Radio Doll with Aaron from The Netherlands.

Hi everyone, this is Aurasha and you're listening to Radio Doll Podcast.

A podcast which used to be in Farsi but this time for the first time we have a full episode in English. In this podcast I talked with my friends around the globe to listen to their stories about living in different parts of the world and their experiences through this journey. So about this podcast I was curious, I was curious to know what it's like to live somewhere other than Iran. And it wasn't something that I could easily go and do and experience it by myself because... So I started talking to my friends who had left the country and asked them some questions that I had about their experience This podcast began when I decided to document these conversations In that way I'd like to describe it as some sort of long-form improvised conversations with my friend yeah, so At first the guests were my close friends those who I mostly knew from college. And after a while, to my amazement, some strangers expressed their interest to participating in the podcast. So it started to get bigger and bigger. Italy, Portugal, Japan, South Africa, Sweden, Ireland, all or some of the countries we've covered in the past, something like 40 episodes. And now we've reached this point that after something like four years, I had this chance to take this giant leap and have my first non-farsy speaking guest. I can't spell myself so lucky that I had the chance to meet Aaron. He's so friendly, he knows how to express his thoughts clearly. And most importantly, he had so many interesting stories to tell. You'll listen, you'll find out. Since his podcast listener convincing him to participate in one of the episodes was rather easy and I appreciate his trust in me for being as I said already our first non-forcius picking guest. They start a conversation by some questions about Aaron's childhood in the Netherlands, his teenage years in school and his first job in his hometown. Things start to get more fascinating when his daughter's journey as a backpacker to Australia. Listen, I hope you enjoyed and please share your feedbacks with me. You can find Rudi O'Dol, the WAL on Twitter and Instagram also you can find

supplementary content and title of the topics we discussed for each episode in

our website. So without further ado let's go and listen to this episode with

Aaron from Holland. I don't know. I think the best thing you can always do is just be self-deprecating rather than... So yeah, making fun of yourself rather than making fun of others. It's a tough interview. Yeah, it's totally different than the first one we had. Yeah, yeah. It's getting late. We're getting tired. Is there recording working? Yeah, I guess it's the ones who stop is here. I'd at least say something nice on the end. No, no, it's better to continue. I mean. So the things that I was interested to know, how was the school, how was the elementary school? What would you do? I mean, did you go to the streets to play with friends at the streets? I don't know, football or whatever. Yeah, I mean, primary school is just primary school. We just go there, play with our friends. Usually after school, we have a football field next to primary school. So we all play football there. Or any evening we play hide and seek, those kind of things. And then after that, how was college? So for us, after primary school, we go to high school. So in year 12, we go to high school. High school was good the first year. It was nice meeting a lot of new people. but then I was more interested in not going to school, playing video games at home, smoking cigarettes outside of school. And just be really annoying. Maybe rebellious, you know, way, I mean, we would skip school. And then we run to, there was this youth center.'d run to there and then smoke cigarettes there. I had a paper round back then, so I had some money, so I could buy cigarettes. And then we would just share cigarettes, we'd all bring the odor and chewing gum and then make sure nobody could smell, but always of course they knew we were smoking. And yeah, that's all we did. And usually usually after school as well we would always meet at the pool and we would go to the back of the pool, back of the building and we meet there with a lot of friends and smoke cigarettes and just sit there. Here we have this thing in Netherlands where you just hang, we don't really have a translation for it, but yeah, it just means that young kids are always hanging around. So they hang around at the bench at the church, with a pool or somewhere else. So we just sit there and smoke and just listen to Bob Marley. Yeah. Yeah. That was my school. And then in high school, the second year, it became worse because I didn't wanna go to school at all. I didn't really like going to school. But did they touch in the school? What they taught us. So we have Dutch language, English language. We have geography, history. We have religious, like religious things, but more learning about the world. History, I said, and math, and physical education. Practically the same as ours. Yeah, I would think so. But you didn't have to say in lines, when you wanted to go to. No, we didn't. We were not like Belgium. No, we would just come whenever we wanted to. Pretty much. Yeah, it's not too strict. Although they were very strict on people being late. So time at home is actually really important. So if you're one minute late, you are late. And it's such a bad thing. So if you would come one minute late in the class, you would have to go to the, I don't know what they call it, just like some guy sitting there, you go through him and then you'll ask you like, oh, why are you late? Why are you late one minute? And then you tell them, oh, I was, I had some issues with my bicycle or something, they would get a note note. And then with that note, the next morning you would have to come in early. Think it was about an eight, you had to come in. So normally you would start at nine or eight thirty, but you would have to come in at eight one hour. Yeah, you would have to come in at that time and then give them the note to prove that you came early that next day. So yeah, but I had an issue with that. So I was always late, always like five minutes, I mean, and a lot of that papers had a lot of those papers. So what happens then is that they will give you a warning and then if it happens again a couple times, they will send you to the police. So I had to go to the police and then yeah to what yeah so I was late. Yeah exactly. So yeah I had to go to the police and then you have to say yeah yeah I've been late so many times and then they will give you a punishment. So you get community service. So I had community service because I was late. Five minutes, ten minutes every day. You had community service because you were late to get to the school? Yeah. Yeah. So harsh. Yeah. Yeah, that's horrible. But yeah, so my community service was to help clean up this festival that we had. And it was pretty okay because all these people are cool people, you know, and then the people that work there that will guide you, they are really nice and everything. So yeah, they just let you sit and then you help clean a bit. And then they let you go the next day. What was the hard part during your childhood? The hard part, probably my family,

