So by this time we have obviously arrived in the apartment. I took a few snaps of the place for future use (a proper review on the place will be in a separate post sometime. Given the amount of time it has taken to get these photos up, I’d not hold your breath 🙂 ). In the mean time, you can check out his site over here.
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Feb 11 2009
Amsterdam 2008 Photos #3
Feb 11 2009
Amsterdam 2008 Photos #2
Here we have landed a day late in Amsterdam, and met a couple of fellow forum visitors. Birthday presents were given, and this day seemed to be going a lot better than the day before, and it wasn’t even midday yet! We hopped on a tram to the general area of the apartment, and used GPS for the last few minutes walk. The last shot was how the rest of the world looked once we had arrived inside the flat and met the nice man Paul.
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Feb 10 2009
Amsterdam 2008 Photos – Finally
Before my life is taken over my nappies, changing mats & cute shoes, I wanted to try and catch up with tasks in real life, and bits I’d never quite got to finishing on the blog. So, here are the first of some Amsterdam April 2008 shots.
As you may remember from my ramblings at the time, a problem with flights had meant we missed the last connection from Frankfurt to Amsterdam on the 19th by mere minutes.
Anyway, we grabbed a couple of hours of sleep in a nearby hotel, got up for my Birthday and decided we would try and make today run a little better. A beautiful sight of some bunnies frolicking on the lawn below our window. Glad of the few hours rest we’d had, we got ready and headed to the airport for the first flight out Amsterdam. We were NOT going to be missing the 4.20pm meet on 4/20 at the coffeeshop 420 🙂
Anyway, more of that later, have these as a taster of the posts to come. I’ll try and put up the ones from 2007 later, with Chris and Alex…
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Jul 02 2008
Making Joints With Any Sort Of Tobacco Will Be Outlawed
MAKING? LMAO
See this BBC article for a rather large typo, or very misinformed journalist. Although the BBC World television report did not contain this inaccuracy, the fact that the online version wasn’t checked properly is quite astounding. The idea that the Dutch are banning people from rolling their spliffs with tobacco is laughable. In case you haven’t yet heard, the Netherlands are following most of Europe by banning smoking cigarettes (and in their case alone, joints with tobacco in) in enclosed public places. I still want to know whether they expect all smokers who prefer hash to weed to use pipes, but I guess I’ll have to wait a while before returning to Amsterdam to further my research. It is a tough job writing this blog 😉
Jun 11 2008
Missing Posts
OK, so I definitely need to clear some time in the next week or two, and try to catch up with a lot of posts (and photo editing) on this blog. Although my memory of my holiday last September may be a little hazy by now, I’m hoping the pictures will either refresh said memory, or paint a good enough picture to give you, the reader, enough of an idea. After that, we have our trip to Britain over Christmas and New Year, with Mum’s wedding in between. After that we have finally meeting up with Tom the pilot, contact being made with an American Jazz singer hopefully coming to Astana to play some sets locally. Finally, we have the birthday trip to Amsterdam (I may need to link to upcoming forum posts for the Coffeeshop specific info) and Britain again this April and May. I’m hoping that by posting this summary now, it will remind me what is missing, and force me into actually taking the time out to write a few words and crop a few piccies. To friends and family still waiting for those posts, thanks for your patience so far.
Apr 20 2008
Happy Birthday To Me
If all has gone to plan, today Ira and I are in Amsterdam, celebrating my 29th birthday. Or should that be 30th – the day you turn 1 year old, is surely your second birthday, 365 days (or thereabouts) after the day you were born…
Anyway, despite the meandering style of this post, I’m not writing this live from our apartment in smokeland Amsterdam – I wrote most of the next two weeks worth of posts whilst still back in Kazakhstan. I wanted to keep my readers coming back for more (if you stop posting for more than a few days, you are guaranteed to lose return visitors), and as most of my friends are too lazy to guest-post. ChrisD would be a prime example – 18 months later and still no sign of his post on holidaying in Astana. So, I finally got around to clearing out all the collections of bookmarks I’d made on topics that I wanted to blog about ‘one day’.
Anyway, I hope all who read this do so in good health, to my friends in Britain, I hope to see you soon (we’ll be near Swansea 25th – 29th April (approx.) then some time in Cheltenham and Evesham, before heading back to Swansea once more, as my cousin is getting married. 4th May we head back to Astana, so if I haven’t seen you by then, you’ll have to survive until Xmas again.) To friends elsewhere, I hope things are going well, and that our paths cross again sooner rather than later…
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Apr 19 2008
Almost Gone
We will be leaving for the airport in the next hour, and things appear to be sorted in time. Everything has been packed, I think I’ve replied to all outstanding e-mails, and this blog has two or three posts scheduled to be published each day we are away. We are in Amsterdam from 19th – 24th April, then on to Clydach until the 28th/29th April. From there, we go to Cheltenham and Evesham until 1st/2nd May, then back to Clydach for my cousin’s wedding, finally returning to Kazakhstan on the 5th May.
I hope everyone is OK, and that we’ll be seeing some of you soon 🙂
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Apr 14 2008
424320 Seconds To Go!
Well it is now just 118 hours until Irina and I leave for Amsterdam 🙂
I still have quite a lot to do work to do before we leave, not least is working out what to take with us for both the Netherlands and our subsequent trip to Britain. In terms of lightweight equipment, I am trying to minimize on the gadgets and accompanying power supplies etc., and also working out the minimum amount of clothes we can take, considering we’re not likely to be using a laundry in Holland. So what am I taking? Well my HTC TyTn II is definitely coming along, as it serves as my phone, a PDA (for gaming in between flights, internet browsing whenever I can find a WiFi signal) and it also has a built in GPS device, so there’ll be no excuse for getting lost whilst stumbling from one coffeeshop tourist destination to the next.
(Yes, I know 118 hours does not equal 424320 seconds, but by the time I wrote out this post, a few more minutes had past 🙂 )
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Mar 21 2008
Dutch Visa
Irina has had her request for a Schengen visa (specifically to visit Holland) approved, which is a big relief, as we had to buy the plane tickets and book our accommodation before we could even apply for the visa. It is now just 30 days until we arrive there, and after that we’ll be going back to Britain to see some family and friends before heading back to work again. I hope to be able to report back how the apartment was, and depending on my memory, any coffeeshops, museums and other distractions we visit 🙂 I’ve had a few ideas to improve the apartment-owner’s website, but I’ll keep that under wraps until we’ve actually met with him.
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Mar 12 2008
How Not To Travel
Thanks to a member over at an Amsterdam forum for this video…
I can’t work out if the cigarette the skipper smokes at the end is just tobacco, or with a relaxant added, and whether she is drunk whilst on the canal, or just nervous? I do love her reasoning that it was the weather that caused problems. Anyway, we’re hoping to catch a St. Nick’s boat club trip on the canals this April, we’ll let you know how it goes.
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