entire way along the river for which we were rewarded with some pretty views.


The next day we went to Cochem to check out Shosh her first castle: Reichsburg Cochem. We joined the guide and got a cool tour of the castle's interior. If you have a chance to visit, you should because it is worth it! After a walk through town and a beer in a very German bar we drove on to some of the places in the area. In one of them, Bernkastel-Kues, we looked up a restaurant and had an authentic German schnitzel.

On Monday we said farewell to our bungalow and drove to Luxembourg. Again the sun was shining, we found a great parking spot and could start exploring right away. Luxmbourg has very old city walls which are on the Unesco World Heritage list. This assures spectacular views and relaxed walks over the walls!


On the way back to Maastricht we stopped for some real Belgian "frietjes" and arrived early evening. "Unfortunately" I live in Utrecht nowadays, so I still had to drive an additional two hours before I was home.

All-in-all, it was a great weekend!

Cheers,
Der Rudi

Carnaval!!!

Alaaf!!! Alaaf!!! Alaaf!!!

In the south of the Netherlands many people celebrate carnaval. Once it was the last couple of days of fun, food and drinks before the fasting starts (Lent before Easter). Nowadays, hardly anyone adheres to the fasting part but we so like to enjoy the pre-Lent party :-) Smart Dutchies!
On Saturday Jochem (a colleague) and I invited a couple of foreign colleague trainees to join us for the celebration of carnaval in Eindhoven. It was a good, but (for me) short day. The work of the week before and the rushing from one place to another (Amsterdam-Maastricht-Weert-Eindhoven) had its effect on me... Nevertheless we all enjoyed the Brabants carnaval!

On Sunday Shosh and I went for "frühstück" to my sister and her boyfriend. After a good meal (a nice layer for the coming beers...) we went to the city (Weert) to watch the parade.



After the parade it was time to hit the bars and have fun with all the other dressed-up people. As usual, this was a lot of fun! The good thing about starting so early in the day with celebrating is that you get tired relatively early and don't get back home in the middle of the night. Good thing, because I had to work the day after...

Shosh and I also booked a small vacation in the weekend of 14 March. My parents are in Egypt then and we can borrow their car. Reason for us to hit the road and go visit some of Germany's nicer places, in our case, the Mösel area near Trier and Bitburg.

More on that next time!
Cheerio,

Ruudje

(ING) Chances for Children

Work sometimes is more than just work...

The past 5 weeks I have been part of one of the Corporate Responsibility activities of ING. ING Chances for Children to be exact. The assignment was simple: join the "Native Speaker Program" and teach basic English to 11-13 year old students from a "hard-learning" school in Amsterdam. The school I am talking about is the infamous Calvijn met Junior College in Amsterdam West. It has been described in the book "Onzichtbare ouders - De buurt van Mohammed B." by Margalith Kleijwegt who is an editor at Vrij Nederland and tries to create an image of the lives of the children of this school and their homes.


The teaching actually is no more than sitting down with a group of 3-5 kids and try to have a very basic conversation with them in English. But since for some of them it is the first time the have English classes it is hard to talk with them. Nevertheless when you hit the right subject they will try to talk a lot... for the boys these subjects were computer games, brand clothing and cars. For girls you should just mention the words kids or marriage and they are happy as can be!

I can really recommend this experience to everyone because it will widen your horizon! That school has "nothing" in common with the schools I went to or taught at (in China). And you also do something good for society! Simply a win-win situation!

Cheerio,
Ruudje