Day: 9 September 2026

Dinner in a hotel restaurant here, a group of us, plates cleared, that pleasant stage of the evening where nobody is in a hurry. The waitress comes over, entirely friendly, and says:

You’re all gay though, right?

Well. Yes. Obviously yes. Demonstrably, visibly, audibly yes.

I genuinely cannot remember what any of us said back, which tells you it cannot have been anything clever. What I remember is the delivery. It was not a nudge, or a bit of banter, or a waitress being daring. It had exactly the tone of somebody confirming that the table wanted the bill split.

A British waitress would sooner walk into traffic. She might spend the whole evening being certain, and would take that certainty to her grave rather than say it out loud at the table. The information would be established entirely through inference and never once acknowledged, which we would all agree afterwards had been the polite way to handle it.

Here it was just a thing that was true, said out loud, on the way to the till.

It is not the first time

The all time champion remains the makelaar. This was back when I had moved over and my husband was still in London, and I was going round apartments on my own trying to find us somewhere to live.

So I explain the situation. Married, husband still in the UK for now, looking for a place for both of us. And the estate agent asks, with no edge to it whatsoever, whether we are in an open marriage.

Reader, I laughed. Partly at the question and partly at the total absence of any sense that it might be a question you would not ask a client you had met twenty minutes earlier.

And in fairness to her, from a housing point of view it was not entirely irrelevant. Two names or one, two people living here or one, is a legitimate thing for a makelaar to want settled. She had simply gone at it directly instead of circling for ten minutes hoping I would volunteer it.

I have written before about how long it took me to stop hearing Dutch directness as rudeness. These are the two exchanges I think of whenever it comes up, because neither of them was remotely rude. Both were somebody establishing a fact they wanted, in one sentence, and then moving on with their day.

Nine years in and I still could not do it. But I have stopped flinching, which is progress of a sort.

In 2018 my then employer asked me to write something for their careers blog about relocating from London to Amsterdam. I did, they published it, and last week I went to look for it. It is a 404.

The company is still there. The website is still there. The blog is still there, and still lists eleven posts, several of which are other people’s employee stories. Mine has simply been taken down at some point in the last few years without anybody mentioning it, which is entirely their right and also exactly the thing I keep writing posts about.

The Internet Archive has it, in five snapshots between August 2019 and September 2020. So here it is again, on a domain I pay for. What follows is what I wrote at the time, unedited, minus the corporate preamble about the company’s brands which was not mine and is not interesting.

Moving to the land of pickled herring, biertjes and stroopwafels

Originally published on the Travix careers blog, 9 August. Reproduced from the Internet Archive copy.

A year ago, I made the decision to move from London to Amsterdam and I absolutely love it. I had been to Amsterdam a few times over the years and also did an Erasmus study abroad at Tilburg University—I’ve always really enjoyed it here. So, when I was sitting having a beer at Rembrandtplein after a year of round-the-world travel, I decided to look into the possibility of staying longer by getting a job. I came across a job ad for a position as product owner at Travix via Arrows recruitment agency.

I immediately applied and, a week later, I had an interview! And after a few more interviews, I was offered the job! During the interviews, I got the impression Travix was like a startup where everyone was very keen and passionate about their work and, to me, that was a great selling point for wanting to join the company. Everything happened so quickly and now I’m working as the Senior Product Owner of the website landing pages and content management system.

Buddying up and apartment searching

Landing the job was the first big hurdle, but then came the time to actually plan the relocation and move. Travix helped me along the entire process. They have a buddy system and my buddy was the person I was replacing in the position. It worked out really well and it was nice to speak to someone about everything related to moving and settling into the Netherlands, next to regular day-to-day work topics.

Since I had just returned from a year of travelling, I could start working right away in the London office while I prepared for my relocation to Amsterdam. Travix introduced me to a relocation specialist named Yael. I explained what I was looking for in an apartment and she started searching right away. She found 6 apartments and took me on the back of her scooter to visit them all. Between visits, she introduced me to pickled herring and told me about the different neighborhoods. The hard part was choosing which apartment to rent!

Travix offered me a number of relocation benefits. Next to arranging a buddy and paying for a relocation specialist to assist me, they pay for shipping and flight costs and help me set up my appointments to get a BSN (national identification number) and to open a bank account. They are also willing to pay for the first month’s rent in an apartment while you apartment hunt, but I didn’t need that since I found one while working from the London office. Travix also supports you in learning Dutch and I’ve been learning how to speak basic Dutch for everyday living. I met 7 other people in the Dutch lessons held at the office who are not from my own department, so it has been a great source for getting to know colleagues and make new friends.

I can truly say that Travix lives up to their Mantra “We move people”. Not only physically, in my case from London to Amsterdam, but also emotionally by really supporting me and making me feel very welcome all throughout the relocation and onboarding process.

My 3 tips for people relocating for work

Overall, the relocation process has gone super smoothly. Things that I thought would be difficult, weren’t! I am also happy to share my 3 tips for people planning to relocate for work. They are:

• Find every piece of important paperwork you think you may need – from bank statements to birth and marriage certificates, and so on. Put them all into one folder so you have them ready on hand, as you will need to have copies of them to do several things, such as opening a bank account.
• For moving to the Netherlands, I recommend reading the Undutchables book, as it puts a lot of things into perspective.
• Anytime you move house, I advise you put things that are important to you—things that hold some emotional or sentimental value into a box, such as a photo, mug, etc. to move with you right away (before the rest of your items are shipped) so you can feel at home more quickly. It makes all the difference.

