Arrival in Amsterdam

This is the view from my room (the picture was taken in May)


Last January, after a stressful train ride from Paris to Amsterdam (my friend and I flew to Paris to stay for a week before starting school), we took a cab to get to our residence because we realized it was not an easy task to walk around with the amount of luggage we had brought! I remember that day like it was yesterday. It was a cold and cloudy winter day. We first went to the student housing corporation's office to get our keys and were told they had sent some people to one of the two residences building and they were the ones who had our keys. So we dragged our luggage in the snow and took another taxi. 20 more Euros later, we finally found the building. Meeting the staff was a relief as it was the first real contact we got and they were there to guide us. After signing the contract, getting some documents, useful information and receiving the keys to our apartment, we left and walked towards our building located a minute away.

We then arrived to number 22 and unlocked the door to find an apartment filled with cockroaches! You cannot imagine how shocked and disappointed we were, especially now that it was too late to do anything about it since we arrived just before 4 o’clock, which was the time the staff was there until. The only thing I could do was open my computer and get in contact with my friends and family through Skype to get a little encouragement…

Here is a video of when we first got inside the apartment. It is in french but as you can sense in my tone of voice, I was pretty upset...



It was getting late and my friend and I had not eaten much that day, so we walked to the grocery store located a block away, and that’s when we first experienced culture shock. The products were so unfamiliar and all the ingredients were written in Dutch. When we asked one of the employees where we could find the pita bread because we assumed they had some, we were surprised to find out the employee barely spoke English and had no idea what we were talking about. By the way we found the pita bread, but it’s nothing like the big and thin one we are used to. Anyways, after spending about half an hour in there, we returned to our new home to have dinner in my room because it was the only place where the cockroaches were not present (although there were some dead ones on the wall)! Later on we went to bed and tried to get some sleep even though it was quite difficult.

The next morning, we woke up early and were happy to first of all get out of our apartment, but more importantly to go to school to attend the introduction day. Luckily, we got to speak to the women who gave us our keys the day before, and she agreed to give us the keys to another apartment for us to stay in while they would take care of the problem. With this being solved, we were glad to move on with our day and meet the other international students. That evening, the international students were invited to do a pub-crawl organized by Babylonix, a student’s association. That night was memorable. It was the beginning of our “new life”.

Arriving to a different country can be scary, but faith is very important. Although I’m the first one to be very cautious about what’s around me when I travel, I learned that sometimes you just need to let people who you feel look trustworthy help you. After all, every single one of us will need help at some point in our lives, and that’s one of the reasons we exist, to help each other out.