Rebuilding Amsterdam

Rebuilding Amsterdam

Amsterdam seems to be in a state of constant renovation and re-building. Ever since I arrived in the city something, somewhere has been under going reconstruction (BlondeButBright has commented on this too). The big projects at the moment are the addition of a new metro line and the re-building of Amsterdam Central Train Station (or Amsterdam Central Building Site as I like to call it), an undertaking that will not be complete until 2011.

Mini building sites can pop up any where in the city with out warning like black holes. At the start of this week one such construction zone appeared right outside the office where I worked. The street is currently being pulled up in preparation for a re-construction of the canal side.

The water supply to our office has already been cut off due to a miss calculation with a pickaxe and the strength of a water pipe. As a result our H2O was spilling out over the street and into the near by canal for most of the day. By the end of the week we might have a full defensive moat or we’ll all be floating out into the harbour on our desks when the building falls into the canal. Dutch safety laws do not seem to be the strictest in the world (if they exist at all).

The mishap with the water has also created one of the many daring obstacles I now have to navigate in order to get to work. There are JCB diggers to dodge, raging rapids (that was once the office water supply) to avoid, mounds of sand to navigate, holes to side step and various other building site perils to brave. All that is missing is a tense but adventurous movie soundtrack, a giant rolling bolder and a few treasure hunting Nazis. However, Indiana Jones might shy away from this one and even Bob the Builder would give up.

Stuart

Stuart is an accident prone Englishman who has been living in the Netherlands since 2001. Even his move to the country was an unintentional accident, the result of replying to a cryptic job advertisement he found one day in a local British magazine. Since then he has learned to love the Dutch (so much so that he married one of them) and now calls the country home. He started the blog Invading Holland in 2006 as a place to share his strange stories of language misunderstandings, cultural confusions and his own accident prone nature.

16 Responses

  1. marycub says:

    Schipol airport is also always under reconstruction, it was when i arrived in holland in 1996 and it still was when we left for england in 2003. I’m guessing they’re still reconstructing as we speak.

Leave a Reply

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.