Our First Day of School

We started our day off with a crepe breakfast (not homemade, don't be too impressed). We discovered premade ones from the grocery store, so cheap and just as good. After breakfast we headed downstairs, grabbed our bikes and felt like our moms should have been there to pull out the camera and take an embarrassing picture of us. Oh the first day of school.

We pull into the school and proceed to lock our bikes up against a pole (surprisingly there were no bike stands). Sounds easy enough, but within 10 seconds both bikes had fallen to the ground and my pedal had managed to secure itself around the pole so I couldn't move it. It was seriously out of a movie. All of the "cool" kids were outside the front door having a smoke staring at us failing miserably to simply lock up our bicycles. We could not stop laughing. I'm thinking of hiring someone here to follow us around with a camera.

We got to school an hour early so that we could talk to an advisor and make sure that our classes would all transfer back to the U of M. Then at 11:00 we headed into room 1.029 for our very first class. We started joking around, "What if our prof spoke in Dutch, and we found out this program wasn't actually in English". Laughing at the thought, our professor walks in, starts writing gibberish on the board, and is speaking in Dutch. HA. We waited it out for about 30 seconds, until we realized she wasn't going to be switching over to English, and then asked the students behind us what class we were in. Turns out it was some accounting and management course, not Banking Structure and Strategy, which we were signed up for. We proceeded to exit the classroom and asked the class across the hall for some clarity, but they just looked at us blankly. We went back up to the advisor and told her what happened. She looked up the class with us and told us it was in fact on Tuesday in room 1.029 at 11:00, so at this point we are mildly panicking. Luckily she made a call, and we figured out that the class is indeed at that time and in that room, but not until November. This means our class runs from November 1st- December 6th? Fantastic.

Realizing the only other class we had that day was at 2:20, we ran into the square for a few things and then back to our place for lunch. At 2 we headed back to the school (we are only a 2 minute bike ride, it is very convenient), and down to our classroom. Thankfully this time we were in the right place. Not only was our prof speaking English, but he was also Canadian! He also loves profanity, which I will have to get used to, and calling people out and embarrassing them. I think he took a liking to us though, because he shook my hand to display how easy it was to enter a contract with someone and said he'd be over later. I laughed awkwardly and we pounded it. BFF's.

We are now back at home, about to start studying! We are actually SO excited. I miss reading and doing homework. The weird thing is that most of our classes are 100% final, so we'll have to keep on top of things on our own during the year.

That's all for now. Feel free to email us with your life updates as well, we want to know what's going on in Winnipeg!

Life in Amsterdam

We have finally made it to the land of the Dutch!

Our first night was a little rough. Our plane landed at 4:50pm, and the office to get our keys for our apartment closed at 5pm. Thinking we could just get the keys from reception in our building, we decided to take the metro there and figure something out when we got there. We took the metro to where we thought our building was and proceeded to walk around aimlessly until we realized we had no idea where we were going. We stopped this Dutch guy and asked if he knew the address, but he didn't speak any English. Luckily he had an iphone and punched the address into his gps. He showed us on his iphone where it should be (did I mention yet that it was raining?), and we started heading in that direction. I think he felt bad for us with all of our bags in the rain, because he ended up offering us a ride. Seriously the Dutch are the nicest people in the world. He dropped us off at our building, and my friend Frank was there to meet us because he had been keeping one of my suitcases while I had been traveling. We got him to thank the guy for us in Dutch. Frank could only stay for about 5 minutes because he was still on the clock, and we assured him we would figure something out for the night.

Well once inside our building we realized that there was no receptionist. Luckily there was already a party commencing in room 606, and after meeting this guy Sebastian from Argentina, were offered a floor to sleep on. This clearly wasn't optimal as there were tons of people in his room partying, we were tired, and weren't sure when we would get to sleep. We headed up to our floor (the ninth) and asked our neighbours if we could leave our bags in there for the night while we figured out where to sleep. Thankfully Neela (room 904), offered us her floor, which we figured was a much better option. It was about 9pm and she said she was headed into town for a bit, and we were hungry, so we said we'd meet back there later to get back into her room, or one of her roommates should be there to let us in.

We decided to walk to McDonald's which we knew would be open late, and after arriving in this little square, we realized that we lived in what many people refer to here as "the ghetto". We were the only white people, seriously. I love our neighborhood though, everyone is so friendly and has been so nice to us.
After eating our McDonald's (which was even better than at home), we headed back to our place. We got there around 11pm, and no one from 904 was home. Luckily 906 was home, and said we could hang out with him until 904 got home. We soon found out that 906 was a huge druggy from Berlin, and we had nothing in common. We did have a good laugh when he told us that he usually pregames at his place, heads to the club at 5am, and stays til 12pm. Haha like we were actually just laughing at him, I was speechless. It was a classic first night in Amsterdam. At around 12:30 we were getting pretty tired, and thankfully 906 said we could just sleep on his floor until 904 got home (we left them a note to wake us up). Realizing this was our only option, we took him up on the offer. Despite all of the drugs he was actually very nice. He gave us his sleeping bag and a blanket, so we both snuggled up on the tile floor in our jeans and sweaters in the kitchen. 904 never woke us up. We later realized it was because they were out partying until 6:30am. Of course they were.

It was 8:30 and decided to head straight to our housing office and get our keys. That went pretty smoothly, albeit we were unshowered for 2 days and wearing the same clothes. Talk about the walk of shame. After getting our keys we figured we should run some errands to give 904 plenty of time to get back home so we could get all of our stuff. We hit IKEA, registered at school, registered with the city and then went back to our place. 904 was home (praise the Lord), we got our bags and entered our new apartment!!
Let's just say that we were pleasantly surprised! Every other room we had seen thus far was a 4 person shared room, very stark and uninviting. Our room was a 2 bedroom, with a separate room for the kitchen, our bathroom had a bigger sink, and a curtained off shower (the others just had a shower head that would get the whole bathroom wet). Yes, we are living the high life. Our first order of business was rearranging the furniture, as we decided we wanted to sleep in the same room. We moved wardrobes, beds, desks, lamps and other things. Men, be impressed, this involved some heavy lifting. Our rooms were also fully furnished, everything we needed for the kitchen, bedding, lamps, pictures, it was fantastic. We completely unpacked and felt right at home immediately.

This is dragging on, so I will just mention a few highlights from the past two days:

• We had three other people offer to drive us when we were lost (seriously the Dutch may be nicer than Canadians).
• Skipped all of orientation, we figured we could orient ourselves.
• We bought a few more things from IKEA to make our place more homey, such as dishcloths
• We accidentally stumbled upon the red light district, went into our first "coffee shop"
• Walked around in the rain for hours trying to get passport photos taken, find internet cable chords and open bank accounts
• Bought bikes!! Much more expensive (and difficult to find) than we thought, but well worth it, as we will save so much money not taking the metro, and we can sell it back when we leave
• Had our first dinner at the apartment: I had a peanut butter and jam sandwich, and Selena had chicken and cheese. Watch out Martha Stewart.

That about sums up our time in Amsterdam so far! Stay tuned for our weekend adventures...