You can read about the 2nd and last day in Hamburg from Petteri's blog. Heikki took some fine pics that can be found from the blog posts:
http://flyinghighinholland.blogspot.com/ (just to praise myself a bit - I made up the name of Petteri's blog haha and I'm proud of it)
But yesss. Yesterday night we arrived in Haarlem. With a little bit of navigation problems, nothing too major - just a stop at the local police office, we made it to Yana's & Alex's. Don't get me wrong, the stop at the police was only for asking the way, not because of anything criminal. Petteri and Heikki got a nice inflatable mattress to sleep on but in the morning I found H sleeping on a flat mattress and P sleeping on the sofa. Hahah great. Today we went to get the guys new mattresses from Alex's friend.
The day was pretty much a get to know Haarlem kind. Haarlem is amazingly pretty, looks like a miniature town or like some scene of a movie. All the canals and all...bjuuutiful! The only thing is that every street looks the same - this makes my averagely good in-head navigating system go crrraaazzy and ever so mixed up. Meaning...yes, we did take a few false turns today. But - here we are, safe and sound at our Haarlem hosts' apartment.
The highlights of the day were visiting school and getting this information package (school starts tomorrow at 10am), getting a Dutch sim and phone, going to IKEA (! I've had such an Ikea week !) for lunch and killing time and laying on the sofas and and and what best...
1) I got the most random call from Finland: "Hi, this is X from the Swedish radio. Could we interview you about why there are so many Christian Democrats in Varkaus?" I was ever so confused, why on earth did they call me. Anyhow, I just said that hey I'm sorry but I'm in Holland so this is not the most cheapest phonecall you are making. Then the guy just laughed and said he should contact someone else instead. I was pretty proud of myself since the whole phonecall discussion was held in Swedish. Whoop!
2) We found about 4 real estate companies out of which we got one to search apartments for us. Apartments in Haarlem, and Holland in general, are not cheap at all. Plus you have to pay all kinds of extra costs like the agency for all the work they do and rent security deposits and all. We're gonna be broke! Also we had the best luck ever when walking in town. There was a sign on the windows and door of an office space in the city center saying "huur" which means "for rent". The door was open and we saw stairs going up so we decided to go and ask whether they had something to offer students. I wasn't expecting anything else than finding a real estate officer and hoping to ask him for possibilities of apartments but nooo... we found a big apartment upstairs the office which was being renovated. We found the landlady who was extremely surprised how come we came to the apartment. She said the renting signs were only for the office downstairs and not for her apartments. We came to the conclusion that it must have been destiny we came to visit. She showed us around the LUXURY apartment and told us to call her on Friday when she could give us prices and more information about possible renting. I have a really bad feeling that we will not afford that apartment at all - it was too good to be true. Let's hope I'm wrong! ...so apartment hunting still continues. Tomorrow we should hear more from two real estate peeps.
Now off to bed, can't wait for tomorrow's first day of orientation!
Oh, and we found the local "big" grocery store called Albert Heijn today after like...an half an hours search (you can't find food stores anywhere here!). It had been compared to a Finnish Prisma or Citymarket but oh no - it so is not! Albert Heijn is the size of a Finnish Siwa which could almost be called a corner shop. I'm a bit scared about how my "eat healthy and organic" diet shall work out since the selections in the shops aren't that huge nor healty-looking. Today I even tasted the traditional Dutch "kroket" which I couldn't eat till the end. Not my kind of food! Need to get my blender working so that the supersmoothie -times can start again.
But, good night, sleep tight, and all,
Love,
Linda
xxx
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