Amsterdam.

This is the start of my adventures with Marion in the Netherlands. We're currently living in the same flat in London, but when Marion arrived at the Dutch airport Schiphol we had no clue what our living situation would be in a month's time. Marion had rented a sublet in London for a month and I would stay there during Summer in the City and a couple of days after so we could go house hunting. After that I would go back to the Netherlands and then hop on a plane to New York for two weeks. Stressful  times all 'round.

This was hanging over us as we spent a week in my home country. My house was empty, because my parents and brothers were vacationing in Italy for three weeks. One of our first stops was Amsterdam. Somehow I'd managed to get free train tickets. The government pays for a free public transportation card when you're a student and as soon as I graduated I got an offer for a free 40% train discount card. I'm not surprised that the NS (National Railroads) is scared to lose students as their customers, since traveling by train is pretty freaking expensive in the Netherlands. Anyways, besides this card I also got two tickets to travel for free for one entire day. Fortunately I also managed to snap up two tickets that enabled Marion to tag along with me. The result: two crazy days of travelling.

Amsterdam was bright and sunny when we arrived and we spent a lot of time just wandering through the city. Next to one of the canals I spotted my future apartment, with shelves and shelves of books. Of course I didn't stand there for a good 10 minutes creepily taking pictures through the window. Nope. After the obligatory Bagels & Beans stop we got in the endless line for the Anne Frank house and munched on our bagels while listening to all the foreign accents. Not a single Dutch person to be found. We also managed to sneak into the Van Gogh museum just 45 minutes before it closed and afterwards we just plopped down in the Museumpark, where I leafed through my New York travel guide until it got too cold in the shade.

Note: All the pictures from this particular week are just going to contain Marion's face. If you want to see any pictures of me, you should probably head over to Marion's blog.