Houseboat

I arrived in Amsterdam two nights ago, after a flight that was delayed for 2 hours because of a bomb threat. The people who own the house boat that we are renting sent a car to pick us up, which greatly reduced the amount of confusion (and work) that we would have to deal with--each of us had 3 enormous suitcases.

Our boat was built in 1901. There are a lot of houseboats in the canals, but ours is one of the few that actually look like boats--many of the others are just floating squares, and rather ugly. All of our windows are portholes, and there is a lot of sunlight coming in from the skylights in the ceiling. Granted, what is somewhat creepy is that anyone on the street can look into our boat and see us, since the skylights have no curtains. We'll be asking our landlord for a better lock, since apparently our door doesn't actually lock properly, and we are somewhat close to the red light district. Being close to an area full of drugs and prostitutes technically means there are lots of police in the area since it is highly regulated, but also that there's a lot of drunk/high/horny men wandering around. Anyhow, once we get a better lock that shouldn't be a problem.

My room is very cozy. We don't have a lot of space, but we're in a very good location. The ends of the boat are quite cold, but we have a good heating system. All the water however, drains into canal. We've been instructed not to dump anything hazardous...but our toilets flush into the canal, which is pretty gross. I guess all houseboats do that? Thus, it's a pretty bad idea to jump into or swim in these canals.

The area is really beautiful. When we wake up in the morning, we can see ducks and swans outside our windows, bridges over the canals and really cute buildings. I don't know if the lights are up year rounds, but right now many of the streets have blue and white Christmas lights up; it makes me think of the nutcracker actually, since the architecture is older, and the holidays are still on my mind.

Yesterday, we went to a pancake house. Pancakes here are amazing. I decided to be adventurous, and got bacon/apple pancakes. I didn't particularly like it, but their sweet pancakes are amazing. I haven't yet figured how to make them, so for breakfast we eat these cookie like things called stroopwaffels--two wafers with buttery, vanilla caramel inside. Eating out is more expensive here than it is in New York, so we'll be cooking a lot more often.