The mist

My building.

Amsterdam has been covered in a misty fog for the last few weeks, and I am absolutely loving it.

It reminds me of a couple of things.

I looked outside my front windows today and I had a nolstalgic moment of home.

The fog in the Adelaide Hills was always pretty disorientating and quite dangerous when you're speeding up the freeway at 100 kilometres per hour, but I always loved it.

The colours of autumn in the trees at the park across the road, in conjunction with the mist made me think about the Adelaide Hills, and how nice it was there, and how nice it is here right now. Not too cold at six degrees, just nice.


Also brings me back to when I first arrived and ended up housesitting Pia's houseboat along an inner city canal at the beginning of winter. The streets along that canal are all cobblestoned with old street lamps illuminating the way home. I was walking back from my first Christmas dinner with the company, and wondering if I would end up staying in Amsterdam to see another winter.

I had joked with my boss at the time that since there was no guarantee of me being around next year as I was on a contract, we should go all out on the dinner and go nuts with the wine. I walked home (the houseboat) from the museum restaurant, through the mist and fog and I remember feeling like I was walking through an old movie, expecting Sherlock Holmes and some bloodhounds to come tearing around the corner. (Understanding that this isn't London, I'm just trying to convey how old world it felt.)

The first week I was there, it was like living in Sleepy Hollow.

Then fast forward to the weekend just been, I spent it with friends doing fun things, sometimes creative, sometimes absurd, sometimes pointless.

Last night, I stayed at a friend's house after a paticularly huge Saturday night out with a few other people, and my friend AHS and I were cycling over a bridge over the Amstel river trying to navigate our way home.

We had all been watching movies inside the entire day, bravely fighting hangovers with toasted cheese sandwiches, kapsalon (literally, "The Hairdresser" - which is a dutch fast food kebab invention of kebab meat, covered in melted cheese, aoili, salad, and tomato sauce and fries) and coffee.

As I cycled next to AHS, we could barely see through the dense cloud that surrounded us, not even being able to see the lights along the river, or the illuminated outline of the Skinny bridge (Magere Brug), Amsterdam's most famous bridge. Being inside all day with Australians and watching American movies, it was very easy to forget where I was.

"Don't you feel like you're in a movie?"

"Yeah. All the time. I hope it never ends." he said.

All the ranting and wailing in my previous post was just a basic frustration about my job and the whole situation with being owned by the company.

But it's that same job that allows me to have the great times that I do, stay with the great friends that I have and experience "normal" things like cycling home through thick fog.

I went to bed last night, and looked outside my bedroom window and saw the transluscent mist floating around and I kind of gasped unintentionally.

I went to bed grateful.