House Hunting
I am now on a two-city apartment hunt. Our Amsterdam lease is up, and turns out I will need to relocate to Paris for most of September and October. Of course, this should be good news --how glamorous! But in reality it is just turning out to be one big headache.
I just can’t get over the cramped spaces and hugely inflated prices! Paris is far, far worse than Amsterdam. Can you believe a housing agency just sent me a list of 17m2 studios for 1000 euros each!! Yes, you heard correctly--seventeen square meters--that is literally the size of my current bathroom! The photos all show dimly lit rooms, with strange “space-saving” contraptions--beds popping out of the walls, beds perched overtop of desks, and kitchen tables neatly tucked in closets. It makes the space shuttle look like luxury living!
The A’dam apartment hunt isn't going all that well either. Moe and I visited several possible apartments this week with no luck. The only place we actually liked turned out to be way out of budget. Of course, my good old Winnipegger self can’t help but imagine what I could get back home for that price. For $2,000 Cdn I could live in a penthouse complete with maid and butler! (yes, slight exaggeration). Things are getting so desperate that I was almost convinced to rent a houseboat?!
Quick update
Last week was all about the big news. Firstly my promotion was made official. Secondly, Moses and I booked our tickets for our Christmas vacation –3 weeks in good old (ice cold) Winterpeg. And lastly, and most exciting, at our weekly girl’s night in Utrecht, S asked me to be the “Master of Ceremonies” of her upcoming spring wedding. I am very honoured to be asked and can’t wait!! Happy couple below!!
SAIL away!
This evening I went with two of my new colleagues ( one Australian and one Moroccan) to SAIL. We had VIP tickets to a party being hosted by Amsterdam Weekly (a free funky English paper in Amsterdam) to enjoy the view from their harbour front offices.
SAIL is a “twice-a-decade” event, where hundreds of ships and vessels from all around the world congregate at the Amsterdam harbour. This year over 700 ships are participating, and the city has estimated that the event will bring over 2 million tourists to the city. Unfortunately there is a garbage strike on at the moment as well. Do the tourists just think Amsterdam is a filthy place?!
Tonight was “sail-in”--the first evening when all the ships coordinate their arrival time and form a large, albeit slightly chaotic, entrance parade. It was a very cool sight to see. The largest boat in the world (and no, this isn’t just one of my many exaggerations) is participating this year; a Russian tall ship measuring 118 m and dating from 1921!!
I half expected to see at any moment, pirates swinging from the numerous sails and invading the streets of Amsterdam. I suppose the hordes of spectators, those in particular who had had a few too many bruskies in the sun, were an appropriate replacement. Perhaps, for the sake of my personal amusement, I could convince a few to sport an eye patch and parrot? Whatcha think??
More fun in the sun!
I thought I'd share a few more pics from our holidays with you. Maybe if I keep writing about it I can still relive that holiday feeling.
Work today was trying very hard to crush my holiday glow. It was trying to burry me in emails, excel sheets, and ad deadlines, trying desperately to steal every last reserve of holiday relaxation I had stored up inside me.
But I'm not going to let it. Oh, no siree, you can't keep this girl down!
See me running away from it...real fast. Look at me go!
Desert Oasis
Our 10 day escape in Mojacar now seems like a distant memory. Last week someone on the beach told us that Holland was going through a minor heat wave--unfortunately, they couldn’t have been more wrong. Upon landing we were greeted with familiar grey skies and damp, cold
weather. A hard pill to swallow after coming from 2 weeks of 40C!
Mojacar was absolutely beautiful. It is located in Europe’s only desert –cacti and dusty hills at every glance. The city is made up of the old town and the beach front. The old town is carved into the side of the hills—all the houses and buildings are white washed. From a distance they look like tiny sugar cubes dotting the skyline.
The weather was unbelievable—over 40C in the sun, but with the constant wind from the ocean it was just perfect. We spent the days soaking up the sun with some great books (highly recommend “The Amateur Marriage” and “Girl, Interrupted”), bobbing in the sea and playing beach volley. In the evenings we enjoyed delicious gazpacho, tapas, lemon meringue and of course, paella! What more could a girl want?
And so, tomorrow is back to reality. Back to the clicking keyboards, relentless emails, manic meetings, and ticking minutes. Wish me luck that I don’t just run abscond from it all and find my own sugar cube hideaway in the hills.
Sun, sand, and sea!
Vacation here I come! In one hour we will be boarding a plane for the south of Spain. Up until yesterday I didn’t even know the name of the city we are going to. This time, I have happily let Moe plan every detail from where we are going, to where we are staying. We are flying into Alicante and then renting a car for a two hour drive south west to the coast. The town is called Majacar –and its apparently one of the best keep secrets in the south. Its beaches aren’t yet overrun with badly sunburnt Brits.
I am going to try not to think about work a single time for the next two weeks, but it will be hard knowing the piles (and piles) of work waiting for me when I come back. Truth be told, I don’t think I have ever needed a holiday so desperately. Even as I write this, I am worrying about my Inbox and the loads of messages filling it up as we speak. Maybe I will just give it a quick peek before we leave...
14 things you (most likely) don’t know about the Dutch and Holland
1. You should greet friends (and even acquaintances) with 3 kisses –I am trying to instate just one. Enough is enough already.
2. You should bring cake (or treats) to work for your colleagues in two instances 1) your birthday 2) if you are late –this can be quite costly : )
3. At a typical Dutch housewarming or birthday you should congratulate everyone in attendance ("gefeliciteerd") –I was at a friends housewarming a few weekends ago and attempted to ask an explanation for this, but the only response I could drum up was “tradition”. Still puzzled.
4. The Dutch love their deep fried treats. My personal favourite is the deep fried unidentifiable meat pressed into the shape of spare ribs –if you haven’t seen this one yet, stop by my work cafeteria any day!
5. A typical Dutch lunch consists of a carton of karnemelk (read: sour milk), 4 pieces of bread, a slice of meat and some cheese.
6. The average Dutch will eat four kilos of drop per year (Drop is a shockingly fowl-tasting version of black liquorice. I dare anyone to eat 4 kilos of it!)
7. One fifth of Holland’s population is of foreign descent. Something they haven’t quite come to terms with yet.
8. Bathtubs are not uncommon, but definetly not a standard fixture of all apartments.
9. There are over 600,000 bicycles in Amsterdam. That’s almost one per person.
10. Only 5% of the prostitutes found in de Wallen (Amsterdam’s Red Light district) were born in the Netherlands.
11. 78% of the Dutch population have “no problems whatsoever with prostitution”
12. When you order a soda water, ice tea, or white beer your drink will come with a lemon and a stampertjes—a stir stick with a disc at the bottom to crush your lemon. Brilliant invention, why is this only in Holland?!
13. There are over 10,000 woonboten (houseboats) in Holland.
14. And shocker of shockers...the clog isn’t a Dutch invention!
