Change of Plans

Surprised? Me neither. But before I go into what the next few weeks holds, here’s a quick update from the past two days…

I got all caught up on sleep the first night and have enjoyed feeling well-rested so honestly, I have not so much been up for going out in the city. I want to take advantage of being in Amsterdam of course, but it’s been so cold so I’d rather be in bed at a decent time, and not curse my alarm clock when it rings at 6:30am for work. So with that said, my update isn’t too exciting. We’ve been working until around 7pm, then taking the 7:30pm train back to the city so we don’t really get back until a little after 8pm. Tuesday, 4 of us Deloitters went out for a Mediterranean dinner. Mediterranean is one of my favorite cuisines! I love hummus, the yogurt-based cucumber sauces, the greek vinaigrette flavors, pita bread, etc. I was very tempted to get the chicken dish, but decided to go for the yoghurt and grilled lamb entrée on top of a pita. It was dark meat, but quite tender oval strips of grilled lamb on top of pitas and a little bit of tomato-based sauce with yoghurt dipping sauces on the side, with an authentic hummus appetizer. We also tried a Turkish alcoholic drink called Raki. It tastes kind of like Sambuca and black licorice. In Turkey, raki is the unofficial 'national drink' and it is traditionally drunk mixed with water. The dilution causes this alcoholic drink to turn a milky-white color, and possibly because of its color, this mixture is popularly called aslan sütü (or arslan sütü), literally meaning "lion's milk" (Wikipedia). So we drank some lion’s milk… and it wasn’t very good (not sweet enough for me), but I tried it.

Wednesday was business as usual. Not much to report here. Oh I did run into one of my friends on the train that I had met back in December. We randomly got to talking last time and he was telling me all about his move from Mirabella (France) to Holland. It’s very interesting learning about the difference in schooling, culture, etc., and he speaks about 5 languages. Anyway, I pretty much worked all day Wednesday, got back to Amsterdam around 8:15pm, walked by my favorite soup place, picked up some soup, went back to my lovely hotel, did some research for a new project, and went to bed.

Ok now onto the latest updates on my travel plans. Basically, a lot has changed! I was originally planning on being here for 2 weeks, then traveling to Barcelona, then flying to London, then flying back to the U.S. on 1/21. Well, we are ahead of schedule so we were all asked to move our flights to this Saturday, and then plan to be in Santa Clara next week. I am determined to go to London so I explained my former plan to my manager’s manager and asked if I could at least take Monday off and then go to London Saturday-Tuesday, and then fly directly to Santa Clara from Heathrow on late Monday or early Tuesday. Well she proposed that I just move my vacation week (scheduled for 1/19) up one week and then go to Santa Clara the following week (1/26). Yay. That means I get to go to London! I am skipping Barcelona since my colleagues are no longer going. So I am headed to London on Saturday… flying out of Amsterdam on Saturday morning 9am, and staying until 1pm on Wednesday, so about 5 days. Looks like I will be making friends when I get there. Since it’s kind of last minute planning, I’ll most definitely be flying by the seat of my pants, but I do know that I will be staying at the Marriott on Park Lane (and using 110,000 Marriott points!). So I’ll get back late Wednesday evening next week, then I have a meeting with a partner in Irving the following day, and I need to look for a new project, then I’ll get to enjoy the long weekend (MLK on Monday) and get caught up on sleep. On that Tuesday after MLK, I head back to Santa Clara for my final week on Sun. I rolloff the project for good on 1/23 and it looks like I may be un-staffed for awhile… not sure if that means 2 weeks or 2 months or more…