First year in Amsterdam

Today marks a very special anniversary in our lives… We have moved to Amsterdam exactly a year ago! And I though there is no better excuse to break the long period of silence and tell the story of our first year in this beautiful city with some numbers and facts. So, here they are…

• 365 days since moving to Amsterdam…

• 365 days of rain (I’m just joking! it’s really not that bad…)

• 238 days of commute on bicycle, including 5 days on snow and ice, 22 days miserably missed out due to heavy rain…

• 158 Dutch words learned (152 are the same in German, so I might be cheating a little bit!)

• 62 runs completed, 547 km run in total, including 1 half marathon and 1 10-mile race…

• 48 different restaurants tested (and liked! How do they keep the bar so high??)

• 18 cities visited in 9 different countries, 3 countries for the first time ever!…

• 12 visits by friends and family (not sure if they came to visit us or the city J)

• 5 days spent to get used to living here, 1 day was more than enough to fall in love!…

• 1 laptop bag stolen (but surprisingly not my bike yet, though it is probably just a matter of time)…

• 1 Ajax game watched live in Bijlmer Arena (I think I watched more Galatasaray games at TT Arena while living in Amsterdam, some habits don’t go away…)

• 0 days where I wished I still had a car (you want to improve the quality of your life? drop the car!)

• 0 mouse spotted in the house (our friends tell us that in Amsterdam, you either have a cat as a pet or a mouse, you just might not know it yet!)

• 0 traffic jams experienced (I’m not counting the heavy congestions on bike lanes during the rush hours)…

• 0 political turmoil reported, 0 economic crisis artificially generated (booooring! I am still wondering what the Dutch are reporting in the evening news, the cat stuck on the tree?)…

I will keep adding more statistics as I remember other stuff, but you get the idea!