Wo Baby Jetlag

I've gone and done it. I've moved to Amsterdam. The sum total of my worldly possessions have been whittled down to a few bags I took with me, and 3 boxes of keepsakes that I left back in Vancouver with my grandparents. After saying my various goodbyes, and a long "last walk" around the Vancouver Sea Wall, I hopped onto a plane for a couple days with my parents in Kelowna where I managed to de-stress in preparation for an even bigger Ball of Scary. Wednesday morning, I said goodbye to my parents, and boarded a flight back to Vancouver, where my brother, his future wife (hi Shawna!), and their dogs met me at the airport and shuttled me to Delta to pick up my stuff. We had Grandma Soup, said goodbye to my grandparents and then Butthead drove me back to YVR for the big flight over the North Pole.

The flight was as comfortable as you'd expect any flight with FIVE children younger than 2 years old only a few seats away. Luckily I had a pair of those nifty silicon headphones, so the screaming wasn't as painful as one would think. Those, coupled with the Gravol and sleeping mask, and frankly, I don't remember much of the flight.

I landed in Schipol with more energy and clarity than I expected, re-charged the T-Mobile SIM card I acquired last time I was here, and called Tineke, my to-be-landlord to let her know that I'd landed and would be arriving soon. I grabbed a cab, showed him the GoogleMap location of where I needed to go, and €58 later, I was hobbling through the front door of my new home.

My lodgings are... well they're small, but Tineke is really quite friendly. She left fruit in the room, and some fresh squeezed orange juice the following morning. The rent is pretty good though considering (€450/mo) and I'll likely be here for a month or two while I get my bearings and look for a more permanent place to live.

The jetlag though... it's been brutal. I stayed up until 1900 the first night and woke up at midnight. Most of that day was a write off, and today I awoke at 0400. I'm feeling a little better though, so I'm going to do some more exploring today. On my todo list: buy an umbrella and purchase an OV-Chipkaart (a transit pass) while getting used to how to get around the city.

Now the bad news: the new job isn't where I thought it was. I could swear that I'd seen it on a map, checked the address, but that must have been a different company. MarketSims is in Naarden, a suburb of Amsterdam about 22km from where I want to live. Now thanks to the wonders of transit in this city, it's not that big a deal in terms of my commute (about 30min door to door) but the realisation was rather unsettling when it came.

For the graphically inclined, here's a Google map of where I am:

Lastly, for those of you interested in following my travels in a more real-time way, You can check out my Gowalla page or better yet, follow @travellingjack on Twitter, an account I created after Melanie suggested I take her little stuffed Jack Sparrow doll with me and take pictures of his exploits ;-) Should be fun.