This was written on 2021-11-26 but it is retro-dated so as to not appear among my recent posts, and thus avoid embarrassing certain unnamed entities. It is written in past tense even though a few paragraphs down the page it begins describing my current experience, because in the near future I intend this to become my past experience.
In 2015 I decided to leave Greece and its destroyed economy, and to go live and work elsewhere in Europe. I started an international job search, and within a couple of months I had a few offers to choose from. I picked the one from a company called Topdesk, in the nice little university town of Delft, in The Netherlands, mainly because of tax benefits available to expats in that country, but also, and in no small part, because The Netherlands has the reputation of being one of the most foreigner-friendly countries in Europe. The Netherlands achieves this reputation in a number of ways, one of which is the fact that the Dutch rank number one in the world (1) in English-as-a-foreign language proficiency, making it possible to live in The Netherlands without ever having to learn Dutch.
