In the city of Amsterdam, you can have a lot of fun ...

A little late but here we are.  We had a fantastic stay in Amsterdam - and extra special thanks to our amazing hostesses (whom we love so dearly and can't wait to see again!).  Not only did our hostess and her daughter open up their home to us but for our first night, they got us a stay in a PIMPIN hotel (Hotel Arena see: http://www.hotelarena.nl/).   Not only was the hotel comfortable and stylish with a delicious breakfast, it's branding was amazing.  The building the hotel is in used to be an orphanage, then it was a hostel (with various artistic performances there, if I remember correctly) and now a hotel.  Associated with the hotel (TOSTAY) is also a large club (TONIGHT), a restaurant (TOEAT) and various meeting rooms for corporate events (TOMEET).   Rooms were fabulous - our had a loft bed and rain shower (which was by the way all in glass that looked onto the living area :).  And we certainly enjoyed the room to the max.  We arrived very early in the morning from the US bleary eyed and very tired (having only napped on our overnight flight).  As the hotel was booked the room wasn't ready yet so we left our packs and went for a walk in the city. The day was absolutely dreadful, worst weather we have encountered yet: dark, windy and pouring rain.  As all the Dutch kept saying "typical Dutch weather".  When we got back to the hotel all wet, tired and cranky, the room with its heavenly rain shower was waiting for us.  And we never left the room again until the next day.  Just perfect :)   Ladies - thank you so much again (dank u wel)!!! 

I know, you're probably thinking, enough already, let me hear a bit about Amsterdam!!!  Well, in a nutshell, it is a beautiful, very livable and very well organized city with friendly, tall and good looking Dutch people.  We could 100% live there.  All the gorgeous canals are lined with tall and not too wide 3-4 story buildings with high windows on the streets and canal boats in the canals (with I think about 400 bridges crossing all the canals).   As the houses are narrow and hence the stairs are quite tight, they all have a hook at the top of the building onto which you attach a long rope to raise furniture or other big pieces into the house through the windows.  Which by the way open ALL THE WAY!  Brilliant! 

A hook at the top of a house

We read that they used to tax you based on the street frontage you had, so residents used to make their houses as narrow and tall as possible.  Check out this one-meter wide house -- narrow street frontage and then it widens in the back to accommodate normal living quarters :)  Pure stroke of genius!!!



the one meter house

And, of course, one couldn't talk about Amsterdam without mentioning all of the bikes ... there are bikes everywhere.  And we mean everywhere.  On a six hour walk through the centrum and south of Amsterdam, we counted every corner and we only found 6 without a bike.  And we don't mean intersections but corners.  Every corner had a bike locked up or just sitting there.  Just amazing and quite brilliant we have to say.  The city is pretty flat so it makes so much sense: it's economical, environmentally sound and very healthy for the population.  No wonder everyone is so tall, lean and healthy.  And everyone bikes, everyone, to go anywhere and everywhere.  That brings us back to our organization comment - the city is sooo well organized.  Every single street has first a path for pedestrians, then a bike path, then a tram or bus line, then one lane for cars, then again, tram/bus, bike, then people.  Just brilliant. You can go anywhere you want by foot, bike or public transport and then if you have to, you can drive.  We absolutely loved it.  Oh and can't forget the roads and sidewalks: they are all so nice and made of stone or cobble stone.  So Euro and very classy. 

parking by central station

So in closing, comparing our first European destination to our last North American one we have come to a few conclusions.  New York is alive and definitely a city that doesn't sleep but it's gritty, dirty, and busy with dirty buildings and their exterior fire escapes (which ruin the aperance of building just a tad) and entrances to basements.  Amsterdam on the other hand was fresh, organized and clean with a noticable pride of ownership.  All of the buildings looked freshly painted or stained in colours that were vibrant but classy.  The roads were organized and well maintained and who can forget the bikes.  Lastly, the people were frendly and 99% of them spoke perfect English (Dank u wel!).   We highly recommend that you visit Amsterdam on any trip to Europe.

Here are a few pictures and to see more, click on this link (password: europa):  http://photobucket.com/SM_Amsterdam2010. 

Talk again soon!

parking in front of Central Station

The Depression Sets In

Day 5: rain, rain and more rain (more like a constant drizzle) :(

Well, no report on the mens final between our man Nole and Rafa as it never took place.  But we can report on the fact that it rained from the time we walked out of the train at Flushing Meadows to the time we got out of the train back in Manhattan.  THEN... the rain stopped!!!  So, the final has been rescheduled to 4 pm tomorrow.  Sadly, we are flying out of NYC at 3 pm.  We can't believe we won't get to see the match at all.* Unbelievable!!!   Anyone out there listening, if you could tape the match and email it to us so we can watch it later, we will be forever thankful :)  Is that even possible?

