Time to revisit that little piece o’ news I mentioned a couple of weeks ago and give you guys a little more information about it. We have a spacious, beautiful loft in the heart of De Pijp (roughly pronounced ‘Pipe’ for us Americans). This hip, little neighborhood is located in the Amsterdam-Zuid borough, so we are just south of the canal district. Now for all of you whining about us not having a canal view, I don’t want to hear it. As a visitor you would have had to sleep on the floor since there is no way we could have found a place with all our must-haves like a second bedroom. So really, this arrangement works out better for you, our guests. You all are visiting, right?

We are almost finished furnishing the place and let me tell you, it is no small undertaking. Our initial expectations were pretty low (by that I mean, teeny tiny), so we didn’t ship a lot of our furniture. Boy, were we off! We be shoppin’ up a storm to make this house a home. Last night we bough a beautiful dining room table and, for some reason, that purchase made me feel like a real adult. I mean, it’s teak. Fancy. We still don’t have chairs yet, but hey, we’re getting there. While it will still look pretty bare in here, it’s all intentional as we plan on filling it up with personal items that we will collect as we travel. You all know how impatient I am so this will be a challenge for me. As soon as we are all initially set up, I will post some before and after pictures to get that ‘Oooh’ and ‘Ahh’ effect from all of you. I know, I know, I have been making empty promises talking about pictures for quite awhile, but now that we have our home computer, I can start uploading! Yay!

While we are thrilled with our loft, moving into a new place abroad has had its challenges. Like…

– we have a convection oven. I always saw the instructions on food packaging, but didn’t think they actually exist. You know, like the Lock Ness Monster. Anyway, it’s the size of a large toaster. I made some mean stuffed portabellos in there last night though, I will dominate it soon enough.

– we have huge, 2-story windows. How on earth are we supposed to clean those things? #firstworldproblems

-our TV and computer are from the States and I grumpily happily went to four places before I found a shop with 3-prong converters.

-the metric system. Liters. Meters. Celsius. All things I know embarrassingly little about. I do know that 82 Fahrenheit is the one temperature that can be flipped to 28 Celsius exactly. #nerdalert

That’s it for now.

xxx