Here I Am in Amsterdam!

I had a very uneventful trip from home to here. I boarded my flights on Tuesday without issue and passed the time with a movie (I Love You, Man) and half a book (Gilead, by Marilynne Robinson). I only ended up getting two hours of sleep for the night though, so I was pretty much exhausted by the time I reached my destination. My taxi driver had no trouble finding the building at the address I gave him, but finding the IES office itself was probably the most difficult part of my journey. This was because, despite the fact that I could see the building address written on a wall in front of me, I couldn’t seem to find a door that I was supposed to enter (notice that "Main Entrance" points to the wall itself).

I wandered around the corner into a courtyard where I assumed the building would be, but you can imagine my confusion when I found it surrounded by at least three different buildings – none of which were clearly marked or labeled. That was when I noticed the bright blue path painted across the bricks of the courtyard. I couldn’t help feeling a little bit like Dorothy as I followed the curving path to a door. Sure enough, there was a tiny sign by the entrance for the Universiteit van Amsterdam’s office for international students.

Once inside, however, I found that nobody seemed to know what “IES” was, or where the program was located inside the building. The people on the ground floor told me I needed to go to the second floor, but the people on the second floor said I needed to go to the first. I lugged my bags around in circles for probably 15 minutes until one woman took pity on me in my bedraggled state and called for someone to lead me in the right direction. I finally found the IES office on the first (but not the ground) floor of the building, and my time as a student in Amsterdam officially began.

That was Wednesday. I spent the rest of the week in frantic orientation activities with the other IES students. There are about 45 of us in all, including students in the Pre-Law Certificate Program, the Conservatorium van Amsterdam for music, and the Gerrit Rietveld Academie for studio art (of which my roommate, Conny, is one). The three IES program leaders, Chantal, Margarethe, and Eva, are all super friendly and nice, but the amount of running around we did in those first few days was exhausting and sometimes even disorienting. We were shown a lot of helpful places like the doctor’s office and the international student information building, but when there are forty-odd people surrounding you at any given point, it becomes a little difficult to keep track of where you’re going.

Nevertheless, I managed to keep myself from getting hopelessly lost for the first few days, and we finished out our hectic orientation schedule with a peaceful boat tour of the canal. Amsterdam really is an attractive city, with lots of beautiful architecture, crazy bikes, and interesting people, and the canal tour was nice way to see it all without wearing ourselves out. My biggest goal by the end of the week was to settle in and get my bearings before classes started on the following Tuesday, which I managed to do during a series of adventures over the weekend. More on that to come…