I moved to Amsterdam

Where have I lived?

In the last three years, I’ve been living in the small town of Zwolle. My wife and I chose the city almost randomly. We just wanted to try and become homeowners, but we didn’t want to spend too much money on that experiment. That’s how, in 2023, we bought a house in a suburban area of Zwolle.

The Netherlands housing crisis is one of the biggest in Europe, but one hour from Amsterdam, you can still find cities where the price is relatively affordable. Together with the incredible conditions of the Dutch mortgage system, it adds up to a very good deal.

Life has been good. I cannot complain, and I don’t have to say anything bad about living in Zwolle. But maybe that was the issue. Life there was just nothing remarkable, nothing extraordinary, nothing bad, and nothing exciting.

We moved to the Netherlands after four years of travelling the world full-time. It was quite an exhausting lifestyle, especially when you were trying to build a career and a freelance business along the way. Needless to say, we were tired. So buying a house in a place without much going on had been exactly what we needed back then.

But after three years of living in Zwolle, both of us started hearing this little voice whispering “big city life, remember how awesome it was?”. Both of us grew up in large megacities, and of course, the buzz of the megapolis was part of our identities.

But what exactly are the upsides of the big city? To me personally, there were a few factors that I missed living in a small town:

Global/international mindset.

Zwolle is a very local city, and it can be amazing for some. You can easily find your community, help in the neighbourhood, and your children can easily find friends. I am through and through a global person. No matter which country I live in, I look for cosmopolitanism. I love having people from all over the world in my neighbourhood. Zwolle, on the other hand, mostly has Dutch people. I don’t have anything against Dutch people; they are great, actually. I just prefer a melting pot.

English.

Yeah, I know, I know. I am one of the annoying expats who still haven’t learned Dutch. I am learning, honestly, just extremely slowly. But it’s actually not the point. Even if I learn Dutch, I consider it a specialised language, same as my native language. I want to use it for special local cases or to talk with native speakers. But I do want to use English for my day-to-day life. I’ve been using English for the last seven years in almost every aspect of my existence, and I have no plans of stopping. So having English as at least one of the languages of the city would benefit me a lot. Which is absolutely not the case in Zwolle, as it’s one of the most Dutch cities in the country.

People.

Zwollenaars are great. They are relatively open-minded, considering that the city is so close to the Bible Belt of the Netherlands. They are friendly, nice, and all of that. But Zwolle has very few people in the tech/startup space. It’s just not the place where people go with such interests or careers. I am a very much tech-oriented person, and now I am building a tech startup as well. I wanted to find my crowd, because without like-minded people, it’s very hard to go by in life. I also enjoy meeting people who represent modernity: green initiatives, freedom, ambitions, building the future. I must admit I also like hipster places, whatever that means.

Never bored.

Depending on where you are in life, boredom can actually be good for you. But to me, a few years of it was enough. I miss going places. Zwolle has some things to offer, but it’s, of course, unable to compete with the amenities of a big city. Simply walking out of your house and exploring the city you live in, stumbling upon a new café, visiting a new cinema where you’ve never been before, exploring tens of different museums, going to meet-ups, events, and endless opportunities to do something energising. Zwolle, in my opinion, doesn’t have that. At least certainly not on an international scale. Local events, yes, plenty.

Testing the theory.

Those four factors were the main drivers of my thinking in the last year or so. But at the same time, in Zwolle, we had almost a perfect life on paper. We were afraid to give it up. We had a cheap mortgage, a calm, clean, and almost utopian city, and a big house. Who in their right mind would give it up?

So we decided to do a scientific approach and test the hypothesis of living in a big city. We’ve been considering various places around the country: Rotterdam, Eindhoven, Utrecht, but eventually decided to test the biggest of them all - Amsterdam. In the last few years, we visited Amsterdam quite often, and we’d grown to like being there.

In April 2026, we rented an apartment in Amsterdam for a month, and I was really curious what all the fuss and hate were about, because Amsterdam is a controversial place. If you listen long enough to the Dutch (outside of Amsterdam), you would think it’s the worst place on Earth. However, it’s not uncommon to hate capitals (Paris and Moscow have even more of that), so you have to take it with a grain of salt. Also, never listen to Rotterdammers’ opinion about the capital. They have their own thing going on there. At the same time, you can find many expats and tourists’ opinions that Amsterdam is the best place. The city is a part of the touristic/IG/TikTok bubble, so I wouldn’t trust this on 100% either.

Big city life.

So, we settled and started exploring the city, doing a lot of events, activities, and explorations to see how we fit into the Amsterdam lifestyle. After spending a month, my wife and I fell in love with the city. There are downsides to any big city, of course, but what matters the most is your inner feeling while being in that city. When you truly love being there, it becomes very easy to close your eyes on the downsides. The enjoyment overshadows it.

Also, it turned out, most of the negatives you hear about Amsterdam are not quite true.

Is it dirty and overwhelmed by tourists? It can be, but only if you spend your time in the middle of the Centrum. The first impression indeed can be quite terrible. If you walk out of the central train station and walk directly across the Damrak street towards the Dam Square, you might hate it. But it’s, in my opinion, the worst area of the city.

But if you start to explore wider and dig into more local areas, you find that the city is calm and beautiful. I actually really like how Amsterdam manages tourists. Despite having nearly 27 million day visits a year (a mind-blowing number), when you live here, you mostly don’t see them. Compared to Barcelona, for example, where tourists just overrun the city completely. Here, they mostly concentrate on a few central streets and canals.

All the four things I hoped to find in this city, I found here.

Amsterdam is an incredibly international city, with foreigners from all over the globe. There are thousands of people from tech, startup, and innovation ecosystems. Same with events, meetups, groups, and initiatives. At this point, the only limit to visiting them all is my time. Never the lack of spaces. Apart from the tech scene, there is always something to do, a venue to visit, a thing to try, an exhibition to enjoy, and a new café to try a coffee in. English, as I also discovered, is indeed de facto the language of the city. Most people use it for communication in day-to-day life. It doesn’t mean Dutch is absent; it is still very much the language of the Dutch people and government communication, and you still have to learn it to integrate properly. But English runs in the city culture very deeply.

Apart from all of those obvious benefits, I just like how I feel here. I genuinely feel happier and more content. Amsterdam is a very good fit for me, and I hope I’ll be a good fit for the city. I constantly catch myself just enjoying being here and smiling, no matter what I am doing.

They say you make three of the most important decisions that directly affect the quality of your life: what you work on, who you’re with, and where you live. I am quite settled on the first two questions, but where to live still wasn’t answered for me. I like the Netherlands, but I couldn’t find the right city. I honestly think Amsterdam might actually be the answer I was looking for.

In the end, it was an easy decision to give up all that “perfect” life in Zwolle when we felt how great of a fit Amsterdam was for us.

The cost.

Of course, with any change, there are costs. In Amsterdam, the literal cost of living is a huge downside, as it’s one of the most expensive cities in Europe, especially with the chaos on the rental market.

But there are other costs as well. A big city means more noise, more pollution, more chaos and busyness. My opinion might change, but so far I feel like Amsterdam still hits a very good spot of being a huge cosmopolitan international hub, without being overwhelming. Somehow they managed to separate very busy tourist and business centres from the rest of the residential parts where your life actually happens. But of course, there might be more downsides to surface as I stay here for longer. Especially knowing myself, I tend to idolise places at first, so I wonder if my opinion will change in a year or two.

I’ll keep you posted about my life in Amsterdam here. Stay tuned!