Too depressed to say anything else.  Speak to you again from the Netherlands ...

*by the way, we tried to change our flight to the following day but it would have cost us almost as much as our flights did combined.  Not happening.  Still so sad.  GO NOLE GO!!!!!!!!

NOLE MAJSTORE!!!!

Day 4 (Super Saturday) - Perfect day for tennis... finally!!!
After two cold and windy days we were blessed with a beautiful sunny day (and were terribly overdressed). On the menu for the day were two mens semi-finals and the ladies championship match.  It all started with the Nadal vs Youzhny snoozefest.  This match was over before it even started with Rafa winning in three straight sets.  It seamed that Youzhny never recovered from his marathon match from two days ago and decided to mail this one in.  Rafa was very impressive from the get go and ran his opponent off the court.

Match #2 was the highly anticipated rematch from the previous 3 US Open semis featuring Djokovic vs Federer (Federer had eliminated Djokovic in the last 4 US Open tournaments, once in the final and 3 times in the semis).  To call this match fantastic would be an understatement!  Federer showed flashes of brilliance throughout the five sets but never managed to take full control.  This was largely due to Nole's impeccable play.  You can say he gave the defending champ a run for his money and then some.  He served really well, controlled the baseline and returned serve to perfection.  He also managed to drastically improve on his net game as compared to his 1/4 final match.  The crowd was LOVING this match from start to finish (begging for action after the Rafa match).  We were on the edge of our seats throughout and nearly had a heart attack in the final 3 games.  Nole overcame two of Federer's match points on his serve and came back to break Roger and win in the end avoiding a dreaded tie-breaker.

The best part of this whole experience was cheering for a true underdog who everyone including the whole ESPN cast wrote off.  Listening to 90% of the people at the tourney already talking about a Federer/Nadal final before the Djokovic match even started was getting irritating!  However he who laughs last laughs the sweetest :)  AND believe us, we are still grinning ear to ear 7 hrs later!

Final Score:  5-7, 6-1, 5-7, 6-2, 7-5

Finally, the last match of the day was a vicious beating of Zvonareva at the hands of Clijsters.  This women's final was finished exactly 60 minutes after it began.  No joke!!!   Absolutely incredible or embarrassing, depending on where you sit.  For her troubles, Clijsters took home a measly $2.2 MILLION!!!!  WOW!!!  Make sure to say in ...  tennis school kids.

Tomorrow is the big final.  The mighty Serb (who us, biased? Never, it's just science :)) verses the #1 ranked player in the world.  To say that we are excited about having tickets to this once in a lifetime event would be a gross understatement.  We can't wait and we are pretty sure that Rafa is giggling at the thought of playing a worn out Djokovic.

NAPRED NOLE!!!!! .... GO NOLE GO!!!!

Welcome to the US Open

After killing our feet, legs and backs pounding the pavement in New York, we are now sitting and watching others pound the pavement at the US Open.   It's fantastic.  The US Open is one of four yearly grand slam tournaments and Arthur Ashe Stadium at the US Open is the largest stadium in the world.

Day 1: 32C and clear skies!  

You can't imagine a finer day for tennis AND somebody is celebrating a birthday:)   We get there and find out we are watching Djokovic vs Monfils at Arthur Ashe!  For those of you that didn't watch the match it was close in the first 10 games.  After that, Nole kicked some serious ass!  Not his greatest game but it helped that Monfils attempted to hit the ball through his legs while facing the net for no other reason than to showboat and missed miserably.

The grounds at Flushing Meadows are nice, well organized and nice to walk.  Everyone has access to the surrounding courts and practice courts, where you can find anything from a juniors or wheelchair games to the legends and pro's practicing.  Once inside the complex, anyone is free to go and watch a match at the Louis Armstrong Stadium. While walking around, we came across Monfils practicing for the Nole game (where he also played a bit of bball) and Nestor practicing with the legendary Todd Martin.  Very cool thing happened that night, we saw Daniel Nestor again: while at dinner at Les Halles, he came in and was seated right next to us!

