A Dutch Orientation

All we saw was a blanket of fog as the plane lowered into Schiphol Airport in Amsterdam on Monday morning. “Typical Dutch weather,” the girl next to me said, as I vaguely wondered how much planning I’d actually done in preparation for this semester abroad.

For a full day of travel, my trip halfway across Canada and then across the Atlantic was pretty unexceptional. I found a crinkled 20 Euro bill on the floor at Trudeau Airport in Montreal, so that was the highlight of that leg of the trip. I had a few hours to kill in Toronto, so I got a Greek salad in the international lounge, where there was a sea of iPads attached to the restaurant tables, confirmation of the theory that by the time you’ve been travelling with anyone long enough to end up there, the last thing you want to do is talk to them.

Then, as the sun set, the gate opened up for Air Canada flight 824, overnight to Amsterdam.

One vacuum-wrapped chicken dinner and a near-upright sleep later, we touched down in the dreary Dutch morning, and I made the short bus ride from the airport to VU University. The apartment where myself and Kayla are staying at is another 15 minute walk, fog in the air mimicking the fog in my jetlagged skull as I wheeled my suitcase down the road. Maybe I didn’t pay enough attention, but the lineups they had set up for the huge influx of international students to apply for residence permits and get their housing keys and buy insurance resembled a bureaucratic train wreck, where the reward for standing in a lineup for half an hour was all too frequently a curt “You were supposed to be in that line over there. Next.”

Somehow, I got my keys, got registered with the municipality of Amstelveen (just south of Amsterdam, where our residence building is located), and wheeled my bag out of the cultural maelstrom towards a pillow. Our building is a 12-storey apartment complex surrounded by other buildings of the same size, our window looking out onto a network of balconies piled on top of each other.

Bottom right, third one up is us

I need to try to accurately sum up my first impression, and the only way to do that is to set up the context. I was tired, having been in motion for more than 24 hours. I was by myself—Kayla booked her flight, via New York and Norway, for the next day. It was damp and raining outside. Good chance I was hungry. A couple of my courses conflicted in their scheduled time, and I only realized that in the airport in Toronto, so I was half-expecting them to pound on my door that afternoon to send me back to Canada. In short, it wasn’t a great time, and one stray straw might be the one to break the camel’s back.

In case you’re wondering, that is our toilet, right in the crossfire of the shower. As in, you move the curtain across, and the toilet is still there. You get in for a scrub, and you had better move the toilet paper, unless you like it damp. That’s also the straw, and once I saw that we didn’t have a doorknob (I’ve since figured out how to angle our key when we’re leaving so that it kind of works as a doorknob . . . per Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, getting groceries and an extra set of keys took priority over the doorknob), that my electricity convertor decided to stop working so my electronics were running on fumes, and that our double bed was actually two borderline cots pushed together next to a window that rattled with the din of a dozen planes in a row right overhead, I was really starting to question some things. Like my decision-making ability.

First impressions, thankfully, are made to be changed. I slept for a few hours after supper, and was hardly on the go long enough to be considered awake before I went back to bed for the night.

Tuesday morning dawned overcast, but thankfully no rain. I set off with the loose plan of getting to the airport to meet Kayla around 6:30 that night, and ended up walking through the narrow laneways of Amstelveen, and the compact little bungalows hidden behind thick green shrubs. Green spaces dot many of the pockets of this city, affording plenty of opportunities for picnickers and wanderers alike.

And, of course, the bikes. Everyone has a bicycle, because the land is so flat, and because this city accommodates the bikers so much. Roundabouts have separate biking lanes, separated by concrete medians, and there are traffic lights specifically designed for bikes. I’ve seen people with strollers attached to the front of the bike, people texting while biking, businessmen in suits out on bikes, and a couple people walking their dog from the comfort of their bike seat.

I went through a chunk of the sprawling Amsterdamse Bos, a beautiful park three times the size of Central Park that felt something like the Super Nintendo Jurassic Park game. I hope there’s at least one person reading this who completely understands that reference and gets what my day was like: a lot of trails in the leafy forest that I wasn’t sure where they ended up, some fences that I couldn’t get by, some bodies of water that I couldn’t cross, and a few concrete buildings that I didn’t know what they were for. The only thing missing was poorly rendered 3D dinosaurs.

I walked most of the way to Schiphol (once a runway blocks your route, they prefer you take a bus rather than hope for a crosswalk), and was there at the arrivals for when Kayla disembarked, her internal clock as screwed up as mine had been the day before. Incidentally, I picked the least-fun part of the airport to wait for her.

With no hassles on visas, baggage, or anything else, we caught the short train back to VU and weren’t long before flopping down in the beds I’d made fun of only the day before. Already though, it felt more right, reunited with my partner-in-crime in what is, I realize now, the first spot we ever had that's fully our own. Maybe there are supposed to be a scattered bug to work out with the first spot (although, hopefully, no actual bugs) as we embark on this crazy adventure and prepare to tackle the setbacks with a laugh. And maybe a beer, which happens to be exorbitantly cheap in the Netherlands.

Wednesday was full on sunny and warm, and rejuvenated by a considerable sleep, we set out in the late morning to do some shopping and browsing throughout Amstelveen. 

In the process, we ended up finding a fair few things to turn our double room—which only a few days earlier had been comparable to a hostel, in my mind—into something that resembled the Dutch concept of gezelligheid: in a word, coziness.

That concept, something that is [unfortunately] missing from most Western dictionaries, also connotes belonging and time spent with loved ones. We’ve got four months to make sure that this little apartment in the midst of the city lives up to that ideal.

Cheers,

rb