Monday, September 18, 2006

moving a few streets up...

Although I truly think that I need to be closer to the centre of Amsterdam (so as to learn the city and not to get lost anymore), I will be moving just a few streets up from where I live now...

The map above shows how close they are: The green square is where I live now, the red polygon is the VU (my uni), and the blue circle will be my new place.

The good side (thinking only geographically) is that I will be closer to the centre, even closer to my office, and in a much nicer and quiter neighbourhood:
The Olympic Village is almost like an island in the outskirts of Amsterdam.
(Thanks to Google Earth, we can demonstrate this with the satellite image above.)

The Olympic Village is around the Olympic Stadium, built for 1928 Summer Olympics by Jan Wils of the De Stijl movement and won the gold medal for architecture at the Olympic art competition. However I am not really sure if he built the Olympic village around the stadium as well. Here are some photos of my new street...

It is extremely quiet, and the names of the streets are selected from among Greek heroes, myths, gods and goddesses, which gives it an extra romantic touch... some examples are: Achilles, Agamemnon, Hercules, Amazonnen streets (the latter being the one I will move to, and it is pure coincidence that the Amazones have been my favourite myth when I was a child!).

The downside is (again thinking only geographically) that I will still not be close to the city centre. The second map demonstrates how far away I will be living from the old city, which is not a real problem if you are biking, and I will be. But it will definitely slow down my cumbersome learning process of the Amsterdam map...

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