Hello, world!

To my friends: I'm happy to see you here. To anyone else who might happen upon this page: I hope that my ramblings may be of some interest to you as well. But before I go any further, let me introduce myself. My name is Sarah. I'm Norwegian, 26 years old, and I completed my masters degree in comparative literature little over a month ago. It already seems like a small lifetime has passed. One of the reasons for this is that in some ways my life is very different already than it was only a few short weeks ago. Obviously the change from being a student to not being a student is a big one, when you've spent most of your life in school. But even bigger than that is the change from living in Trondheim, Norway, to living in the Netherlands (Amsterdam). How did I get here you ask? Are you sitting comfortably? Well, I'll tell you. This story begins, like so many modern stories, with the internet. It also begins with a man. Some 33 odd months ago, while sitting in front of my computer in my little apartment overlooking Trondheim in all it's glory, trying to write a home exam, I stumbled into an internet forum on IMDb for the American sitcom Friends. I am a huge fan of this show, and those who know me also know that I will quote it and refer to it ad nauseam. Which brings me to a small digression: if you read a joke of some sort on my blog that you don't get, there's a 50/50 chance I'm trying to be funny and am not being successful, or that I'm quoting some movie or television show that you may not have seen (Friends, more often than not). This is also the case when it comes to the title of this blog, Sarah in Neverland. It is of course a play on Alice in Wonderland, but also a reference to a Dutch-heavy Friends episode (TOW the Football), where Joey claims that the Netherlands is a make believe place where Peter Pan and Tinkerbell live.

Anyway, back to my story. On this forum was a man. He was witty, he was clever, he was eloquent, and I decided I had to know him. So I sent him a message. I'm a lot more of a wuss when it comes to approaching someone in real life, since it's much more unpleasant to be shot down face to face. But on the internet, with someone who is still a stranger, what have you really got to lose? Looking back, I feel almost as if some sort of divine intervention led me to contact this man (even though I'm not really sure about God and all that). We got along really well, and our e-mails got longer and longer (particularly mine). He had a way with words (still has for that matter), and a way of seemingly knowing exactly what to say to me (but not in a creepy psychopath serial killer kinda way). Before long I was swooning for this man, in some ways still a stranger to me, but in other ways familiar and easy to talk with. It would be almost a year since our first mail correspondence before we actually met. I had decided to go and visit him. To me he was a friend with the potential for something more, someone I had trusted with my innermost thoughts and feelings, who I shared a bond with. To my friends and family he was some guy I'd been e-mailing with that I couldn't really know, whose picture I'd never seen, whose voice I'd never heard, who lived in a different country and who was 15 years older than me. And here I was ready to go down and visit him, and live in his house for 10 days, with no plan B. Madness, surely? But for me it was something I just had to do.

I remember being so nervous coming out from baggage claim at Schiphol that my legs could hardly carry me. Outside those sliding doors, only a few meters away was the man who could potentially change my whole life. At least that's what I thought. And you know what? I was right. After 10 days in Amsterdam I was completely enchanted, head over heels in love, and I think he kinda liked me too. :) When he kissed me, it felt as if I'd never been kissed before, because I'd never experienced anything like it. Maybe that sounds like a cliché, but it's nevertheless true. The rest, as they say, is history.

I've been flying back and forth to Amsterdam every other month or so while finishing my degree, and now that I'm done with my studies I am here to stay, and ready to start a life here with my wonderful boyfriend. I still think he's too good to be true, but we'll see if I still feel the same way after having lived with him for a year in our tiny apartment here in the center of Amsterdam..

So basically what I want to do in this blog is to write about what it's like for me to live here in Amsterdam, mostly as a way to keep old and new friends up to date, and for me to remember what I've been up to lately.. And maybe there will be some useful information for anyone wanting to visit Amsterdam, we'll see how things progress.

Currently I'm having a nice long summer holiday, while still waiting to sort out all the bureaucratic stuff that will hopefully in the end result in the releasing of my boxes with all my stuff in that are currently held hostage on the docks somewhere, a BSN number, bank account, and anything else I might need in order to actively start looking for some kind of job here. But enough about that boring stuff. This weekend we are planning a trip to the Efteling theme park, and I'm very excited about it. :)

If you've stayed with me this far, please come again. I'll try to post somewhat regularly, and I'll try to be somewhat interesting.

Tot ziens!