mostly. I mean there's a lot of stuff that happened within my family, a lot of drug abuse and abuse as well. So that didn't make it easier for me in high school. Yeah. And then call it Chappend.

Yeah, so for us we have to go to school until we're 18. So I was 16 when I finished my high school. So we have in that high school that where I was, you have three levels. So you have like the the okay age level, which I was doing. Then you have like better than okay and the best one. So I was on the okay-ish. And so after four years you finished there and then you're only 16 so you still have to do two years. So when you're 16 you pick your college and then you specialize further in what you want to do. So that's when I started to do software and game development for, yeah I was supposed to be three years But then is there something that people suddenly start? No, I was always interested in programming. I mean, I was always really into video games You know played a lot of world of Warcraft and a lot of command and conquer and all these things and I was always playing online. So I was always on team speak and ventrilo talking to other people and stuff. So I wanted to do something with that. So yeah, that's why I chose game development. Yeah, it's part of that. How does it work? I mean, do you have to do some entrance exam? No, no. No, so college is because you were on the okay level, right? It's not that hard to get in. So that means you do four years and then you have a high school exam and then based on that you can pick your next college. Yeah. So there's the exam. There's an exam, yeah. Which I passed barely. So you choose software development game development software and game development. Yeah What was the vision? What did you want it to do? I mean did you have an vision that okay? I want to be a game developer and create work on that Something like World of Warcraft or Half-Life. Yeah, definitely definitely that that was the plan. You know when I Yeah, that's definitely something I wanted to do, like, be able to somehow write some code and then see that reflect into the video game itself. And yeah, then I joined that course and then we were building Yatsue and some card games and snake and it wasn't really... You know I wanted to treat each other. What else we were using really we were using Lua to make some games as well and I don't know I wanted to work on 3d games like Unreal Engine right or Unity or whatever but that wasn't really the case back then. So what was the rush? Were we so impatient? Do you have to start from some there? The issue at those colleges is that the programming languages that they use is very old. For example, we were learning some web development as well and they were teaching us how to use Dreamweaver and they were teaching us HTML1. So HTML1... Do we have HTML1? Yeah, I mean you have capitalized tags like capital H1 or you use capital B in between tags to have bold tags. You know those kind of things. So it was very outdated and also the teachers there they're very old you know they don't really keep up with what's happening in programming. What are you talking about? We're talking about 2009. Yeah, 2009, 2010. Yeah, so the all the students that were there we knew programming. We knew how to use C sharp and all that stuff. They're teaching us visual basic for applications. So it wasn't using its own IDE like Visual Studio.net. I was using Excel and then you would go into the menu for scripts, visual basic for applications. You would go in there and then in there you would write your Yatsi or something. So this is very, very bad. And then yeah, some stuff happened in my family as well. So then I was not too motivated because of that and in combination with all this stuff being outdated. So yeah, then after two years, I thought, okay, I'll just quit and get a job, make some money. To get your degree, you had to attend two more years, right? One more year. Yeah. One more year. Yeah. But I was so done at that point, you know, yeah. So that's when I quit. And then I think it was just before the summer holidays. And then my parents said, okay, if you want to quit, that's fine. But you're definitely not going to be at home the entire day. So better get a job and I was okay with that. So I signed up on this just through a website. So they talked to me that we don't want you to be at home during that. And yeah I think they don't want you to be lazy right and not do anything. I think it's a good thing. I mean I want my children to be independent and do stuff you know and not sit at home play video games. So I can understand them because I was playing video games a lot a lot a lot you know it wasn't like okay after. You know work I played two hours no it was like all nighters, everything. Because I loved it, you know. So, yeah, yeah, I mean, it was amazing for me to be able to, I couldn't believe like how you can create such a big world and then all these people are walking around everything. I was just fascinated by it. So I really liked it. But yeah, so I thought it was a good thing that they said, okay, you go get a job somewhere. And then I signed up on this website for some warehouse job in my hometown. The Boy Warehouse. It's a warehouse for a store. You just... I mean, so you had this experience in programming, why didn't you? Because I didn't have a degree. I didn't have a degree and I think I was a bit too green at that point to actually go to companies and say, hey, I want to be a programmer. I think I was still a bit young. I was 18. So also I thought, you know, I was a bit of a nerd. so I thought, okay, if I'm going to always be an IT, I don't want to be one of those weirdos, you know, that cannot talk to anyone. No, but so I thought it would be good for me to get a job and work with other people to avoid something like this. So that's when I signed up online for that warehouse. And I thought they won't contact me. But in my message, I wrote, I'm available, how long you want me, whatever. So of course, they call me right away. And I started the next Monday, I guess, started working there for maybe two euros an hour or something like that. I said two euros or four euros. Yeah. Minimum wage or is this? Yeah. So it's minimum wage for a underage person for your age. So in Netherlands, it's by age. So if you are, if you are 18, you make this amount of money. If you are're 19 you make this amount of money up until you're 27

