Essential Dutch phrases

Your citizen service number, issued when the gemeente registers you. Salary, banking, insurance and tax all hang off it — nothing works before it exists.

Registering your address with the city, legally within five days of arrival. Internationals with a knowledge-worker permit do it at the Holland Expat Center South, not at a normal counter.

The national digital login. Tax, allowances, health insurers, pension and the municipality all sit behind it. The activation code arrives by post, so your name has to be on the letterbox.

'Locked' — the gemeente's term for the six neighbourhoods where no new room-letting or house-splitting permits are issued at all. If a listing is in one, ask hard questions before signing.

The compulsory own-risk excess on your health insurance, which you pay out of pocket before the insurer pays for anything other than GP visits.

The official name for the Eindhoven region's technology cluster — 21 municipalities, one supply chain. You will hear it used as a place, an employer and an argument for national funding, sometimes in the same sentence.

'Knowledge worker' — the local shorthand for the highly skilled migrant permit holder. The expat centre, the housing agencies and half the bars are organised around this one category of person.

Goodbye, in Brabant rather than in Dutch. It is warmer than 'doei' and marks you as someone who has been here a while. The reply is 'houdoe' back, or 'hoi'.

'Lamp hole' — what Eindhoven renames itself during carnival, after the Philips light bulbs that built it. For five days in February the street signs and the mayor change too.

The longest pub street in the Netherlands, a few hundred metres with over fifty bars on it. It is also the most heavily monitored street in the city, for the obvious reason.

A sausage roll in bread dough, and the default Brabant snack. Ordering one warm at a bakery in the morning is completely normal here and slightly odd north of the rivers.

One number for police, fire and ambulance, free from any phone. Operators speak English. 0900-8844 is the non-urgent police line.