Stadskantoor Utrecht

I suppose the good part about the new city hall is the building itself. It’s open, clean and mostly well designed. I say mostly because within the building itself lies one of it’s fatal flaws: the elevators. All publicly accessible areas can be reached by stairs, escalator and an elevator. Usually I take either the stairs or escalator, however with my son and his pram in tow, I of course chose the elevator.
The annoyance here starts by not just being able to press a simple button and choose your floor once your in the elevator, no, you have to choose your floor right then and there or else the elevator doesn’t come. Seems like a perfectly fine system until you choose the wrong floor, step on the elevator and have to wait for the doors to open so you can fix your mistake.
Secondly, the elevators are seriously small. Not exactly comfortable if you have a huge pram like ours. I can’t imagine it’s necessarily easy if you’re in a wheelchair or scooter, possibly with oxygen or whatever attached.
The third and biggest annoyance: people who have nothing wrong with their legs choose not to take the stairs or even if they’re lazy the escalator, no they have to cram themselves in the elevator making it impossible for someone who actually needs to use it, to even get on the elevator. For some reason one of the buttons on the outside of it has a wheelchair on it and after encountering two overfull elevators (while trying to get back down from the first escalated floor!) we decided to push this button in the assumption that the system would then send an empty elevator. It didn’t. Luckily the people in this elevator managed to cram themselves to one side of the elevator so we could finally reach our destination one floor lower and leave the building. I was however on the verge of just lifting the pram (eighteen kilos on it’s own) downstairs on the escalator.
Now to the actual city hall business. I needed to renew my passport about a month after my due date so I chose not to do it before delivery thinking I could easily make an appointment to get it done soon after having my son. I was wrong. I couldn’t get an appointment until after my passport had expired and even with that appointment it really didn’t matter. They don’t even stick to their own schedule and so I had to wait. Usually already rather torturous, but when you have to time your appointment exactly between your newborn’s feeds and you have a long wait, it’s basically hell. I was lucky enough that le boyfriend was their to change our son and comfort him while he had to wait for me to be able to leave and feed him somewhere. By the way, changing is possible in the building, but feeding (unless you’re okay with just doing that in public) is not so much an option.
So anyway, I’m not really looking forward to my appointment next week when I have to pick up my passport. Really, everything ran much smoother at the old location.