Motivated by the thought of F I N A L L Y reaching my destination after nearly a full twenty four hours of travel, I pushed my jet-lagged body and three suitcases equivalent to my weight through what happened to be the largest airport in Europe. Unsure of what time of day it was and not quite confident I was in the right place to catch my bus, I half-tripped my way through the exit doors and was greeted by a cloudy, muggy August day surrounded by nondescript, industrial architecture that would come to be the typical Dutch backdrop. I could have landed on an entirely new planet as I looked around trying to get a sense of my surroundings. After a bus ride with a hand full of fellow international students and some brief introductions, we were directed into a café building on campus and handed the keys to our room, given a booklet about our new city and that was that. I asked around to see if any of the other students lived on my floor, but it seemed everyone who had arrived with me was scattered throughout the twelve story international building.
I took the tiny, grimy elevator to the seventh floor, my muscles weak from carrying an entire semesters worth of luggage from America to Amsterdam, a job for three. I opened the door to a long, dark hallway of separate bedrooms. The door echoed as it closed, I was the first one to get here. I had chosen the absolute earliest arrival day because I was so eager to begin my adventure. Exhausted as I was, I was still too excited to consider if this was the right choice. I opened the door that matched the numbers on the key I was handed. I’m not sure what I was expecting exactly, but it wasn’t this. It was the dirtiest room I’d ever moved into, its dull grey-white walls filled with pin and nail holes and randomly dotted with half-scraped, foreign Hello Kitty stickers from past residents. A few outdated pieces of dusty odd and end furniture were randomly pushed into the corners, a big white box of basic linens sitting on a bare mattress. My body was running on zero sleep and zero food, my body ached in a way that only results from a solid day’s worth of travel, multiple layovers and an entirely new time zone. My body was exhausted but my mind had never been more awake! I had been looking forward to this moment for months on end, and with manic energy, I dug out a washcloth and shampoo from my luggage and started scrubbing the dusty floor, so ready to transform this little hole in the wall into my new home.
Once I came to my senses, I realized I hadn’t showered or eaten anything in quite a while. I opened the squeaky door to the tiny tiled bathroom within my room. The shower-head was right over the toilet (the Dutch really like to conserve space) and over time using the toilet lid as a shower shelf did admittedly come in handy. My stomach growled. I had eaten all of the snacks I had packed to hold me over throughout the flights. I had no idea where to get food, nobody to ask, and no Internet or phone to try and find it. I wandered out into the odd little campus, nothing compared to the sprawling and busy campus of any American university I had ever been to. The residential campus was separate from the University, which was located more towards the city. Within the isolated little campus I had a few options to explore, none of it making sense.
The campus was a ghost town; Dutch students wouldn’t move in for another week and a half and I was four days early to the regular international arrival. Outside the campus was mainly a collection of tall residential buildings and to my luck- a tiny convenient shop- labeled in Dutch so I had no way of knowing what was inside this little shop but I decided to explore. I browsed the little refrigerated section and found a carton that appeared to be milk- it was labeled “melk” with some long descriptive word that looked to me like “jsfhbshfbhfj melk”. Close enough, what else can it be, I thought. I recognized a box of cereal, and soon had myself my first meal. I was confident in my purchase and returned back to my room, only to discover that there was no silverware or kitchenware of any kind in the kitchen yet. I ate my first meal in a mug I found and used the end of my makeup brush as a spoon. Except the “melk” wasn’t milk. It was a thick, plain yogurt that tasted very acidic and not at all what I had been expecting. So that was my first meal; I forced myself to choke down a few soggy, bitter bites before falling into my new bed, looking forward to things making sense very soon. I later found out that whatever word was before milk signaled the product was plain kefir. In other words, a nasty mix between the texture of a smoothie and the flavor of sour cream.
Luckily that night there was an official gathering for all of the early arriving international students at a small café below the resident buildings. On a completely empty stomach, I was not so thrilled to hear that the opening activity was a giant game of beer pong sponsored by a university organization (absolutely UNHEARD of as an activity put on by any student organization I had been in at my home university in Ohio). I was finally able to talk to the other students and laugh about all of our similar arrival scenarios and I learned my first helpful phrases in Dutch: brood for bread, which I was desperate to find, and “neuken in the keuken”, which a Dutch student thought was absolutely necessary for us naïve new students to know. Amsterdam is weird I thought, but I am starting to like it already.
A tourist in my own city after a few months of calling it home 
the backwards umbrella says it all 
Nothing beats a fresh stroopwafel lathered in chocolate
BroadsAbroad 