Me and my partner just got back from Amsterdam, went over on the eurostar from London Euston. Wanted to share my experience as a powerchair user incase it helps anyone else planning a trip.

Travel

The London to Brussels legs were great both ways. But Brussels to Amsterdam they put us on an older train with another wheelchair user, no way to turn round or get to a toilet. Felt like a total afterthought.

Getting around the city

Amsterdam is a genuinely beautiful city but its rough going in an electric chair. Cobbles everywhere, bikes dumped on every path, and people will just walk straight into your path or push infront of you without a second thought.

The metro claims to be accessible but I had to rush to be able to get out due to gaps and uneven platforms, and at one point my front castors got stuck and my partner had to lift me out, this was in the disabled carriage. It ended up damaging my chair.

Trams were basically unusable for me. Buses were actually really good though, …

I was outside the Toren hotel on the canal, which is a nice hotel in a decently nice part of town. It was 6:30am and it was bright out. I saw a guy hanging around us and figured he was a local enjoying the morning and thought nothing of it. He walked away and we kept waiting for our Uber.

Then we hear a blood curdling scream where he walked, and I think he was trying to rape a girl who was just walking with her bag down the street.

She was struggling, screaming, and I ran at the scene screaming for him to get off of her. He did and started running. She was screaming for 30 seconds before I could get to her and she was right by houses, nobody came out to help her in a reasonable amount of time with her screaming at the top of her lungs.

He didn’t try to take her bag at all, it looked like a sexual assault. Careful if travelling alone here.

Otherwise it was the time of my life, but that’s how the trip ended and then I got in an Uber and went home. Bad vibes, j might be …

It is genuinely getting tiring to see posts from people who want to move to the Netherlands mainly because Dutch salaries look high compared with those in their home country.

Yes, the salaries are higher. But so are the costs. Housing is extremely expensive, childcare is expensive, groceries are not cheap, and taxes take a considerable share of your income. A Dutch salary does not automatically give you a luxurious Dutch life.

I understand wanting a better future. The Netherlands is still a country with plenty of opportunities. But some things look much better from abroad than they actually are. Without secure housing and a realistic budget, moving here can become a financial disaster very quickly.

What also annoys me is the number of low-effort posts asking whether someone can live comfortably in Amsterdam on a random salary without mentioning rent, savings, family situation or lifestyle. Do people not research anything before planning an international move?

And no, simply …

So today I was heading to my train, and when I was downstairs, I heard such a loud bang like the train crashed or something. As I went upstairs, I saw an intercity parked at a station where normally only sprinters stop. There weren’t really any people on the platform, and I thought it was just nothing, so I decided to take a closer look, and as I kept walking, I saw blood and something which I first thought was a heart but probably just skin, and then I saw a person under the train.

The corpse was dismembered to an extent; it was such a weird, overwhelming feeling when I saw the person lying there.

I have never in my life seen a dead person, and there I am staring at one. The people were looking at me, not knowing what was going on inside the train, and I was just staring in horror. The more I looked, the more things I noticed, like shoes off on the platform and the phone on the other track and some blood on the platform I was on. All those things are just making me think more …

I left my apartment in Amsterdam at 4:55 pm, cycled to Sloterdijk station in 10 minutes, took a train to Schipol for another 10 minutes and by 5:30 pm I already passed through security. Just wanted to vent a positive experience of living in this beautiful country. Cheers :)