Volleyball, Bootcamp, Bikes & Picnics

Now that school has started and we are settling in Amsterdam, we are exploring new activities.

First, Ryan convinced me to come out of volleyball retirement and play on the Saturday meetup he found. I haven't played volleyball since before the pandemic.  This is 3 hours of playing with random people on random teams.  This allows for flexibility and no commitment to play every week which is good.  I lasted 2.5 hours which may be the longest I've ever played volleyball since maybe the days of beach volleyball afternoons in Chicago.  It was hot, I was out of "volleyball shape" and my arms were confused by what was happening to them. I was super bruised and sore. Yes, I did this to myself and will probably do it again.

On Wednesday I signed up for an expat fitness meetup. This was a choice of yoga, bootcamp or boxing in the park.  I chose yoga.  The yoga teacher didn't show up so they offered me a spot in bootcamp which I reluctantly accepted. Similar to volleyball, I was out of "bootcamp shape". 60 minutes of sprints, pushups, mountain climbers and other torturous exercises. My body had barely recovered from volleyball!

On to my next challenge - I bought a bike!  Not the easiest thing for me given there are not too many short-people used bikes available. I found one at a nearby bike shop.  I took it out for a ride the next day to the Amsterdam Bos (forest) which is very nice and quiet and easy to get to from our house (on bike).  Except when I get close to our house and there's a traffic circle where I almost got run over by a bike, car and tram. On day 3 of riding I made the rookie mistake of getting my tire caught on a tram track and went down (both myself and the bike were fine - minor accident).  I have booked bike lessons designed for people learning to bike in Amsterdam. 😀

I had been wanting to do a picnic in Vondelpark since we moved here.  Travel and weather has not allowed it but finally we did it!  We chose a particularly dog-filled section of the park to settle in and eat, read and practice football.  It was delightful since random dogs would come to us for petting and ball throwing as we relaxed with baguettes and brie. Then a very dirty and wet dog ran straight through our picnic leaving paw prints and dirty brie and tomatoes. We recovered and ate dirty food. THEN, a dog peed on Ryan's coffee mug!  😝🐕  Still lovely but lesson learned about picnics in the dog section.

This post sums up a lot about my expat experiences - amazing followed by horrifying!