Landing

Week One in Amsterdam

May 20, 2026

I was walking towards David’s place near Zuid in Amsterdam.

The street had four lines of trees extending from both sides of my eyes towards the end of the vanishing point. They were overpoweringly tall, dense and lush. The architecture in this neighbourhood felt closer to where I grew up in China and I was able to pull out two similar streets from memory, one in Nanjing, one at my high school in Shanghai. The trees were different, but the sensations were similar.

I felt surrounded.

Summer is at the doorstep, even though the city is currently stuck in grey, wind and scattered rains.

Zuid means South in Dutch. I made the connection by realising “ui” was supposed to be pronounced exactly like “ou” in South.

It sounds like “造的” (zao de) in Mandarin. A perfect phrase to use if you were to deem doing a complete life reset and moving across continents two totally unnecessary things to do, to which I would say “You might have a point, but it’s too late now.” It also reminds me of how Chloe Zhao’s name was announced the year she won Best Director for Nomadland at the Oscars.

Oost is East. Noord is North. But West remains West.

After almost six months of floating around, travelling and crashing at a few friends’ places, starting again is getting slightly easier each time.

My system, although simple, has become very effective. It includes knowing where to put my stuff, going to the gym, cooking for myself, messaging friends, and writing or taking photos whenever I can.

I quickly decided where to unpack and put my entire life, which is down to two suitcases and one duffle bag at the moment, in the study my friends Kuangyi and Steven kindly cleared out for me. They had just built an empty IKEA shelf to house some extra tools, which has now been granted to be my temporary storage.

The moment I stepped through their door, I knew I wanted to rent a similar place for myself: slightly older, light-filled, and facing a lot of trees. Both of them are extremely handy, with benches, lights and furniture from their hands all over their home.

I met Kuangyi through the podcast I was running a few years back. They moved to the Netherlands shortly after and transitioned into full-time artist at the start of the year. We went to Great Ocean Road during their last visit back to Melbourne. We all took seasick pills because of how winding the drive was. I felt excited about how much the Dutch government was funding art and artists (for their residents, of course) when chatting about Kuangyi’s work and the photo exhibition I created earlier that year.

On the exercising front, I felt lucky that my regular Melbourne gym has a branch a 5-minute walk away from my temporary home. I have really been taking advantage of the franchise’s promise to let me exercise wherever I go (it’s Anytime Fitness). I have worked out in Wellington, borrowed the toilet in Tokyo, and kept myself sane in both Brisbane and Sydney.

But how the gym happens to fall into this particular neighbourhood felt cosmic. I was told repeatedly that this is not a popular part of Amsterdam. There’s also nothing more grounding than finishing a routine set on Monday morning with a dozen grandmas chit-chatting in Dutch and getting ready for a group class.

I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised at how healthy people here are.

Locating shops, buying groceries and cooking my own meals completed the baseline of my system. I cooked a terrible steak last night. It was overly burnt on the outside and extremely chewy on the inside, to the point that I could feel my biting muscle was getting a workout in some of the most extreme conditions. But I did accidentally develop a new fried egg recipe with sushi vinegar and a couple of drops of fish sauce, the two bottles available in the kitchen. It was perfection.

I find it peculiar how Albert Heijn, the Coles or Woolies equivalent in Amsterdam, asks me to weigh every piece of fruit and vegetable. While you don’t see plastic bags much, I thought the printed stickers were equally wasteful. But I felt happy whenever I pulled out my Woolies shopping bags.

My two new landlords commented that I had made a very thorough plan.

But honestly, in my mind I literally just rocked up. I didn’t even factor in a foreign language, but I like how my brain feels tickled whenever I spot a new word on the street or on the shelf.

Uitgang, ingang, kip, bief, the list goes on.

In the short span of 2 days, I tried food from Colombia, Suriname and Yemen, all for the first time. They were also new additions to my mental map of the world, which was devastatingly inaccurate and incomplete, and still is.

I tagged along on Kuangyi’s gym trip to Oost on Sunday.