Day 2: windy and cold ... very windy and very cold

We went from 32C and sunburns to 15C and 50 km winds.  We definitely did not dress for the occasion.  In the gusting wind, we watched the mixed doubles final where Bryan (USA) and Huber (USA) def. Peschke (CZE)  and Qureshi (PAK).  Bryan also won the men's doubles with his twin brother the following day, defeating Qureshi (PAK) and Bopanna (IND).  Following the mixed doubles, we watched a marathon match between Wawrinka (SUI) and Youzhny (RUS).  Youzhny won in five sets.  We shivered our way home and had an amazing $4 chicken shawarma.  

Day 3: sunny, then more wind and cold again

This time we came prepared in many warm layers and enjoyed another great day of tennis.  We watched the women's semi-finals where seventh seed Zvonareva (RUS) deaf first seed Wozniacki (DEN) in two straight sets and then second seed Kim Clijsters (BEL) battled and beat third seed Venus Williams in three great sets (and many aces from Venus).  

We are looking forward to a whole day of tennis tomorrow: Women's Finals and Mens Semi-Finals.  GO NOLE GO!!!!!  

To be continued ... 

We ♥ New York

The first four days here in NYC we walked about 35 km and biked the circle around central park twice (about 20 km).  Still so much to see but we've seen quite a nice cross-section of the big apple: buskers on the streets and in the subways (from break dancers, musicians, statutes of liberty and the electronic tin man!), the cities many parks and squares (union square, washington square park, bryant park, times square, and let's not forget central park), all the main buildings to see (Rockefellar Center, Empire State Building, the flatiron, the UN, MSG, New York Stock Exchange and Ground Zero), the many new york neighbourhoods (east village where we are staying, Chinatown, Little Italy, Soho, Noho, midtown, upper east side, upper west side, chelsea and the financial district) and the icing on the cake, we witnessed our first suicide attempt :s.   We can't forget that we also were part of the studio audience for The Late Show with David Letterman (aired Tuesday Sept 7th) and we somehow managed to get front row seats!  Right in front of Dave's desk.  Just amazing!  


As every good Serb should do when in a foreign country, on our first day we managed to come across the oldest Serbian Church in Manhattan, the Serbian Embassy and every Serbian flag out on display in the city.  It was destiny :)


The planning and the architecture in this city is just phenomenal for North American standards ... we spend most of our time staring up and consequently bumping into people.  Toronto has a lot to learn.  It's so refreshing to see that buildings exist that aren't made only of cheap glass.  What a concept! :)  And there's a subway system which consists of more than our two straight lines.  Who would have thought that connecting a city through public transit could be so efficient and convenient.  Yet another noble concept.  Oh Toronto, will we ever get there with our petitions against dedicated street car tracks?! We're not sure but can only hope.  While we are on the subject of transportation, we'd like to make note of the good use of one way streets in this city.  How does one get rid of traffic jams downtown? Convert 80% of the streets to one ways.  If it can work so well for 8.5 million people we're sure it can work for 2.5 million.  But, let's not get ahead of ourselves ... let's first connect the airport to the downtown as every other world class city has and thengo from there!


However, New York, you're not going to get off that easy. Can you please clean the streets once in a while and lock away your lunatics in the institutions where they belong and stop letting them roam the streets and your fine subway system!!


With that, here are a few pictures, and for more, feel free to click on this link (password: 66e7st):  http://photobucket.com/M2OHnyc2010 

So it begins ...

We should probably start off with who we are.

We are a young (relatively), unemployed (definitely) and married (recently) couple. We decided not to go the traditional honeymoon route and opted instead to take many moons.   So, we quit our jobs and are now setting off on a what we hope to be a nine month journey (it all banks on our budgeting skills!).  

We've been unemployed since three days before our wedding (which was at the end of July) and today was our first day of true relaxation.  You would think that being unemployed would be easier than full time work but boy were we ever wrong.  Not that we're complaining but ... yah, we are.  Let us break it down like a fraction: (1) we painted our whole apartment; (2) renovated our kitchen; (3) replaced all of the doors in our condo (long story); (4) packed all of our belongings and moved out of our condo; (5) received a zillion vaccination shots each; (6) were tour guides for our visiting families from overseas (which was a blast!!!); (7) wrote all of our thank you cards; (8) got our visas and bought our trip essentials; and last but not least (9) packed in our itsy bitsy knapsacks (ok, so they are not that small but come on, nine months and only 2 pairs of pants!!!).*  

So here we are, a month and a bit later, 20 hours of sleep combined (and still having nightmares about painting) and we are as happy as can be.  All that hard work was for the greater good .... OUR TRIP!!!!

*we have to admit, complaining aside, we are so thankful that we are able to do this and it beats working any day.