Past visits to the Netherlands
Many people have asked us if we visited the NL prior to moving. Yes! We visited the NL on our first trip abroad in 1994.
Pre-cell phones and armed with physical maps, we stayed in Den Haag for a conference and took a train into Amsterdam for a day, not realizing that the one day we chose to visit Amsterdam was Queen’s Day (now King’s Day). We didn’t get far! I remember spending time in Scheveningen (try pronouncing that), perfectly timing a visit to Keukenhof to see tulips, eating many pancakes and discovering the Dutch have really cool textiles. I splurged on a charming yellow tablecloth with cat designs on it which I still have.
Our most recent visit to the Netherlands was in 2022. I had two reasons for visiting the Netherlands: I didn’t want to spend ALL of our summer vacation in Germany and I wanted to visit my friend Sarah Pedlow, an embroidery artist, in Amsterdam. Sarah took the bold step of moving abroad five years prior. We met through our mutual friend, Lucy Childs, another amazing embroidery artist, who is also about to do a move of her own but cross country in the US. We had a lovely dinner with Sarah and her partner, sort of post-Covid. Amazingly on that trip to Europe, we never got sick (we did the following year)! Midway through the meal, an emergency alert came to everyone’s phone, including ours. There was a garbage fire north of the city and everyone was told to stay inside. Having been through two terrifyingly close forest fires in California, we felt a bit of PTSD when the air smelled like smoke and the skies turned orange. Here’s a video of what it felt like on September 9, 2020, the day the sky turned orange in northern California. This was at 4:30 pm.
See what I mean by forest fires being terrifyingly close? This is one of the reasons we are no longer living in California. Thankfully, the fire in Amsterdam was under control later that evening. But it was a memorable night! We spent four nights in Amsterdam and it was incredibly crowded with tourists. Thankfully we stayed in a small hotel a bit out of the way just NE of the train station in Haarlemmerbuurt, not Haarlem. In retrospect, we should have stayed in Haarlem, with easy train access to Amsterdam and much more living space. Plus, there are a ton of shops here and it’s much less crowded.
So, if you’re planning a trip to Amsterdam, consider staying in Haarlem. Now we live here. It feels weird so far. Not real? I guess this is what an expat feels at first. Many more posts about expat life to come!