WE'RE MOVING TO AMSTERDAM!
I filled you guys in on our news about 2 weeks ago while myself and John were visiting Amsterdam and deciding where we wanted to live. It's something that we both decided on around Christmas time after our second visit to the City in November. It's one of my favourite places in the entire world and we both wanted a new adventure. Why not move to Amsterdam? It's a beautiful city with no language barrier as lots of people speak fluent english (although it will be fun to learn some dutch), it's super close to home (just over an hour flight from both Cork and Dublin), so let's do it!
I was nervous initially at the thought of packing up and moving country for a year, even though we had done it before as we used to live in London but I guess it's a natural stress that anyone would have moving. Will I miss home? Will we find a house we like? Will I make new friends? Of course all of these things come to mind but when we visited again last week I knew we were making the right decision. I didn't want to come home so it confirmed how much I love it! We also met a lovely Irish couple who we ended up having some drinks with and all my fear just seemed to vanish. Of course we still have the struggles that everyone does with finding an apartment and all of the other not so fun stuff that comes with moving but it always works out. We're planning to move early Summer and honestly, I'm so so excited. Our family and friends are too so I'm sure we're going to have a tonne of visitors :) John is going to work in Amsterdam and I will be still blogging full time over there. That's the beauty about a job that's online, it can be done from anywhere.
I've done a blog post about some of our favourite places in Amsterdam before which you can find here. I'll also do a little updated version on this blog post too. We still have SO much of Amsterdam to discover which is what I'm most looking forward to so I'll keep you guys updated along the way!
Where we stayed:
Hotel Arena- This is honestly my favourite hotel of anywhere we have been. This was our second time staying here and I absolutely love it. The grounds are in the middle of a beautiful park with a stunning terrace cafe and a gorgeous bar. Just a short journey into Amsterdam city centre with public transport right at your door and for a very reasonable price, I couldn't recommend this hotel enough. Visit the website here.
Price: $$$$$
Where we ate:
You can find more food recommendations on my previous blog post but new additions would be black beauty Italian if you take a trip out to Haarlem. It's such a gorgeous area and definitely worth a visit. We also ate in Burger 'n' Shake in Amsterdam city which was delish! As the weather was so nice we also bought food and drink from the supermarket "Albert Heijn' (which are everywhere) and a pizza to takeaway from one of the restaurants and ate on the canals. Such a lovely way to spend an afternoon and watch the world and boats go by.
What we did:
Other than just wander about the canals and stop for and al fresco cocktail, we also visited the incredible tulip fields in Lisse. Unfortunately this is only something that you can do for a few weeks each year (end of April to the beginning of may) while the tulips are in bloom before they harvest them for retailers and markets. You can visit the tulip farms by hiring bikes outside the main area 'Keukenhof'. You can get to the tulip fields either by taxi (which is what we did as the queue for the bus was SO long and we had to catch our flight that afternoon) or via a bus from schipol airport. If you are visiting Amsterdam I would 100% suggest visiting in Spring when the weather is beautiful and when you can visit the flower farms. It's next level beauty, I couldn't quite believe my eyes!
