In the last let´s say two weeks the weather had been truly awful – cold, windy and very very rainy. Seeing the face of the sun was really rare and my mood started getting low due to so little sunlight. Well, the last few days we got our dose of sun, finally! Today it´s kind of rainy again, but I am still holding inside the precious sun energy…
We were putting off visiting the cute old ´t Sluisje café at Nieuwendammerdijk because of the weather (since we wanted to sit on the outdoor terrace near the water), but then the sun arrived and we went for a lunch, it was truly awesome, such a positive place, with great food (we had their homemade yummy tomato soup, yummy thick french fries and Nardo was happy to score a beer from his favourite local brewery – unpasteurised and organic!). Also the people working there are nice and we enjoyed watching a group of old men fishing on the pier and chatting. We sure will visit again to experience the tranquility and beauty of this place!
On Saturday the weather was really hot and sunny, so first we went in the early morning to Noordermarkt to the organic market (and had this tiny and expensive but oh so good rawfood chocolate cake) and in the afternoon we went for a long biking trip into the Waterland area which surrounds Amsterdam-Noord. It´s a pretty rural landscape with lots of little canals and wetlands and a neat network of bikepaths which take you to the charming old villages – we visited Durgerdam (once an important harbour on the IJ shore, today very attractive for tourists), Ransdorp (with a beautiful 16th century church) and Holysloot (probably the cutest of the villages). All these places still belong to Amsterdam, which is hard to believe! I am happy that we live close to such a beautiful area with lots of old farmhouses, gardens and animals (we saw many horses, cows and even a camel! :-p). In Holysloot we rested in a pub which used to be a school, and we enjoyed a nearly-free snack and drink, since I found a 10 euro banknote lying under the table, what odd luck 
Some days ago we became friends of the local goose colony at Schellingwouderbreek lake by feeding them old bread :-p You can even feed them straight from your hand! But then I read geese should not really eat bread, so I plan to save some veggie scraps for them!
We spent some time lately searching for housemates on Couchsurfing – we had a very nice girl from Belgium visiting us (we even had dinner together and we showed her Nieuwendammerdijk), unfortunately she got an offer for a room where she could move in straight away 
Then we had a Dutch guy coming for the viewing, but the room was too small for him. So most likely we will be living with a 17 year old girl, an acquaintance of our landlord, I´m curious to see how that goes! :-p In about a month we will be moving all our stuff downstairs…
Last time I wrote about the bike that Nardo could use, since it was standing in front of the house for weeks and our landlord gave Nar the permission to take it…well, it turned out that the owner of the bike (the guy who used to live in our room before us) was just on vacation and came back to pick up the bike (which our landlord seemed to not know about). Needless to say, he was very angry So, no free nice bike anymore…we´re gonna have to find a secondhand bike in a shop now…
We had another meeting with Denise last week, this time she came to cook dinner with us at our place. I still need to find some friends to meet up with here in Amsterdam, so I´m having a look at Couchsurfing, which is a great place to find people with whom I share interests! Well, and I´m sure to find more during my studies at the Institute…I recently got a list of recommended literature for the studies, so I am again on a book-ordering spree on the internet! Kind of fun looking for the cheapest books online, but also a loooot of work! I´ll be VERY busy reading all that!
I am also greatly enjoying my new blender (from Blokker, great deal!) and trying all kinds of dressings, sauces etc. My so far biggest success is homemade pesto (cheesefree and from organic basil from the market),mmmmm!! And it´s even cheaper than the storebought one…
As for our jobs, Nardo had his ING callcentre appointment last week, but so far no news from them…So he decided to just take the job at Starbucks, where he´s having his first training day today (and for the rest of this week). The times of the shifts are really not nice, so we´re still hoping for something else, but anyway…hope he likes it! I didn´t work at all for about two weeks as there were not enough clients Today I am going back to work because apparently people are back from vacation…really wonder how it goes…I´m supposed to have my own stable group of dogs around Central Station, that would be great indeed, since it´s closer than around Museumplein where I was working last time. More about that in my next post…
Oh and I finally am now officially registered at this address SO I could finally open up a bank account, yay! No more “we don´t accept visa cards” at almost all shops
