student | little home by hand

After we had to cancel our plans made for an extended weekend unexpectedly, my friend and I quickly had to think of something else to do instead.
We found the perfect solution when a friend offered us the keys to her student housing apartment in Amsterdam, where she had been doing an internship for 6 months which was now finished.
Amsterdam is less than 3 hours away and we left very early on friday morning. We dropped our stuff off at the apartment and took the tram into the city center.
Our plan was simple: see much as much as possible and spend as little as possible. We did have to get typically dutch friet speziaal (fries with mayonnaise, ketchup and onions) for lunch though and some yummy dutch cheese.

Amsterdam is a beautiful city, green and full of flowers and beautiful canals. Despite the many people and an unusual number of cats about, it is one of the cleanest cities I have ever seen.

There are of course bikes in every variation and color and dozens of ‘coffee shops’ where people can legally buy small amounts of drugs.

We strolled around the main sights like the flowers market but also tried to find little treasures off the tourist routes.

When we got to Prinsengracht (a beautiful large canal), we found the prettiest house boats and I kept clicking away, with my friend having to shove me off the streets when I was threatened to be run over by cars and bikes.

All in all, our electronical counting thingy showed we’d walked a good 20km that day. No wonder our feet were killing us!
After a long day we had enough of the crowded city and went back to ‘our’ apartment and sat down at the canal in the warm evening light and had a perfect dinner with our delicious dutch cheese, some fresh baguette and grapes and a bottle of white wine.

I’ll have day 2 (at the beach) and day 3 (Amsterdam on a quiet sunday morning) up as soon as possible 🙂

Now if only he were just a tiny teensy bit as brave as a lion in real life and wouldn’t stress himself out over every unusual (and not so unusual) noise I’d be happy. Some days he even jumps at seeing his own shadow, no kidding.

My thesis is in the wrap-up stage. I figured out how to convert SPSS and text outputs to spreadsheets for Word using Excel today, saving me hours of copy and paste for the annex…I’m definitely too pleased with myself over that, lol.
My cats meanwhile tried to distract me by looking way too cute as always:

In case you can’t actually identify what’s on that picture, it’s my two cats deeply asleep on my legs (while I work with the notebook on my lap), so thoroughly entwined that you can’t make out where one ends and the other starts. And yes, they snore too.