Then after that it stops Unless your boss is nice then you can make some more money So yeah, I started working there and the work was quite easy because it was Well, we would just get in boxes from from trucks and then you would put labels on the boxes and we would get orders from the

web shop and you would prepare these orders and pack them for the business.

It's really enjoyed it.

Yeah, I really loved it.

No, that's the thing.

I mean, of all the jobs that I had, I have many different jobs over the years.

I enjoyed most of them, yeah.

Because it's all different, you know.

And the nice thing about this job was that you are really tired at the end of the day, like you see what you have done and it's not just labeling stuff. It's also moving stuff, helping build like new wrecks in a warehouse or going to customers houses and delivering stuff or going on the truck, going to the other side of Netherlands and and delivering the goods. So there was a lot of stuff involved, and it was nice. And the good thing was that they would allow you to work as long as you wanted. So for me, I just, you know, I did a simple calculation in my mind. Okay, if I work 12 hours a day, I get 12 times three euros, it's a lot of money, you know, for a young guy. And if I then work six days or seven days in a week, that's even more. So yeah, so I started working about six days in a week, and then there were days where I went to the warehouse at three in the morning, and then we would go on a truck, go go to the other side of Netherlands and then come back Maybe like two in the afternoon, then we're work until 10 in the evening just to make those hours and get more money How are the co-workers? All different there were guys my age there were people really old And he had to communicate with them on daily basis. Yeah, yeah, yeah, so usually you have your own Your own section in the warehouse so you work with those people mainly but we had lunch so you interact with everyone and You drive forklift so you drive with the other guys and you get to deal with the truck drivers and

One of my favorite things to do was we would get these sea containers

full of product they were filled to the end, you know

So we would get them in the morning and then we would have three hours to empty them

So the store I was working for they would would sell like strollers for babies and beds and all things that you need for a baby. So yeah, this container would come from China, you would open it and it's a long truck. It's a sea container full of small boxes and then okay, you have three hours and then you would just empty it empty it and you would it was a workout definitely Before that they were hiring like an external team to do it these guys were on speed Empty in this thing. It's a drug. It's just so you can work faster to empty it, but then they got rid of these guys Yeah, but that my favorite thing too, because it was such a quick workout and you could drive forklift, so you would load all the boxes on the pallet and then drive the forklift, deliver it to the other guy and then run back and continue. Yeah. So that was good. It was good. It taught me a lot of discipline because my issue in high school was I was always late and then college same thing But then the boss that was working there who's a really like, you know, this guy's from back in the day They're really rough and disciplined, you know So he was like that so every morning if I was late for one minute He would already call me a paper. No, no, no, he would call me and yell at me like,

Oh, what the fuck are you doing?

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