Exactly a week has passed since our arrival to Amsterdam and I can tell you I was helluva lot busy until now!! Well, actually I still am, but it´s getting much more bearable. We have spent the week in a chaotic race to get all the furniture and other items we need, obtain the necessary documentation, get back our old bikes, explore our surroundings, look for suitable jobs, clean the house and probably a lot more still.
To be a bit more specific…When we arrived to the house in Nieuwendam (a cute quiet middle-class neighbourhood in Amsterdam-Noord), I was not thrilled. The communal places (especially the kitchen and the bathroom) looked shabby as if they were not cleaned for quite some time and there was a lot of clutter left in our attic room after the previous inhabitant (random things like a blanket, sheets and pillows, a half-broken Ikea cupboard, parts of a bed, two cheap mattresses, cds and dvds, toilet paper rolls etc.). Not the best welcome to the new home. We started working straight away on turning this place into something pleasant, tidy and cozy. In the kitchen we had to throw away some old food and very thoroughly scrub the inside and outside of the fridge/freezer. We found out that we really need a fridge of our own, as the one here cannot accommodate food of four people, one of them a wacko vegetable-hoarding passionate cook 
Even a bigger task was scrubbing the bathroom – getting rid of all the calcium on the shower, cleaning the hard-to-see-through mirror and especially the mold hosting shelves (after getting rid of a load of ancient shampoo/shower gel/shaving cream etc. bottles). Nardo showed some courage to scrub the above mentioned locations. It took a couple of days to get rid of the junk taking up space in our room, we decided to keep the two mattresses for guests, but almost all the rest went into a nearby shed belonging to the house owner – we gained so much more space this way!! For those who don´t know – we are renting one attic room and one small room in the first floor of the house which we are using as a storage room. The two rooms are connected by a flight of stairs from our room and a hallway. The shared bathroom is next to this little room. The shared kitchen and toilet are in the ground floor, so when we go there we have to go down two staircases :-p Of course, very narrow Dutch stairs…We walk a LOT up and down every day!
A couple of days after our arrival I got the three boxes delivered from Prague through the Toptrans company (or actually, their partner company). I was getting a bit nervous waiting for the boxes to arrive but then one day when I was shopping nearby I got a phonecall from this Czech dude who was already waiting in front of our house, so I quickly hurried to our place to pick up the boxes. So cool this service really works and is not even awfully expensive! So good to also have all (well, a lot) of my stuff here!
Our housemates are both Italian guys – in the groundfloor Alessio (who is now looking for a job, a guy with true Italian temperament :-p) and in the room above, Dario (a student soon to graduate, a more quiet lad). Unfortunately there is no living room where we could hang out with the guys (or just ourselves), so we mostly meet in the kitchen, from time to time :-p As Dario will be leaving end of September, we decided to rent out his room in the first floor instead of our two rooms, because his is nicer, bigger, with a pretty view, and a bit cheaper to top it. Hope it´s a good decision, but we really liked his room and he will be leaving some furniture there…
The hunt for furniture was also a bit exhausting to say the least…We were very very lucky to find an ad on Marktplaats (the most popular ad site in Holland) of a German girl leaving Holland and selling her basically new expensive latex Ikea mattress for incredible 50 euros! We went to pick it up the next day after our arrival and we had to hire a moving company to transport it to our place, still even with that it was a great bargain. It´s a better mattress than the one we used to have two years ago and which is now in France…More luck came in the form of Nardo´s family friend Colette who invited us for dinner and gave us a load of kitchenware (including a cast iron wok!), a large table and a very handy cupboard with shelves for books and other stuff. It was amazing to see all that (and my bunch of macrobiotic books which she kindly took for me from France) fit in the regular size car, just with one removed back seat. We were looking at Marktplaats and other places on the internet for chairs and a fridge, unfortunately we didn´t manage, but today we decided to go to the secondhand Kringloop shop and there we purchased two chairs (finally we can sit at the table like normal people and not on our bed!) and also a small but nice Zanussi fridge which will be transported tomorrow to our place again with Colette´s help. Brilliant! We had to pay a bit more than we aimed for, but it is worth it and we can sell the stuff again later…Through Marktplaats we found a guy selling a toaster (very good one) and a tiny oven/grill thingy which we still have to test out (Nardo really misses an oven