My Room in Leiden!

Ok I have been promising everybody forever that I was going to put this post up, but I just never felt quite finished enough with my room. To be honest, I still don't feel like it's quite ready, I want to hang some more stuff on the walls, but that's just going to have to happen when I wrangle a guy that has an electric drill. My walls are hundreds of years old and VERY thick.

So my house. I live in the center of Leiden, right on the Beestenmarkt plein (square). I'm a five-minute walk from the Haarlemmerstraat and the Breestraat, which are the main shopping streets in Leiden, and a five-minute bike ride from the university. So all-in-all, a pretty good location! Under us is nothing right now, but they're building a Toko shop, which is an Indonesian food shop.

And lucky for us they like to start their drilling and hammering at 8 o'clock in the morning. Next door to me....... is a coffeeshop. And not the Starbucks kind. I know, I know, most people would love to live next door to a coffeeshop, to fulfill their misguided Dutch fantasy, but I was kind of wary of it. Good thing it only opens 4 to 10, and you're not allowed to smoke it there, you have to buy it and leave. But so far, all the customers have been pretty nice to me, no weirdos standing around. On the left side is a Turkish bakery, which is oh so dangerous. Their mini baguettes are 35 cents and delicious. And they have Turkish pancakes and a sort of Baklava things as well. Then across the street? Another coffeeshop. And down the street? Another coffeeshop. I have four on my street. But it's ok, nothing too sketchy, and because it's such a casual thing in Holland, you don't get any weird illegal happenings, or sketchy drug incidents. But the best thing on my street? My beautiful windmill! I love it!

All my roommates keep making fun of me, but I am in love with that thing. I've taken a million pictures of it, and sometimes I like to just stare at it. When I first google mapped the location of my house, I couldn't stop laughing. I mean, I'm really getting the Dutch experience here. I saw the bar next door with a huge Heineken sign out front, a coffeeshop next door... and a windmill on my street. Seriously? And by the way, not every Dutch person has a windmill on their street, and our houses aren't powered by wind or anything... I just happened to be very lucky! See the pointy house on the right? That's my house!

Ok now on to my room! My room is huge! It's about 20m2, and on the top floor facing the back of the house (quieter). I was so lucky to have family in Leiden that helped me out the first couple days. And they even took me to Ikea (there was A LOT of Ikea involved... I still have boxes stacked up all over the house). But now it's finally done! It feels like home!

I'll just let the pics do the talking :)

The stairs up to my room (I feel like I live in a pirate ship - yes, that is a rope instead of a banister).

Before:

AFTER!

The view from my window!