Blog 30, House Hunters, International

What makes a good episode of House Hunters International?

Conflict. One person wants to be close to shops. One person wants close to transportation, or close to work. One of them wants to be close to a park. They both want to be close to entertainment. They need a guest room. Oh, and then there is the budget. The budget is firm, but one will say: “we can pay extra for location”. Ah, yes; so funny.

Until it’s you. 😊

Luckily, we agree on everything this move; we both want it all. We knew for sure we did not want to be in the canal zone; too loud, too many tourists, to many ‘coffeeshops’. We knew we did want to be close to the Vondelpark. Vondelpark is the largest, I think, in Amsterdam. It has trails, ponds, restaurants, and even a great brewery outlet/cafe – yes, that is where we want to be. The park is surrounded by stately brick homes with wrought iron balconies. Who wouldn’t want to live there? And, of course, we want to bring our own furniture and belongings from London to Amsterdam. Our UK bed is super comfy, the barn-wood dish cabinet from Pennsylvania Dutch seems appropriate, and who can read a book without the reclining chairs? Yep, we agreed on it all.

Until we went house hunting. 😊

We walked into the first, completely furnished apartment, and threw all our wants out the balcony window.  Holy cow, it was beautiful! We looked at furnished apartments in London, Paddington actually, before we moved to terraced house in Chiswick. The furnished apartments looked like dorms. The floors were plastic wood simulations, the décor was all gray, the sofas dismal and of a questionable cleanliness – no, who would want a furnished apartment? Not us, we are grownups now. That is not what we saw in Amsterdam. So, maybe, a furnished apartment would be a good thing. We can fill some suitcases with our clothes and ship the rest of our stuff back to the US; that way when we do finally go back to the US; easy/peasy.

OK, so maybe we will change our mind on the furnished/unfurnished question. But, the Vondelpark, we want to be by the park. Turns out, the inside of the beautiful houses show their age – 100’s of years. Dutch stairs are steep and twisted. We opened the door to what looked like a beautiful home next to the park and were greeted by stairs so steep they could be a ladder. A beautiful kitchen and living room could not make up for bathrooms as old as the invention of indoor plumbing. Maybe we don’t want to live right next to the park.

We saw a few apartments in the canal zone. Views of the water, views of the courtyards you can’t even imagine from the streets. Turns out, not all canals are noisy. Not all are filled with coffeeshops (of the light drug dispensing kind). But, they are close to tons of restaurants, venues, and various shopping outlets.

Yes, we have both changed our minds 180 degrees from our ‘want’ list. Now we do want a place in the canals, we do want it to be furnished, and it turns out; Amsterdam is so walkable, getting to the Vondelpark from almost anywhere is not a problem.

All we have to do now is make it happen. 😊