Amsterdam living (and avoiding the tourists)

I’ve only been living here for a year, but I’m already trying to avoid all the tourists. My partner and I take a lot of weekend trips to explore other Dutch cities and towns. Every city has its own charm and people are amazingly friendly. I feel that Amsterdam has all of the benefits of London with the theaters and buzzing nightlife, but without the rat race and stress you have with living in London. People are more laid back here and not in a rush.

What surprised me most about the Netherlands is how much fried food there is! I’ve also gotten used to the small beers – biertjes – instead of the large pints you get in the UK. A big lifestyle difference is, of course, the cycling. It’s so easy to get around the city, which you can do in almost 15-20 minutes to anywhere. I would never cycle in London!

I think you can tell I’m happy to be living here in Amsterdam and working for Travix!

Greetings from Amsterdam,
Iain Croll

A note on all of this being temporary

Reading it back, the striking thing is how confident it is. A year in, everything going well, tips for other people. All of which was true when I wrote it.

Two kinds of ephemerality turn out to be sitting in the same post. The obvious one is the web. A page written for a company blog exists exactly as long as somebody at that company sees a reason to keep it, which is not a decision you are party to and not one anybody is obliged to tell you about. Nothing was deleted maliciously here. A site got rebuilt, or a page got tidied, and the version of me from 2018 was not on the list of things worth migrating. The only reason it still exists at all is that a non-profit in California decided to keep a copy.

The less obvious one is the workplace. I do not work there any more. Neither does my buddy, or Yael who found the apartment on the back of her scooter, or most of the people I met in those Dutch lessons. A job feels permanent while you are in it, in the same way a website does, and the honest lesson of the last few years is that a company is a group of people who happen to be in the same place for a while.

I would still write the post. I would just keep my own copy of it this time, which is what this is.

I was chatting to a friend recently about a gay bar in London that we used to go to when I first moved for University. Then to a work colleague when I was on a work trip to London about how the office block used to be Turnmills and I used to go to a club called Trade there back in the day. Also a milestone birthday is just around the corner so that makes you reminisce a little too. Anyway I think I discovered a problem with Google and that is that it’s not great at recent history unless someone has taken the time to write that history down. So here is a (not complete) list of the bars and clubs I remember from when I first moved to London.

1989 to 1993: the University years

I was new to the city and I did a lot of exploring in those 2.5 years. (0.5 was in NL on an Erasmus exchange and 1 was a work year.) Earl’s Court was the gay centre back then with Hammersmith a close-by companion, and Soho hadn’t yet made its mark as the place to meet and wouldn’t until later in the 90s.

I think the very first bar in London I went to was The Royal Oak in Hammersmith. It’s now a strip club and very straight. Back in the late 80s it was a boisterous bar with drag. Lola Lasagne was on stage the first time I was there, and I met a man called Chris while there with some university friends. That’s when I first discovered how big London was, and how hard it was to traverse at night without a lot of money for taxis.

West

• The Royal Oak, 62 Glenthorne Road, Hammersmith (closed)
• The Coleherne, 261 Earls Court Road, Earl’s Court (closed 2008, became The Pembroke)
• Bromptons, 294 Earls Court Road, Earl’s Court (closed)
• Silks, Shepherd’s Bush Shopping Precinct (closed)

North

• The Black Cap, 171 Camden High Street, Camden Town (closed 2015)
• King Edward VI, 25 Bromfield Street, Islington (closed 2011)

East

• Benjy’s, Mile End Road, Mile End (closed)
• Trade @ Turnmills, Clerkenwell Road, Clerkenwell (Turnmills closed 2008)

South

• Daisy Chain @ The Fridge, Brixton (The Fridge closed 2010, now Electric Brixton)

Central

• Some bar on Bear Street, Leicester Square, which is now Zoo I think, but I can’t remember the name
• Subway (I think that’s what it was called), Leicester Square (closed)
• Jonathan’s (I think that’s what it was called), Leicester Square (closed)
• First Out, 52 St Giles High Street (closed 2011)
• Vespa 15, St Giles High Street (closed)
• Admiral Duncan, 54 Old Compton Street, Soho
• The King’s Arms, 23 Poland Street, Soho (closed)
• City of Quebec, 12 Old Quebec Street, Marble Arch (now straight?)
• Comptons, 53 Old Compton Street, Soho
• Madame JoJo’s, 8-10 Brewer Street, Soho (closed 2014)
• Bang!, 157 Charing Cross Road (I think, but it might have already been at Busby’s)
• Heaven, Villiers Street (now G-A-Y). I worked here too during this period
• Substation, Falconberg Court, Soho (closed). I think it was open in this period but it could have been later
• Village. I think it was somewhere else before it ended up on Wardour Street, Soho

Bars I discovered after University

• The Edge, 11 Soho Square, Soho (closed). This opened I think as I was working at La Rues in 1993
• G-A-Y, Astoria Theatre, 157 Charing Cross Road (the Astoria was demolished in 2009)

Bars I didn’t discover until much later

These came while I was living briefly in Mudchute, the only time I lived on the DLR.

• The Joiners Arms, 116-118 Hackney Road, Bethnal Green (closed 2015)
• The Spiral Staircase? Shoreditch
• The White Swan, 556 Commercial Road, Limehouse

And one that is still open

The Two Brewers on Clapham High Street. It was already a regular by the end of 2000, and it turns up all through the archive of this blog from then on. On 28 January 2007 I met my husband there.

After a list this full of closures, that one being still open feels like the exception that earned its place.

If you remember one I’ve missed, or you know I’ve got a name or an address wrong, the comments are open. That is rather the point of writing it down.