Kindra got a job, Jesse went to London and we found an apartment...

Big news for us from Amsterdam. Kindra got a job at 180 Amsterdam (http://www.180bv.nl/). 180 is an amazing ad agency here in Amsterdam that works on a lot of big accounts including Adidas, Amnesty International, Motorola, Omega, etc.. She'll be starting Monday in their business/legal affairs department which is in charge of a wide range of contractual and legal areas of advertising.

In other news, I went to London for the first time on Thursday to meet the people I'll be working with. Everyone was super nice and it was a great trip. After flying over Thursday afternoon, some agency folks and I met up with the clients, went to see the Blue Man Group and then went to Hakasan, a super nice Asian restaurant down a back alley in London. Friday we had some meetings at the EA UK office in Chertsey. All very cool and not a bad first trip to England.

Lastly, we found an apartment. It's in a neighborhood called De Pijp which is in a great part of Amsterdam not too far from the center. Lot's of little pubs and random places to eat.

We still don't have the Mac hooked up so I can't post too many photos but here are a couple of us around town. Kindra being cute in the snow and me being an idiot, as per usual.

Getting Settled...

We've had some time to get over jet lag and are starting to take care of some of the smaller things. We set up our cell phones, got a bike, figured out where the grocery store is, etc.

We are currently living in corporate housing on a street called Utrechtsestraat. It is between the Keizersgracht and Prinzengracht canals. It's decent but right on a tram line which makes if fairly noisy. As I sleep through fire alarms this doesn't bother me but Kindra is wearing earplugs at night. Cute but dorky looking. :)

We are excited to find a place and have a house hunter that has been helping us look. We went out for about 3 hours last Wednesday and saw a range of apartments. We are interested in one and are going back to see it again on Monday. One concern we have is the Dutch people we tell about it say it's too expensive. However, we have been told that expats should expect to pay more and other expats seem to think it's reasonable.

The first few days here our internal clocks were all messed up so we spent our evenings trying not to fall asleep before 7p. As we're getting acclimated we've started to go out a bit more. The last couple nights we've spent out with folks from W+K. Two nights ago we went to a bar called O'Reiley's near the Dam square and last night we went to a dinner at a co-worker's apartment. Aside from Kindra's wallet and cell phone getting stolen at O'Reiley's both nights were fantastic.

Everyone we've met so far has been incredibly nice. It's also very interesting to hear the backgrounds of everyone. Amsterdam has a ton of expats so everyone is from somewhere else. For example at the dinner party there were three people from England, on from Australia and one from Holland...not including us yanks.

Overall things are great and our new cell numbers are below. We are nine hours ahead of the West Coast and six ahead of the East Coast so account for that when you call.

Jesse Cell: (011) 31 6 2060 8607

Kindra Cell: (011) 31 6 2146 6444

If anyone wants to mail anything to us you should use the W+K address as our home address will be changing. If you are mailing something specifically for Kindra put her name in parenthesis after mine but be sure to include mine as they won't recognize her name alone.

Jesse Long (Kindra Long)
Wieden+Kennedy
Keizersgracht 125-127
1015CJ Amsterdam
The Netherlands

Arrival in Amsterdam...

We're safe and we've already lost five pounds carrying our luggage up the insanely steep stairs to the door of our temporary apartment. The apartment itself is pretty nice although the upstairs feels a bit like a tree house as we have to duck when we go up and down.

Fudge arrived unscathed and seems to be enjoying himself. For all the hurdles we had to go through in the US to get him here we assumed it would be a pain on this end but no one seemed to care in customs.

Aside from sleeping, we've ventured out a couple of times to find some food and look around. We went out to run some errands Monday morning to find that most shops open around 1p on Mondays. It was explained to us that the Dutch need some time to get over the weekend.

We'll post some pics of the place when we have a our computer set up.