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I am moving to my new flat in Amsterdam in few hours. Now that I am no longer a visiting-hotel-junkie-consultant (tm) and will be slowly moving into resident status, I thought that I would share with the world the financial frustration of a newcomer to this city.

First, don't get me wrong though. I love Amsterdam. I prefer living here 10 times more than in London. I haven't been here for a long time, but I have already seen that the quality of life here is way higher than in London. Amsterdam is big enough so that you enjoy all the pleasures of modern occidental lifestyle, while being small enough and village-like enough to ensure a nice and pleasant (possibly long term) stay. Not to mention that people I met in the street are actually very nice.

This said, as one of the financial centers of Europe, Amsterdam attracts many consultants, contractors, expats and other variations of the "I didn't enjoy my mother's basement that much and wanted to see the world" kind of person (passport not included). The locals know it and seem to have no problems trying to screw you (I was looking for a better way to describe it, but didn't find any).

In third position of the ultimate "I screw you" contest, you have letting agents. I was lucky enough that the nice (English) girl who took care of me, made the entire experience not so painful, but still the agencies fees are astronomical (unheard of, as far as I am concerned). Not to mention the renting contract terms (apparently standard here) which make going to prison looks like a luxury cruise.

In second position, we have the hotels. The first hotel was all right, but the second hotel was expensive beyond belief. Not really the room itself (let me come back to this claim a bit later actually...), but the extras. For instance the internet was costing me Euros 10 an hour. Ten freaking euros per 60 minutes. Come on! For fuck sake ! I tend to depend on the internet like oxygen, but I decided that I would not pay for it so I spent the entire week without emails.

When checking out (two days earlier than I should have, but they didn't give me any refund), I was expecting to pay some extras for the council taxes (they charge you council taxes in hotels around here, but only when you check out -- I discovered this when I was checking out of my first hotel), some extras for the laundry, and a bit of the mini bar, but then I was presented with a bill of Euros 260. I asked for the breakdown of the bill and discovered that they put some random room fees nowhere related to what I had paid online when I did the booking. I then started explaining to the guy that I would not pay for that, that it was a mistake between their computing system and the online broker. He didn't want to admit it, so I had to pull the laptop out, bring the confirmation screenshot of the booking up (that I had saved as pdf file, as I always do under my Keep Everything policy) and ask him to redo all the calculus by hand himself. After a while he left, came back few minutes later, apologised for the mistake, and issued another invoice. I saved myself Euros 120. But the victory was a short one because outside the lobby of the hotel I (re)encountered Evil itself, well one of them, under the human form of taxi drivers which collectively hold the ...

First position: Taxi Drivers.
Not all of them are blood suckers (aka vampires), but I can't count the number of times I have been screwed by their kind (maybe they suffer of collective hallucination and think I am some kind of moving living purse). Because of them I think I have some permanent damages in my ass now. If you come in or out of an hotel, they ask you few innocent questions such as where you come from, how long you've been in Amsterdam etc. At the beginning I thought they were all nice, but in fact they simply target their victims. I fell for it today again, and it was already too late when I realised that I paid almost twice more than I should for a very short trip around lunch time

I will get revenge. In one way or another I will. I swear it!