Amsterdam
I haven't really been on livejournal in a while, but it's a better place to be putting out updates that are longer than a sentence than facebook, or god forbid, twitter.
So far, I'm really happy we've made the move over here - I wanted to expand my horizons beyond just Melbourne, and Amsterdam has been a great city to do it in. (I still miss my Melbourne people heaps, but am looking forward to getting Aussie visitors over the next year, and that's starting next week with Tara. And we'll be back over Christmas). There's a lot to like. There's a couple of ways it totally trumps Melbourne - city size, and transport. You can ride from one side of the city to the other in around half an hour. Which I do to get to work, since my workplace is in fact at the outskirts of Amsterdam (meaning a 20 minute tram ride from the centre) and we live just to the east of the centre.
And despite the increased density, it generally doesn't feel that crowded. They turn the traffic lights off at some intersections in the evenings and on the weekends, adding to this feeling that I'm in some big country town.
In the actual centre it will probably be getting progressively more crowded as the weather warms up, and the tourist numbers shoot through the roof, and on warm days, such as it has been for the last week, the lawns of parks are tiled with shirtless Amsterdammers picnicing, bbqing with their disposable bbqs, setting up tents and tanning.
And while I wouldn't say that the weather is better than in Melbourne (although my Dutch lessons will soon be teaching us that the Netherlands has "een heerlijk klimaat" - "a delightful climate"), but the division between the seasons is far more dramatic, particularly visually, but also mood wise. I quite enjoyed Winter here, since everything was novel and the bare trees and bleached colours show Amsterdam in a particularly beautiful light and it was quite mild for a Winter. It just snowed the once. I got very excited at work, everyone else commented at both how boring snow was, and in particular how lame that snow fall was, and that it would be melted before we finished. So I left early and enjoyed my couple of mm of snow before it melted. But I'm not sure how I'll go when we are here for a full Winter and it's no longer a novelty. I hope that the trip back to Melbourne will break it up enough to make it managable.
Now that Spring is here, it is like a different city. There have been so many bulbs coming up everywhere, and everything is green and lush in a way that Melbourne just doesn't do. Today we went for a ride out to a castle in a town near Amsterdam - about 12km from the city centre - which involved riding through the country side that starts about 5km from our place before we reached this tiny village with a huge castle by the sea. On the way we saw lots of lambs in bright green fields and nesting birds along the canals. I only hope that it manages to stay this lovely into Summer, but I've been warned that this is some kind of climate anomoly that we are experiencing and that there is plenty more rain and wind on its way.
So far, I'm really happy we've made the move over here - I wanted to expand my horizons beyond just Melbourne, and Amsterdam has been a great city to do it in. (I still miss my Melbourne people heaps, but am looking forward to getting Aussie visitors over the next year, and that's starting next week with Tara. And we'll be back over Christmas). There's a lot to like. There's a couple of ways it totally trumps Melbourne - city size, and transport. You can ride from one side of the city to the other in around half an hour. Which I do to get to work, since my workplace is in fact at the outskirts of Amsterdam (meaning a 20 minute tram ride from the centre) and we live just to the east of the centre.
And despite the increased density, it generally doesn't feel that crowded. They turn the traffic lights off at some intersections in the evenings and on the weekends, adding to this feeling that I'm in some big country town.
In the actual centre it will probably be getting progressively more crowded as the weather warms up, and the tourist numbers shoot through the roof, and on warm days, such as it has been for the last week, the lawns of parks are tiled with shirtless Amsterdammers picnicing, bbqing with their disposable bbqs, setting up tents and tanning.
And while I wouldn't say that the weather is better than in Melbourne (although my Dutch lessons will soon be teaching us that the Netherlands has "een heerlijk klimaat" - "a delightful climate"), but the division between the seasons is far more dramatic, particularly visually, but also mood wise. I quite enjoyed Winter here, since everything was novel and the bare trees and bleached colours show Amsterdam in a particularly beautiful light and it was quite mild for a Winter. It just snowed the once. I got very excited at work, everyone else commented at both how boring snow was, and in particular how lame that snow fall was, and that it would be melted before we finished. So I left early and enjoyed my couple of mm of snow before it melted. But I'm not sure how I'll go when we are here for a full Winter and it's no longer a novelty. I hope that the trip back to Melbourne will break it up enough to make it managable.
Now that Spring is here, it is like a different city. There have been so many bulbs coming up everywhere, and everything is green and lush in a way that Melbourne just doesn't do. Today we went for a ride out to a castle in a town near Amsterdam - about 12km from the city centre - which involved riding through the country side that starts about 5km from our place before we reached this tiny village with a huge castle by the sea. On the way we saw lots of lambs in bright green fields and nesting birds along the canals. I only hope that it manages to stay this lovely into Summer, but I've been warned that this is some kind of climate anomoly that we are experiencing and that there is plenty more rain and wind on its way.