My travels back to Saint Petersburg after visiting home in January included a several-day stay in the Netherlands, where I attended my first professional dance company auditions and adjusted to eight hours of time difference, before I continued on to Russia (and had to then face the remaining two hours of time difference). Though I was not offered a job - and am, at the time I am writing this, still in search of one - I met up with numerous friends that I hadn't seen in ages, saw some fantastic art, and explored two of the major cities of a country that I had never before visited.
My first stop was Amsterdam, a city that I'd already fallen in love with by the end of my first day there. It's now one of my most beloved cities, joining the likes of New York City, Prague, and Saint Petersburg in my mental list of the best places in the world.
Because of the way my flights worked out, I ended up arriving in Amsterdam before dawn, alone, with several massive suitcases, no idea where to go, and zero knowledge of the Dutch language. I somehow navigated the subway and train systems and arrived at the station nearest my hotel, but the sun still had not risen and I had over an hour to twiddle my thumbs before the reception at my hotel would open. I rode the escalator up out of the station and wandered into a darkened square lined by closed shops, devoid of pedestrians and cars. After nearly getting run over by the rush of bicyclists on their way to work and school, then determining that finding an open coffee shop or breakfast cafe would be a futile task, I decided to return to the subway station.
This is the point at which things could have begun to go very badly, but instead they started going very well. A group of the subway station's employees, who had noticed me coming and going (unsurprising considering how lost and out-of-place I must have looked), asked if I needed navigational help. What I really needed was a place to sit, and, after I explained that, they showed me where I could sit down and invited me to use the employees-only coffee machine in their break room. I was exhausted, cold, and feeling very conscious of my lack of belonging, so this combination of hot cappuccino and kindness was just what I was in need of.
Ninety minutes later, in the grayish light of early morning, I had left the subway station and hauled myself and my luggage to the check-in of my hotel. A cheerful woman answered the door when I rang the bell, and, after helping me inside, promptly proceeded to make me a coffee. At that point, I felt slightly more awake and significantly more comfortable - it's a very nice feeling to, in just two hours, have been made coffee two times by people you're only just met.
I was shown to the room I'd be staying in - a studio apartment located in the lower level of one of Amsterdam's historic rowhouses, complete with a stocked refrigerator, a set of remote-controlled lights that turned to any one of fifteen colors with the push of a button, and a king-sized bed adorned with towel swans and mini stroopwaffles. I was already wishing that I'd be staying more than two nights. (And if you want to stay at Amsterdam at Home Bed and Breakfast, the link to the page with facility and booking information is
here. I recommend it very highly).
Having grown up in a city built upon the outline of the grid that was superimposed onto the land of the western United States, I am both confused and fascinated by cities that sprawl out in a more natural, less firmly structured pattern - confused because I have extreme difficulty navigating when the streets follow less of a predictable, square pattern than I am used to (even the streets of Manhattan downtown of 14th Street give me trouble) and fascinated because often these cities are quite old, filled with buildings representative of centuries of history that the buildings in my hometown are far too young to have witnessed. That first afternoon, I got very lost as I tried to find the studio where I was to attend a dance class; I spent half an hour wandering around enjoying the architecture, the water, the many bicycles, and then pausing to ask for directions whenever I felt that I was straying from the course laid out by the last person I'd asked. It was truly wonderful.
I was pleasantly surprised by how kind and helpful people were to the lost tourist girl that I was, beginning with the subway employees who offered me coffee, then the man selling tickets on the bus who let me ride even though I couldn't find my money to pay for the ticket, the half-dozen people who gave me directions on the way to the dance studio even though I don't speak a word of Dutch, the former breakdancer who struck up conversation while I waited, sweaty and flushed, for the tram to take me back to the hotel after the dance class, and the woman from the hotel reception who left a box of seashell-shaped chocolate truffles and a note of well wishes in my room on the night before my departure. I could have been ridiculed for being a tourist, a foreigner, for being lost, for not speaking Dutch, for accidentally walking in the designated bike lanes, but far more frequently than not I was met with kindness, and this had a significant and positive effect on how this visit, the first voyage during which I have been on my own beyond the doors of the airport, went.
(A trip so short requires very efficient sightseeing measures, which for me included a boat tour through the city's canals, ending near the museum district, where I paused to take a selfie with this large, iconic piece of public art (reading I amsterdam) while on my way to the Van Gogh museum).
The dance world is small, so one tends to stumble upon friends and acquaintances from years and summers past in rather unexpected places. I arrived in Amsterdam unaware that I would know anybody at the audition I was about to attend, but soon a post on Instagram by a friend who studies in Moscow hinted to me (and then a quick text message conversation confirmed) that I wouldn't be alone. When I arrived at the audition, I found that two of the girls who study with me in Saint Petersburg were also there. After the audition, I traveled by train with my friend from Moscow, his classmate, and another girl who we had all just met (who also spoke Russian) to Den Haag. At a second audition, this time in Den Haag, I encountered a friend and former Vaganova student who I hadn't seen in over a year. To top it all off, an artist friend of mine who is studying in England was able to come and meet me in Den Haag, where we spent a day wandering around, shopping, looking at art, and drinking coffee. Old friends, new friends, and a couple people I feared that I might never see again... If that isn't happiness than I don't know what is.