It was only natural that we had no idea what we were actually ordering at a Yemeni restaurant. Midday meant lunch for us, but breakfast for the Yemenis. We burst into laughter when the bread, half the size of our table, arrived after my baba ghanoush and Kuangyi’s lamb liver were served.

We even quickly discussed if we should get some extra bread in the short gap because I initially thought my dish was an eggplant salad, but it was a dip and there were no carbs in sight just yet. The bread was taken home and shared by all three of us for the next 2 days. It was, not surprisingly, super tasty though.

I also had one of the best home-cooked meals I had ever had at David’s place. It was braised beef with tomato and asparagus on steamed rice. I felt hungry just thinking about it.

David and I started chatting around New Year. The only reason I knew he was a real person was because we worked for the same manager at different stages of our careers. I joked that we each probably had a team running full-time research and inventing things so we could impress each other.

I have done intense messaging and long distance before, but never with a person across an entire hemisphere, in a country I have never visited before. We bonded over the fact that neither of us was ready for a relationship, the shared understanding of the importance of separate duvets and our work as product designers for tech while wanting to create things for ourselves.

I messaged him about how terrible a choice it was to play The Solitary Gourmet (孤独の美食家) on the flight. The main character accidentally skipped two in-flight meals in a row, so the attendants kept bringing me extra chocolate and pastry.

Arriving at Schiphol Airport felt like the IKEA hallway after making payment for the furniture and making your way to get the sausage. The giant signs are all yellow.

I told David it felt like cheating that he got to see me unprepared through the glass wall dividing the baggage claim area from the proper exit. I had to go hide behind a pole to rip all the tags off my luggage and try to calm my hair down without a mirror (so I probably made it worse).

Neither of us was surprised by each other. It felt like we had known each other for a very long time, and certainly we were not meeting for the first time.

The same night of the baba ghanoush and bread incident, Kuangyi brought me to an Asian Queer community dinner at a lesbian bar called Pamela in the west.

By this point, Steven and I had chatted about the difficulties of making friends in the Netherlands a couple of times. In fact, they moved to the city from other parts of the Netherlands in search of a friend group like mine in Melbourne after their last visit. So after taking a mental note, I decided to say yes to most of the things they invited me to, like bouldering later tonight, and this event.

It was quite a scene of a basement-level space filled with Asians, mostly lesbians and trans women if I am allowed to be honest, playing mahjong and singing Karaoke. I really got into the groove and broke my voice numerous times by shouting. But it was surprisingly fun.

The hosts also prepared Taiwanese bento with braised pork. An Indian-heritage girl who grew up in Hong Kong had somehow encapsulated bubble tea in a jelly dessert.

It felt like the sun was just about to start setting when we walked out of the bar at 9.30pm.

I thought to myself maybe it’s just not that different.

I was explaining to my mom about my decision to move to Amsterdam over a WeChat call. She has been watching a lot of shorts about the state of the world. She’s worried about my safety, the chance of me getting trafficked, conned by evil companies and making bad friends.

Just this morning, she suddenly wondered if I had decided to move because I got badly hurt from my time in Melbourne, and the underlying worry was more about my mental state. I said, “Mom, I would have zero energy if that’s the case, not to mention moving to an entirely new country.”

The conversation felt adorable but simultaneously hard to navigate because up till now she has never visited me, and therefore we almost don’t have common ground to discuss. The best I came up with was telling her: instead of focusing on moving countries, try to imagine if she were to move from Shanghai to Nanjing (or any other major cities in China).

There are certain language barriers, the buildings and roads will feel unfamiliar, the food might not hit the hometown mark, and of course, there are “good” people and “bad” ones. At least, that’s genuinely how I’ve felt so far.

I did have a really quiet moment walking to David’s under the trees on the sidewalk.

It was already late Saturday morning but the small number of joggers and cyclists made it feel like 5AM in Brisbane.

I suddenly had a realisation that there was no one expecting me to do anything. Most of my friends were not checking their phones because of the time zone. I hadn’t checked LinkedIn or Twitter for AI news for a good few days.

The world is running.

I felt calm in an unknown city.

Blunt

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