Settling In (ish)

Welp, we finally got bikes. The Netherlands is very pedestrian friendly, but it's very, VERY bike friendly. Public transportation is an excellent tool, but the reality is that it's often faster to bike to your destination. For the past week we've been hoofing it. A lot. I think we've averaged 12km a day, not including climbing or runs. So yesterday, we finally managed to find relatively cheap used bikes. All of a sudden, it's so much faster to go places.

Lesson #4 of the Netherlands:
Get a bike ASAP. They're faster than public transportation (and walking). Also, legally speaking, in a vehicle vs. bike accident, the car is always at fault, even if the biker hits them.

So there are a lot of geese, birds, and swans that hang out in and around the canals. Yesterday we made friends with a swan. Well, maybe not friends. It was hanging out in the middle of the road and walking after everyone who passed near it. To be clear, swans are not nice animals and are also quite large.

It turns out that we showed up during an unusually sunny and beautiful week. While the Netherlands gets some beautiful days, there is usually some serious wind and rain that accompany, well, everything. As a result, the Dutch really know how to get out and enjoy the nice days (sounds like Fairbanks this summer, eh?).

We were introduced to Holland rain on Friday. Sure, we got drizzled on Wednesday and Thursday, but nothing crazy. On Friday, it was cloudy. Eh, just like the past couple days. Guess we should go for a run, say 7 miles? Looks grey, but it hasn't been raining. We're probably good.

5 minutes out the door the sky opens up and it starts to rain. Hard, heavy rain that stings when it hits and would instantly turn Fairbanks into a lake.

As a side note, the Netherlands uses a lot of pervious pavements, which drains very well and coupled with halfway decent grading results in almost no puddles. The catch is that pervious pavements are pretty brittle and wouldn't survive ten minutes in Alaska.

Being Alaskan and already wet, we kept running. The rain somehow managed to intensify and it turned in to an all-out thunder storm. By the time we reached the park (2.7 miles from the apartment), the lightening strikes were almost on top of us, so we decided to not be the tallest things in a field and turned around. As the rain let up some, we put in the rest of our miles along a canal, and as we approached the apartment, the rain stopped.

And it started getting sunny.

Several hours later, we decided to walk to the climbing gym. It started getting cloudy. As we left the building I joked that it would just suck to be outside during the only heavy rains of the day, especially since neither of us had grabbed a rain jacket.

I really should have kept my mouth shut. Once again, the clouds decided to relieve themselves on us and we took shelter under a tree. We were shortly joined by two gentlemen (one of whom was wearing a red tracksuit with no shirt and unzipped halfway. Oh, and an oversized red cowboy hat) who had definitely been drinking and took advantage of the captive audience to tell us all about how rain is good but too much rain is bad and everything has to be balanced and factories are damaging the ozone and then we'll get a hole in the atmosphere and the sun will burn us and we'll have to live underground and only come out at night because the sun will be too hot and we'll have to evolve and somehow he started talking about how everything would devolve into anarchy and there would be chaos....

At this point, Ev and I decided that we were already wet and might as well keep walking. There's only so much ear-fucking you can take.

Needless to say, we were really, really happy to arrive at the gym. Have I mentioned the climbing gym is  AWESOME? How awesome you ask? This awesome:

Ah yes, and then there was the meeting with the guy at the University who helps arrange all the health insurance. We left Rotterdam early and managed to hit all the connections exactly right, thus arriving an hour early. Whoops. We figured we'd show up at his office anyway, just in case he was able to see us. Lo and behold, he was, and we learned about the Dutch healthcare system (to be clear, it's awesome and super-comprehensive), especially the awesome international student insurance that has (wait for it) ZERO OUT OF POCKET. After our productive meeting, we dawdled back to the bus station. And caught the bus. We made it ten minutes before breaking down, at which point we had to wait an hour for the next regularly scheduled bus to pick us up. Kinda defeated the point of showing up early so we could get on with our day...

The "big" news of the week is that I needed a goal. Obviously, the only appropriate goal is a marathon. So we signed up for the Athens Marathon on 9 November. It follows the original marathon course from Marathon to Athens, which I think is also the marathon course from the 2002 Athens Olympics. Basically, we aren't just running another marathon, we are running THE marathon. Which is awesome. (It has been brought to my attention that I make questionable life choices and should probably redefine my criteria for goals. I may have peer pressured Ev...)

Today we took the metro to Den Haag and went to the beach. We talked about biking, but the weather looked foreboding and biking long distances in rain just didn't sound that great. The metro was followed by a tram ride and a three minute walk to the beach.

And what a beach it is. Beautiful, clean sand for kilometers with no rocks or boulder fields. There's a large boardwalk that runs parallel to the beach with lots of restaurants.

We managed to walk along the beach for about an hour and a half before, in true Netherlands fashion, it started to rain. We ducked into a restaurant, had some delicious lunch (apparently the Dutch version of a veggie burger is basically falafel. Falafels are amazing. Best veggie burger ever.), then headed home.

Then we did some Dutch learning via Duolingo (awesome program, btw. Free, easy to use, and has a bunch of languages) and went climbing.

Ev is getting better at climbing. And, just for the record, if he had to be a sea animal he wants to be a big turtle. I can't make this stuff up.