Life in the Netherlands

Here is the train station in Amsterdam...very fancy..no? I have never had to pay to use a public restroom until I arrived here...the attendent makes his or her living cleaning the facilities. The dutch are big into recycling...we have two shopping carts in our hall...(one for glass, and one for paper)...the trash bens outside are very "clean" they actually look like little post boxes that are fed into a huge underground storage container that is lifted out of the ground and emptied by a truck.
The cobble stone streets are everywhere and beautiful...and the dutch take pride in their homes...each house has a huge living room window that is always in open view of the street...I love biking home at night and seeing all the different arrangements...what is interesting is that a home is never equiped with furniture of any sort..I mean not even a kitchen...they have to order their entire base layout...its common for someone to move out of a house and even strip the walls of decorative paper if you don't pay the previous owner for it..getting a celing light in your new house? Forget it!

Night Life

I have never experienced a night life like this before...only in Groningen the Netherlands do the bars stay open until 7a.m...this one particular location is translated to "Three Sisters"..a huge construction that has three entrances that all lead to connecting bars...I believe there are 20 something differnt bars that are all diffent..the one I enjoy...people walk into a d.j. plaing dance techno and the bar is circular and rotates on its own floor...crazy!...I have actually only stayed out all night one time...it was impossible to sleep the next day...however..I have found myself becoming more of a night owl...all of the shops are closed by 6pm and the grocery stores are only open until 8p.m....absolutely no Sunday shopping...so everything done in public must be done early...and then work late into the night...

Midieval Names

I go to school at the "Zernika Complex" which consists of three different Universities..mine is Hanzehoegeschool... all the streets are named archaically in this town and if you try to pronounce my street name Kornolejestraat...I guarantee you have it wrong:) My city Groningen has about 23 different colleges and Universities...when I got off the train I could tell immediately I had walked into a younger generation run city...all students share one gym called Aclo...there I take different execise classes each day...one that is really populare is called Romba...its a highspeed aerobics class..no stepping blocks for this one...about 200 of us gather in a gym and have our hearts razing to extremely high speed trance music..which they call "hard core" that operates at 140 b/m.

Another Life

This is the Amsterdam Sex museum...it wasn't worth going to..it was advertised as a history museum and actually was just a glorified porn attraction...nothing different than could be found in the red light district...yes there are porn shops in the streets of Amsterdam..but in a remote area...and honestly its not that amusing...its mostly a tourist attraction and not what you would expect...highly government regulated.
I feel sorry for the women who have sold thier lives to this lifestyle and...well...too much for words to describe. There are live porn shows on t.v. as well..its really not as popular as you would think...I have never walked in on a guy watching it...kinda like flipping through a soap opera...nudity is not shocking here, for example they use naked pictures of Marlyn Manore to advertise inn my school and one fundraiser involved the making of a nude calander...but these aren't crude photos...the best way I can describe this atmosphere.. There are pot houses here as well...they are highly government regulated and smoking pot on the streets is illegeal...I am actually getting used to the smell of it because just about all of my roommates smoke it..not all of the time but I guess a couple of times a week...No I haven't tried it myself...I hate smoke and the last thing I am going to do is try weed...don't worry.

We don't have parking lots..we have Biking Lots!

This is my flat's personal biking lot...biking is the ride of choice here. The entire country is flat and everything is close together allowing for anyone to survive without a car...the highest crime rate here?...you guessed it..bike theft...the junkies make their living by selling stolen bikes for about $20..I bought mine from another student "clean" for about $75..I pray that the lock I brought from the states holds up my entire stay...I love biking here..its very convenient and saves alot of money...taxi cabs are extremely expensive...I spent 35 Euros on a trip from the city center to my flat..that was a one time deal...to move all of my luggage from a friend's house...believe it or not the cab was an extended Mercedes!

Beautiful

Look..I have my very own windmill! This windmill is a ten minute bike ride from my flat...I was so excited to find it...my friends and I were just out on an afternoon ride and whala...there it was! My flat is in the most northern part of the city and I enjoy that becuase I can look out my bedroom window and see all skyscrapers...and then look out my kitchen window and see endless land and a beautiful white bridge!

Friends

I have made some genuine friends here and feel that I already have a famiy around me. All of my friends are either permanent residents or international...people keep saying "oh there are a bunch of NAU students here..do you know so and so?" To be honest I didn't come here to hang out with NAU students... I am perfectly happy with going out on a limb and meeting different people...what I keep hearing is "you are so lucky English is you native language"...yes that may be true for the school setting...but I feel like I am missing out by not being fluent in at least two languages like my friends are.

Don't drink the Water!!!

So the water here is in abundance and the best tasting I have experiened! It truely is bottle water quality straight from the tap! Who would have known. For once in my life I don't feel guilty about taking long hot showers. The country is covered in water! And it constantly drizzles.

My Flat

So I live on the 7th floor of an Internationaol house named Kornooljestraat. This is my blue room that I just painted..my room was horribly depressing before...
I am the only girl in my wing...with all dutch and three chinese men.
I share two bathrooms and a kitchen with them.
I was really disgusted at first because the hall smelled like a mixture of weed and flagullents....the kitchen was filfy and no room for me in the tiny refrigerators...but now....I have rearranged my room and am slowly making friends with them....they aren't like other students I could have been living with because they are all permanent students and don't need to socialize any more...they spend all of their time in their rooms with the door shut if they aren't cooking in the kitchen...some of them are really hot...one is drop dead gorgeous...don't worry there will be no shacking up.