Today we had an appointment with the Immigration Department in The Hague (Den Haag in Dutch). This appointment was to get our residence ID and another sticker in our passport. Whatever. I'm glad this was the last appointment... all this stuff is crazy for just a three month visit! Meg and I left from Amsterdam on the train and got to The Hague around 8:45am, which was great because we were meeting the woman from the company that's handling our work VISAs at 9am outside of Central Station. One problem... we were at Den Haag Holland Spoor, a totally different train station from Central Station. Our train didn't even go to Central Station. Oops. We looked at the map in the station and saw that Central Station was not far and we decided to just walk it. We started down the street and saw these big signs for tourists that tell you which direction everything is. We think... great... follow the signs and we'll get there. Of course, the signs did not correspond exactly with the direction we thought we were supposed to go, but at the time, we didn't think much of it. About 15 minutes later, we are walking down a street following the last sign we saw and run into another sign that says Central Station is in the completely opposite direction of where we are walking towards... oops, again. Apparently, one of the signs we were following was pointing the wrong direction (probably blown by the massive winds). About this time, we get a call from Dan asking where we were... and also about this time it starts raining even harder. Dan says they will pick us up in the car that the lady is driving. Fast forward to 40 minutes later... they finally make it to where we were standing... in the rain... drenched. We had stayed outside waiting because we didn't want them to drive by and miss us (we were just on some random street corner). I guess they got tied up in some major traffic at Central Station.
So, while we were waiting for them, we decided to take pictures... such tourists! Here's me by the signs we saw when we realized we were not going the right direction... this is also where we waited for 40 minutes.
We finally met up with the lady and jumped in her car and headed to the Immigration office. After the meeting, she dropped us off at Central Station so we could catch the train back to Amsterdam. Lucky we didn't have to find it on our own this time. : )
Here's a pic of Den Haag Central Station. Anyone want a bike???
Tonight, we went out to dinner with a group of people from work. We went to this restaurant called Cafe Kobalt. It's just outside of the tourist district and is a very popular place.
The food was very good and we had a fun time. I had the gnocchi and Meg had the daily special (some sort of chicken dish).
When we were getting ready to leave, a cat jumped up on the table and started walking around. No one really thought much of it. They said that it's typical for cats to be in places around the canals because they kill the mice. It's very common to have mice in places near canals... makes sense, because I had a mouse in my apartment when I stayed here last year. I've been keeping an eye out in my current place, but so far haven't seen any unwelcome visitors. (Knock on wood!)
We booked our trip to go to Brussels, Belgium this weekend. There was a great deal (40% off!) on train tickets to Brussels. Chocolates and beer, here we come! : )
No comments:
Post a Comment