Exodus to Amsterdam Göteborg

Shannie was off being a good ctizen today by volunteering her time helping collect donations for the local food bank. Because I’m a cold-hearted selfish jerk, I took advantage of the cloudless skies and 21°C temperatures to put my biking pants on and go for a spin around the country. Today’s route took me North from Amsterdam to a small village called Marken, almost entirely along dikes on The Netherland’s East coast.

Bikely.com map of the route I rode

It was an absolutely gorgeous day, except for the blustery head wind off the ocean that I had to contend with for the ride out. However, this made the ride back home ridiculously fast.

Also, sunscreen would have been a nice idea. I’m, um, a little torched right now.

(These photos may take a while to load, I don’t have any photo editing software on the computer I’m using right now, so they’re all just pulled straight off the camera. Patience is a virtue, etc.)

amsterdam, you big tourist bicycles, churches, windmill

What?

It’s been over a month since our last update?

Um… whoops?

Let’s see… in the last month, we’ve managed to: participate in a Red Cross Walkathon, travel to the small Dutch town of Delft, bike 30+ km to the small town of Zaandstad (twice), get lost in the Red Light District a few times, and generally have more amazing experiences than any expats should be able to have without getting arrested.

I (Scott) don’t mind telling you… there have been more than a few times where I’ve been riding my bicycle home quite late at night (usually quite well into my cups) and ridden past a cathedral, or bridge, or some other brick structure older than Canada, or taken a high-speed train from one town to the next, or have been tending the net at a field hockey matchup and thought to myself, “this activity, that I’m doing right now, I’m doing WHILE. LIVING. IN. EUROPE.”

After 3.5 months, I’m not (snicker) homesick for Calgary (guffaw), or miss hearing about mid-April snowstorms in the prairies, or even remotely upset that I didn’t get to watch my home team miss the playoffs for a 3rd straight season.

I’m mostly STILL blown away that, after 32 years of life, I’m actually living on another side of the planet.

Still blows my mind.

Anyways, as it goes, the cats have settled in nicely, the street in front of our apartment has been torn up for reconstruction, and tomorrow is Koninginnedag, a national holiday, where (from what I understand), the entire city of Amsterdam looks much like this:

And how have you been.

amsterdam, you big tourist bicycles, cats, field hockey, immigration, red light district

Like true good residents of the most bicycle-friendly city in the world, Shannie and I went out a couple of weeks back and purchased ourselves a couple of bicycles. We don’t own a car in Amsterdam. We have no plans to buy a car here, because for our lifestyle, we COMPLETELY don’t need one. Almost everywhere we’ll ever need to go to is within walking and/or biking distance within our apartment, and for the occasional times we need to go beyond that, both the public transit and high-speed rail system are more than adequate.

As it turns out, we picked one of the coldest, rainiest days since our arrival to go on a bike-buying run.

Shannie hasn’t been able to ride hers that much, due to her tumble down our staircase a few weeks back, but my new bike has found use every day since. If, by looking at the photo above, you think that it looks a bit too small for me, you’re 110% correct. It was the biggest bike the shop had in stock, though, so I’m making do. Our bikes are probably 20 years old, rusty, and built like tanks. However, with the rate that bikes get stolen here, we didn’t want to fork out for anything expensive. I brought my Surly Cross-check with me from Canada, but it stays up in our apartment and isn’t used for daily commuting, since it would take about 30 seconds to get nicked.

Almost all bikes here are virtually identical, which is by design. It’s the bikes that stand out, the ones that look different that get pinched. However, this has the unpleasant side effect of often leaving me scratching my head, forgetting exactly where I’ve parked, wondering which one of the thousands of identical bikes is mine. Luckily, the inner nerd in me found a fairly inconspicuous way of telling mine apart.

I am SUCH a fanboy.

amsterdam, you big tourist bicycles, rain, walking

So we’re all moved in and the internet is hooked up at home. Yay! I put together a tour of our place but the file is too large to post so I need to redo it. In the meantime Carl has been requesting some “typical” Netherlands photos so without further ado…

We hope this meets with your approval Carl

you big tourist bicycles, horse carriage, tulips, windmill

Today’s been a walkabout day. If you’re unfamiliar with life in Amsterdam (which I COMPLETELY was before the possibility of moving here), there’s a few important things to realize. They are, in order of importance:

• Driving is for suckers.

Bicycles and foot traffic rule the order of the day. Now, the thing about me is that I’m generally not a huge fan of walking. Biking, definitely, but walking has always been Shannie’s thing. She’s the one who walked 45 minutes each way to school every day. Not that I don’t think that walking isn’t a viable transportation option, no, my problem with walking is that I get bored. All I can think about is what else I could be doing with the valuable time that I’m spending travelling at 0.5 miles per hour, and how much faster getting somewhere by bike would have been.

Living in this city could finally change that for me.

Because everything here is so densely packed, every few meters brings about something completely new to see and experience. That’s the beauty of living in a city where the core was built and designed before the age of the automobile. The streets are small, narrow, and the city center is planned around foot, bicycle, and horse traffic.

So today we walked. We needed to find a drugstore for things like soap, shampoo, etc., and the local grocer by our apartment had such a small (and expensive) selection that we opted to stroll to find someplace else. The closest place that was open on Sunday was about a 20 minute or so walk from here, so on went my walkin’ pants and hither and yon we went.

And interesting things did we see.

As a pedestrian here, you’re at the very friggin’ bottom of the Right Of Way list, just below cars. Bikes go where they want, how they want, with or against traffic, and everyone else bows to their royalty. As a walker, you learn very quickly to look both ways before stepping off the sidewalk lest you find a 30 year old steel bicycle ridden by someone old enough to be my great grandparent send you flying.

We also discovered a fantastic tiny little sandwich shop. Shopkeeper spoke very little English and understood even less, but Bacon is apparently a universal language.

Interesting sight of the day: apparently Amsterdam the entire northern hemisphere is going through a strangely cold winter, Amsterdam is experiencing something that hasn’t happened for quite a number of years.

The canals are freezing solid.

Every local sporting goods store is completely sold out of ice skates, as Amsterdammers are flocking to the canals, ponds, and other bodies of water in droves. As a Canadian, seeing skaters out on the water is a daily occurence for 10 months out of the year, but here it’s such a rarity that everyone’s jumping at the chance.

Even those without skates were getting in on the action.

amsterdam, you big tourist bacon, bicycles, walking