G & E in the USA (English version; OLD version)

Last updated January, 2005
This page is no longer maintained. Click on my BLOG for all our new adventures.
Dutch version of this page.
Back to (old) homepage.

In October 2001 Gerard, our cat Lina (LEE-na) and I moved from the Netherlands to the United States. The main cause of our relocation was the job that was offered to Gerard at Lumileds in Santa Clara in California. On these pages you will find "the continuing story" of our relocation and our adventures in the United States.

Check out our new Hikes page, with pictures of a lot of the hikes we made in the San Francisco Bay Area.

Read here more about our adventures in the United States. Sorry, but most adventures are in Dutch only!

Our new address (starting January 2002):

Gerard Harbers and Elies Bik
(address removed)
Telephone numbers (from the Netherlands) (from the US: do not dial the prefix 001):
Home: 001-408-736-3804
Elies mobile: 001-408-835-4456
Gerard mobile: 001-408-835-6285
Elies work: 001-650-493-5000, extension 63163 (Veterans Hospital, Palo Alto)
Gerard work: 001-408-435-4126 (Lumileds)

Clickhere for a floorplan and pictures of our new house in Sunnyvale, were we live since January 2002.

E-mail to Elies (or to Gerard)

Our home e-mail addresses have remained the same.
Replace the asterisks in these addresses with the @ sign. I did this on purpose, to boycot the automatic webcrawlers hunting for more addresses to send their spam to. NB. do not send an e-mail to both addresses, because they will go to the same computer.

Our work e-mail adresses are the following:

Map of the San Francisco Bay Area

Here you see a map of the San Francisco Bay Area, a region slightly smaller than the Netherlands. The city of San Francisco is in the top left, on the Peninsula. The bridge that connects the city with the North is the Golden Gate Bridge, while the bridge between San Francisco and Berkeley is the Bay Bridge.
Our first house here was just for three months, in an apartment in Santa Clara, in the middle of Silicon Valley, where a lot of computer companies have an office. In January of 2002 we moved to Sunnyvale, Northwest of Santa Clara. We chose this city because it is right in between our work places. Gerard works for Lumileds, on the border of East Santa Clara and North San Jose. Since April 2002 I work at the VA Hospital, affiliated with Stanford University, in Palo Alto, on the base of the Peninsula. My brother Aart also lives nearby. He and his wife Renu live in Union City, in the East Bay, close to Fremont. Aart works in Santa Clara, at Intel, which is very close to Lumileds. Renu works for Charles Schwab in Downtown San Francisco.

Time Table

A friendly reminder: (before calling us in the middle of the night): it is 9 hours earlier in California as compared to the Netherlands.
Here is a convenient time table:
NL USA
00.00 AM03.00 PM
03.00 AM06.00 PM
06.00 AM09.00 PM
09.00 AM12.00 AM
12.00 PM03.00 AM
03.00 PM06.00 AM
06.00 PM09.00 AM
09.00 PM12.00 PM