After many invitations, I (Rachel) finally made it over to Amsterdam to visit friend and former CENDEP colleague Tamara. T has been working out of the MSF office in Holland for a year now and is one of the few people from my MSc course I can actually go see easily (others are in Afghanistan, Chad, Colombia, etc. right now). Flights are cheap through Ryan Air to the Netherlands, so having just switched my work schedule to half time (for the next 3 months anyway), I took advantage of my extra free time and headed out.
Tamara lives in a lovely converted house on a canal (in this case the floor she lives on has been modified into 4 bedrooms that share a common kitchen and bathrooms. Only 1 of her house mates was home over the weekend, so we were able to spend a lot of time just lounging around and making good use of the espresso machine!
I did get out and explore the city a bit on my own. This included walking quite a lot and taking in a couple of museums (the Rembrant exibition that includes Nightwatch, Anne Frank’s House, etc.) The old centre of Amsterdam is absolutely lovely (and pedestrian friendly with benches at good intervals overlooking the canals). Talk about a terrible real estate market though. I’ve finally found some place where the prices are much worse than either Oxford or London!
Wanting to have an unusual cuisine experience, T and I went out for Indonesian food on my last night in the city. Indonesia was a Dutch colony into the 20th century and food is one of the influences that definitely remains. Neither of us had really had really sampled this style of cooking before, so we sampled a lot of different dishes (different types of cooked fish, rice, etc.) and enjoyed the wide variety of fruit juice that were available on the menu.
On my final morning, T had to go into the office, so I tagged along. This meant borrowing T’s second bicycle, which actually belongs to a friend who is currently in Saudi Arabia. No one mentioned that this friend is only 5′1. As a result, I looked a bit like a clown cycling around the city with my knees sticking out on either side. Additionally, this bike was an Amsterdam basic (i.e. no gears and back pedaling to brake). As a result, I had to get a running start to get up the arch of every canal bridge (and yes there seemed to be 1000s of these) and then brake very quickly coming down the other side so as to not hit any cars. It was quite the adventure.
The bicycles did get us to our destination, where I got to enjoy visiting the MSF office and meeting a wide variety of staff (it’s now been more than 3 years since I last regularly worked in an environment like this at World Vision. I definitely miss the stimulation and cross-fertilization of ideas possible in an office environment like this). After all that work (T turning in a paper on Sudan and me surviving on the bike : ) we headed out for much desired refreshment (i.e. chocolate) at a funky cake shop in the city. I’ve not seen a vast array of cake decoration and party options like this since walking into Portos Cuban Bakery in Glendale, CA years ago. Even Portos, however, would be hard pressed to keep up to the cake options. Chocolate poppy seed cake anyone?
