The Apartment

This is the street we live on, 2e Schuytstraat. (The 2e means Second Schuytstraat, as there's another Schuytstraat around the corner. It's not common to name streets like this, and it's proving to be confusing for everyone.)


We don't know how to say "Schuytstraat". We thought we did, but our Canadian neighbor below us told us we had to work on our pronunciation.


These two photos were from the first day we had the apartment. We were waiting for FedEx to arrive with our boxes.


The weather in the The Hague changes every 5 minutes. On our first day in the apartment, we had four thundershowers with hot sun in between. We saw a rainbow, so I think that's good luck. At the end of our street (under the rainbow) there's a canal. It's not a nice canal, though. It's just kind of like a ditch filled with water and grass on the sides. But it sounds romantic, eh?


All the houses in The Hague are brick row houses. The only houses that are detached are mansions. Our building was built in 1903, but this apartment was renovated quite recently (I don't think Ikea was doing kitchens back then.)

Like most Dutch rental properties, we don't have an oven. This means the only turkey we'll be eating over the holidays will be deli slices. It might seem like I'm okay with this, but I'm weeping on the inside.


This is our little fridge. We noticed that in the grocery stores here, everything (ie: milk, juice, pop, ketchup, etc.) is packaged very tall and skinny, just like the Dutch themselves. You can't buy 4 litres of milk, cause that would take up half of your fridge.


The door on the right is our front door. The room on the right is our dining/working room. And yes, that's a Marian Bantjes poster on the wall.




The living room is also the bedroom. This is our futon. And yes, that an Abi Huynh/Todd Takahashi poster on the wall.


Do you like how our toilet floats out of the wall?


And our shower looks like a time machine.


Having an actual "bathroom" is unusual, too. This was the only apartment that we looked at that didn't have a separate toilet and shower room.

When we were at Ikea, Ross & I wanted to buy only what we needed, but everything in that store is so tempting. As a way to distinguish our needs from our wants, we kept asking each other, "What would Alan Woo do?" (For those of you who don't know Alan, he is one of our friends from school was on exchange in Denmark for four months last year. He stayed in a studio apartment with nothing more than a mattress on the floor.)


The windows are stained glass, and the 12-foot ceilings have beautiful detailing. The windows are quite large, and there's a ton of light.


Home sweet home.