Leiden

I'm here.  Finally here in this strange little world I've just sort of thrown myself into.  My first spotting of the Netherlands was, of course, windmills.  In the ocean.  IN. the. OCEAN.  Whoa.  

I stumbled my way through Amsterdam and found the train to take me home.  New home.  Leiden is awesome.  The streets are narrow and twisting, weaving in and out of each other as they please.  Toss in a canal here and there.  Everywhere.  Cool.  It's a small town, but so far I feel just like I did in any one of Berlin's quarters.  There are just so many people out and about.  And most of them are on bikes.  Stereotypes that turn out to be true!  I've seen more bikes here than in all of my life combined.  And I don't know that that's an exaggeration.  

My apartment is tiny.  Tiny compared to tiny.  Mom and I decided it was probably about 100 square feet.  9-ish square m!  My apartment in Berlin was 72 square m!  That's 775 square ft.  I'm paying more for this apartment and I have 1 eighth the space.  Also, I sleep over my kitchen.  And bathroom.  I am, unhappy with that.  In fact, I've been rather bummed about it.  But add to that the fact that I haven't slept in two nights and I'm pretty content that this is only an annoying situation.  After a rather exhausting afternoon/evening of running around Leiden trying to get keys and leases and taxis and baggage, I had a mini meltdown when I realized it was only 12:30pm.  However, I have since napped, showered and, alhamdulillah, brushed my teeth, and I'm feeling like a cheerful human again.

I realized that there have been very few times in my life where I have said to myself "Well, this wasn't nearly as awesome as I had hoped."  In fact, most of my life has been me saying "Holy wow, this is ten times more awesome than I had hoped."  So a little disappointment won't kill me.  Plus, my lease runs out August 17th, so I'm hardly trapped here.  

I have been rather taken aback by how foreign I feel here.  Not so foreign, I guess.  This place is really just a strangely spelled, friendly Germany.  But I just don't speak the language all that well.  I did talk to a guy about my cell phone only in Dutch, which was fabulously gratifying, but the reality is, I can't just calmly prattle.  I have to think.  A lot.  Which I haven't had to do in a country I've lived in since middle school.  That's a good 12 years of feeling completely comfortable with my linguistic abilities.  I'm totally stoked to get to be the funny sounding foreign kid who messes up all the verb tenses and idioms.

My horoscope for the week is perfect, and so I shall post it:  "I'm hoping that six months from now, you'll look back and make the following declaration: 'It's so funny that in order to find out where I truly belong, I had to change my ideas about where I truly belong.  Feeling at home on this planet and in this life wasn't possible until I got cured of my delusions about what it would feel like to be at home on this planet and in this life.  I had to lose some of my certainties in order to gain more security."  (www.freewillastrology.com)