Queen's Day celebrations

Queen's Day starts on the evening before - so we had some drinks at Claire's house in Amsterdam to warm up.

Everyone dresses in orange, so the boys procured a few orange tshirts while us girls got orange headgear. Check out how cute we are with our headbands!!

We had a great time - we went to a square where there was a street party and rocked out.

The next day there was a concert in Museumplein, so we headed down there.

I've got my hangover glasses on...

Farewell BBQ at the boys' house

On Friday we had a farewell barbeque at the boys' house. Claire made this whopper bucket of her special punch, complete with vodka-soaked apples. They had a kick!

The actual physical barbeque-ing was less than ideal... Most of the food we ate got fried in the frypan - the bbq didn't work very fast! I think we needed to start it a little earlier in the day.

Here's Cherilyn and I later on in the evening...

A bunch of us girls got Kyryll to take us for a ride on his scooter - very fun but very scary!

Birthday Bash and Vanessa Visit

For my birthday Vanessa took the day off work and flew over from London.

Karen, Claire and I went out for lunch to this great Chinese restaurant - the atmosphere was so relaxing, it was like a day spa. We had some super food before heading back to work. On the way there was a promo girl handing out tiny cans of Coke Zero for free - Happy Birthday to me!

I look like a giant holding the wee can!

A group of us went out for dinner at a Mexican restaurant (we had to search and search to find one that had nachos - I love nachos!). We had frozen margaritas and some delicious pina coladas. Cherilyn and Claire decorated the table with balloons - and tied one to my wrist too.

After dinner we headed out to Boom Chicago, the comedy club. The Late Nite show is an all-improvisation show where the cast are also drinking. It was much funnier than the show we went to with Scott - not sure if its because I had been drinking or because the cast had been!

Here's Vanessa, Kyryll and I at Boom Chicago-

Afterwards the others headed out to a club but Vanessa and I hit the hay - we had a big day ahead of us the next day!

Cath's departure

Cath, one of the South Africans also on secondment here left on Friday, so we had to celebrate/comiserate this properly!! (her secondment was only three months)

Here's Cath looking happy she's leaving us...

We kicked things off by getting together a posse and heading to a little Italian restaurant. Not a very good italian restaurant though - the waiter starts by announcing that even though he is the waiter, he does not look that old (which was incorrect). I wish I'd got a photo but was freaked out by him quietly asking me which of us girls had a boyfriend and then mysteriously disappearing once the guys showed up!

Here's Cherilyn and South African Claire




And here's Kieran and the back of Cath's head

After dinner we headed off to the ice bar - it has a cold room where the bar and the walls are all ice, and there are statues that are ice too. They give you jackets and gloves and shoes (if you need them)

Here's Ange and I with some frozen fruit dacquiris

Here's Ricketts continuing the trend of the Auckland boys holding handbags...

Here's Kieran in Cologne back in February...

Anyhoo, here's Cherilyn geared up for the ice bar

And here it is! Not as impressive as I expected... kind of just a big fridge...

Here's some of the crew inside the ice bar...

And our frozen glasses - they were made of ice too!!

Here's me with Cath and Ricketts

Here's Kieran, Claire, me and Cath

This guy was H.O.T! Cath loved it :)

Disposable Holland

Ok… not too sure if these guys have heard about global warming and the impact on the world from all the rubbish we throw out all the time.

Other than the readymade pancakes that you just have to heat up in the microwave (which I love, by the way), there are all sorts of strange things that you can buy here that seem to be a little too far in the direction of convenience.

However….. this latest development is something that we are going to put to good use. At the supermarket, you can buy……. Disposable barbeques!!!!!!!!!!! Yes you buy them, you grill on it once, and then you throw it out! Can you believe it?!!? We are hoping to use them at our farewell party at the end of April.

Woohoo!

New Years’ Celebrations

On New Year’s Eve, another NZ workmate arrived – Milli! While Amanda and I managed to work out the tram system (well, enough to get into the centre of Amsterdam, anyway) Kinga went to meet her at the airport.

We all gathered at my apartment for a few beverages. Kinga managed to work out the timer on his digital camera (after a few false starts) and the result was this:

What we didn’t realize (when we were this happy) is that public transport doesn’t run in Amsterdam on New Year’s Eve. This is one of the weirdest things I have ever encountered. No shops are open on New Year’s Day, so it’s the perfect night to go out and celebrate. There’s music and fireworks in the squares in the central city, and yet there’s no way for all the people to get there! We started calling taxi numbers from the phone book in my apartment, and had made over 30 phone calls to no avail when Kinga decides that he’s going to miss New Years if this continues and that he is going to try to hitch hike to Amsterdam from Amstelveen! So he takes off outside and leaves us girls inside trying to get hold of someone (anyone!) to drive us into the city, preferably before midnight! We finally strike it lucky and off we go!

We made it into a pizza parlour around 11pm (after a 20min wait at the door) and found that we could order vodka with our pizza! Although the menu detailed it as Wodka…. and when it arrived the orange juice was in one glass and the Wodka was in the other. You had to pour it in together yourself.

We finished eating at 11.55 and made our way outside to the square so that we could see the fireworks. Now, Dutch people go MENTAL for fireworks. They’re only available around New Years (I think, I hope!) and the streets are absolutely littered with all the fireworks wrappers, and all day long you hear people letting them off (even when it isn’t dark – ummmm, hello?!?!).

After the countdown, and the fireworks, and the music (instead of Auld Lang Syne, here they play the ABBA song ‘Happy New Year’, for about the first 5 days of 2008 we heard it absolutely everywhere) we tried to find our way to a bar or something. We were in a total crush crowd-wise and so just followed the flow, and found ourselves on a canal somewhere, with people letting off fireworks left, right and centre, aiming at people, aiming across the canal, and right in the middle of the crowd. It all got a little too much so we ducked into a ‘Bulldog’ bar and got ourselves a few beverages.

The first thing we noticed is the smoke in the bars! The smoke-free bar rule doesn’t come in until later this year, so it was a big haze of tobacco (and other) smoke. Us poor kiwis weren’t really used to it and got sore eyes and went home feeling decidedly smelly.

When we decided to leave, we realized that we had no idea how we were going to find a taxi. We didn’t know where we were, and all the central city streets were closed off to be pedestrian malls for the celebrations. After following the crowd for a few blocks, we found ourselves in the red light district. A few minutes later, Milli and Amanda are being offered ‘a first class ticket to the moon’ which Amanda politely declined while Milli giggled into her boots.

We finally stumbled across a group of taxis, where a guy offered us a ride for 20 euro each for what should be a 30 euro taxi ride, and there were five of us! So he made a mint off of us. None of us cared (well after Milli got Kinga under control none of us cared) because all taxis quote more expensive prices than the meter for special occasions, and we really wanted to get home as soon as possible. Some of the other NZers (who we didn’t manage to catch up with in the city) took a cab back to Amstelveen but had to wait for a few hours before they could get one, so we count ourselves lucky. On the way home we did see this building on fire, though.