Home sweet home

We have a new home!

Well, nearly that is. Brian and I went apartment shopping with the Nike relocation company on Tuesday and although we were told we had a low budget and there aren't many apartments open right now (renting is expensive here - I don't know how anyone affords it), we found a place we both loved.

The place is located in a very nice, kid-friendly neighborhood, and is just minutes away from downtown, the train station, awesome parks, etc... It's also right across from Amsterdam's only zoo called the Artis Zoo, which we're both excited about. Artis is really pretty, free everyday after 4pm, has a million parks and has the coolest advertising campaign involving a sock monkey going on right now:

The result is large billboards with sock monkeys all over town - awesome!

Anyway, our place is very nice. It's split level, wood floors, has lots and lots of light (tons of windows and half the ceiling in the living space area is a skylight), and is huge for us - Brian thinks around 1800 square feet (compared to our place in Portland which was 750). The landlord is going to repaint the whole thing for us, and we will need to buy an oven and new refrigerator when we move in, but he's giving us a discount off the rent because of that so we don't really mind. We don't have pictures of the inside yet, but we'll post them when we do. Here are a few of the outside:

Ours is the one on the right - the penthouse!


A community dining area out front, very cute


The outside of Artis Zoo, right down the street from our place!

The only downside of this whole thing is that I won't really get to live there till October, since we won't be able to move in until the beginning of August because the rest of our stuff won't be here until then. But our temporary place is very nice, so I can't complain... plus, it will just make it even more exciting to come back after the wedding!

- Krista