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I've been back in Amsterdam since Friday and I'm definitely still adjusting to the cultural and seasonal changes. I go back to work on Wednesday, so that will be one more step back to normal life. It'll be good at first, catching up with people and seeing everyone again, but that newness always has to wear off and then you're just back and that's it.

Arriving in Amsterdam was weird. First, everyone on my flight was dressed so much more lightly than other people in the airport, heh. We only had on fleeces and sweatshirts and some people still had on flip-flops, and then you see everyone on the other side of baggage claim and they're wearing thick jackets and big scarfs and it looked so weird to me, I haven't seen people dressed like that in ages. We probably looked weird to them as well.

I had a bit of a newbie guy when I came through immigration. He had a supervisor sitting behind him to help him out. I handed over my passport and my resident visa, like I always do, and he pretty much ignored the card and just scanned my passport and asked me where I was headed. I said I live here, and he was like "oh really? You live here, do you?" I said, "yes, that's why I handed you a card showing I'm a resident." He finally looked at the card and asked me if it's new, he'd never seen one like it before, and I told him they've had cards like that for a few years. So he asked his supervisor if these cards are new and the supervisor said no, so the immigration guy told him "you gotta watch my back, man, and tell me these things" heh. I would have thought someone would have come through with a resident visa card, or he would have learned about them in training, but apparently not.

Later in the day, not long after I woke up from a nap so I was quite out of it, the phone rang and it was someone Dutch asking for me and they said they were from Lotto Weekend Millionaires and if I answered a quiz question I could win something, or something, as I said I was out of it, I'd been in the country for less than 12 hours and now someone's babbling at me in Dutch. But I kept up remarkably well and even answered back ok for awhile. In the end they wanted to give me free lottery tickets for a month and I said I wasn't interested and hung up with my head spinning. What timing.