Settling In

There’s something satisfying about finding routine in the exotic. If we only had a week to spend in Amsterdam, there’s a good chance it would have been a very different week from the one we’ve had thus far. Turns out, though, that we’ve got four months, and that means there’s a lot more lounging, eating baguettes and ham sandwiches, drinking instant coffee on the balcony and going for a run in the park that borders Uilenstede. Normalcy in the Netherlands—and I like it.

This weekend, we packed up some of those aforementioned sandwiches, along with grapes, paprika-flavoured potato chips, and a bottle of wine, and made our way through Amsterdamse Bos, finding the perfect little spot for an afternoon picnic. 

I’m still really floored by the amount of accessible green space in this part of the world—large lawns, discreet paths through the woods, and the amount of families taking advantage of sunny August afternoons.

In the opposite direction as Amsterdamse Bos is Amstelpark, and the only traffic you need to watch out for to get there is bicycles and the odd rabbit that darts out of the trees. The park runs alongside the river Amstel—the same river that the original inhabitants of Amsterdam constructed a dam on. Amstel dam. Get it?

We’ve taken to going for morning jogs through the park, which contains its share of surprises. The first thing you notice is De Riekermolen, a sizeable windmill from 1636 that was originally used to drain the swampy area nearby and apparently still spins on the weekends. Right alongside is a statue of one of Amsterdam’s most famous former residents, Rembrandt, who made sketches in the area back in his day.

Amstelpark itself is another perfect place to stroll. For one, there are fenced enclosures throughout, housing a slew of noisey, furry inhabitants.

For another, it’s just pleasant, expertly manicured and ornamented, with enough branching paths so that there are plenty of things to discover on our next trip there.

We planned a casual day in to Amsterdam proper the other day, just to wander around, look at some canal houses, get a coffee, and come back home. It ended up being much more bureaucratic than touristy—when we stepped off the tram at Museumplein and realized we’d spent 8 euros—each—getting that far, we figured we’d screwed something up. So, we took the tram to Amsterdam Centraal, a bit of a transportation mecca sitting at the forefront of the canal rings. We stood in a lineup at the train station before we got pointed to another building, the GVB—the Gemeentelijk Vervoerbedrijf, the public transport corporation in the city—where we stood with a number in a cramped room clutching a number from an automatic dispenser, waiting for the next ticket agent. Who, of course, directed us to a website to refund our tickets.

All this mess because we checked in on the station platform, but you’re only supposed to do that if you take the metro. If you take the tram, which looks the same but has a different number on the front, you check in and out on the tram—so we checked in on the station, and then as we were leaving the tram, which came up as two check-ins instead of a check-in and a checkout. Clear as mud? I thought so.

I couldn’t even entirely boycott the trams to get back home, as much as I wanted to after that fiasco—the rain that had been threatening for a few days finally burst over Amsterdam.

So far, our exposure to Amsterdam has been waiting in lineups. Not exactly your typical tourist experience—something we’ll have to remedy soon, but there won’t be much chance over the next few days, because we leave for Belgium first thing tomorrow morning, to squeeze a little excursion in before the semester starts. We’ll spend a few days in Brussels, the Belgian capital (and unofficial European capital), eating chocolate, waffles, and taking a tour through the fields of Flanders, Passchendaele, and Ypres, which was in the throes of devastating warfare a hundred years ago.  

Sure to be plenty to talk about when we get back to our little home-away-from-home.

Cheers,

rb