Head Spinning Like a Windmill

As mentioned, I am ten days into my trip, but lets start at day 1

After shoveling my way to the ghost-town Logan Airport calls Terminal A, KLM flight 230 or Delta Flight 6030, or some combination of the two, departed as the sole flight out of Terminal A en route to the comparatively tropical (42 degrees) Schiphol Airport in Amsterdam where I had my first encounter with the Devil-spawn known as “Exchange Rate” while making a worthwhile payphone call home.  After parting ways with classmates for a final time, I passed through customs and met with my country contact, Rick.  Good thing too because while everyone may speak English here, street signs and rail-pass kiosks are in Dutch. 

For an English major known for using pretentious vernacular such as “pretentious vernacular” being illiterate does not suit me very well.  It also messes with my ability to be a human GPS when I can’t pronounce the street names (though that didn’t stop me from directing a Baltimore native last night).  So Rick demonstrated the proper ticket purchasing protocol and we proceeded towards my apartment.

This is a cultural comparison program, so let’s compare:
Boston Apartment: 3 bedrooms, 2 roommates
Amsterdam Apt: 3 bedrooms, 0 roommates

Plenty of room for activities

Also plenty of room for the furniture I didn’t have. 

People often asked “what’s the first thing you are going to do in Amsterdam?”  The answer: spend the day moving furniture from a fully furnished apartment, across the apartment complex, into my room.  Ten hours and a removed banister later, my apartment contained a bed, four chairs, a couch, and a TV connected only to a DVD player.  While this may not sound ideal, “serendipity” is another pretentious word I’m fond of.  While moving in, my neighbor, the first person my age I had seen all day, came home and invited me upstairs for a beer and we watched How I Met Your Mother.  I realized I have an addiction to one of those two things, guess which one.

Having stayed up 36 hours straight (I’m not counting the two hours on the way over in the flying shakewieght) I was more than confident I had overcome any possibility of jetlag and successfully woke up the next morning at 9 AM…Eastern Standard Time, that’s 3 PM in Amsterdam for those of you keeping score.  After a beer with Pete (so much for waiting a while to hang out with my high school friends in Europe haha) I joined my new friends in an evening out in Leidseplein, which is “Light Square” in Dutch.  You can tell you’re in Leisdseplein because everything is decorated in Christmas lights, unlike Rembrandtplein which is decorated in Christmas lights… that distinction would have saved two hours of walking past the same building on Super Bowl Sunday.  

In any case, with jetlag rampant and my first night in “Adult Disneyland” under my belt, Saturday morning also came at sunset, which was just as well given that I managed to score my first entranceway into my project the following morning.  With no choice but to wake up before 5 PM on Sunday, Saturday was rather relaxed and consisted of a dinner of Avocado (forgot to bring the stove over from apartment A) and some last minute work on my interview questions.  Enjoyable as it may be here, having taken the first step in both my project and my social interaction abroad, at this point, my head was still spinning like a windmill in Holland.