here…) and Nar also brought his “tosti machine” (grilling machine for bread with cheese) from his previous place in Amstelveen. We also made the obnoxious trip to Ikea (very bad idea to go there on a Sunday!!) where we got some much needed household items and also a pretty good pillow (two pillows in one, ha! :-p). My favourite thing though is the large supersharp knife for cutting vegetables, yeeeeeah! It´s really so important to have good tools, also in the kitchen, especially when you´re a cooking freak like me. One “bad” thing we did at Ikea was buying the Swedish Almondy cake (the dark chocolate one), those of you who read my blog in Sweden know which one I mean…the supersweet but oh so good glutenfree almond-based cake…well, that was one step aside from my otherwise strict candida macro diet :-p Now back on track after suffering the consequences of dairy and sugar…
Since the beginning we made very many trips to two shopping areas in the vicinity – the huge shopping centre of Buikslotermeerplein, where you can find basically any shop you need (think of all the brand stores) and an Albert Heijn (the largest Dutch grocery chain), and the small shopping area of Waterlandplein (with a Super de Boer, a nicer grocery chain which we used a lot back in Amstelveen, and with a lot of ethnic groceries). I must say I am partial to the latter one, as I love love love the colourful Arabic, Indonesian, Surinami etc. shops where you get to know the people selling there, and where you can find food in bulk for amazing prices, beautiful cheap vegetables and a lot of exotic yumminess (gotta try the cassava root soon!). Of course, we also went to the centre to visit Nardo´s favourite organic market at Noordermarkt where we bought a load of food, especially veggies (and Nar´s favourite old cheese, finally :-p). They have awesome food, but it´s really expensive :-s and it was very very crowded there – next time we must go earlier!! I think we will keep it as a special treat, buying food at this market…We also had lunch in the centre, fries with sauce at our favourite stand, but they were more oily than usually and I am sooo used to eating healthy now, that I didn´t even feel the satisfaction of having these fries I used to love so much Funny how tastebuds change over time…
Finding jobs was (and still is) a big theme here too…I was really hoping I could get a job at a market research company which was looking for Czech natives, that sounded great, and it seemed to be a flexible job. They also called me soon after my application was sent and obviously wanted me…But then…I had the idea to check out Amsterdam based dogwalking services and found one which had a vacancy that seemed really cool…I mailed, got a positive reply, then went to an appointment, and now I have a job from Monday! The company is owned by a young guy who inherited it after his mother and they walk about 30 dogs weekly, in central Amsterdam, mostly dogs of expats, so actually my English is a big pro…I should be working 15-20 hours a week (more than I planned), pay seems good, so let´s see how it goes…I will have to be biking to the centre every day there and back (plenty of exercise) and walking groups of dogs for a couple of hours every day (even more exercise!), I hope I am physically prepared for this Meanwhile Nardo is applying for several positions too and hopefully will succeed soon too. I am also in the middle of the registration process at the municipality which is not so easy as I thought it would be…Nardo registered within five minutes at the Amsterdam-Noord town hall, but I have to go to an office in the centre which is for foreigners, and I had to get a new contract from the house owner (as I wasn´t included in the previous one) and will need a copy of his id :-s They make it so complicated and also give so much contradictory advice it´s hard to find what´s the truth! Hopefully next week this can be done…At least my tax number is probably still valid since two years ago as I have learned…
We don´t have much time for fun things (yet), but we did already go to a little goodbye party of Yvette, Nar´s friend, who is going to be studying in Sweden for a year. It was actually quite fun even though most people spoke Dutch, but we played a very fun game called Rainworms Next week we will hopefully meet Barend, Nar´s former flatmate from Amstelveen who is coming for a visit from Singapore. Today I had a wonderful trip by bike through Nieuwendam (Nardo picked up both mine and his old bike from another former flatmate who still lives at the place and was storing our bikes, luckily!). I went from our house to the spot where the ferry leaves from to go across the IJ bay to the other shore (it goes every few minutes and for free!). The street of Nieuwendammerdijk is so gorgeous, with many old wooden houses, it looks like time stood still here for two centuries or so! I promise to make plenty of pics soon…It was bright sunny weather so it made the whole trip even more enjoyable, I really missed biking…Well, tomorrow another trip around here planned and on Sunday we have to practise going into town so I can go on my own on Monday to my work :-p
