16. Don't you ever leave me baby
Trip Start
Jun 17, ????
1
19
36
Trip End
Ongoing
Amsterdam,
Netherlands
Friday, November 1, 2002
I well remember my first morning in Amsterdam, stepping out to visit a church (The Old Church, I think). As the four of us stood outside taking in teh architecture, a persistent knocking behind us drew our attention to the ho's in the window. I'm not sure whether the plan was to take on all four of us, or whether they were hoping to persaude the men in the group to abandon their wives and head on in. Either way, you can't knock their optimism.
Highlight of the trip for the boys was the tour of the Heineken museum, most especially the free samples. Note to Heineken museum owners: Feel free to provide non-beer related drinks for your non-beer drinking visitors who are only there to support a beer-drinking mate/significant other. Amsterdam is another great place for the diamondly-inclined
1. Amsterdam
. The shop we visited kindly provded the men with beer to help them cope with a sudden lightness of the wallet.Amsterdam is not all drugs, ho's and jollity however. There was culture, at the Van Gogh museum and sadness and Anne Frank's house. So glad we went though.
The canals are fun to travel on, but there's nothing enticing about them.... My useful info for non-Dutch speakers is that "Gracht" means canal. When I finally worked this out, it was a lot clearer to me why Princengracht, for example, appeared twice. I had assumed that the Amsterdammers were all so stoned that they were seeing double when they drew up the road map. It turned out that the roads are all named after the canal that they abut. One road each side of the canal = the same "road" name appearing twice. My other observation is that all trams lead to Spui.
After that first fantastic weekend in Amsterdam, I made my first attmept to leave Schipol airport. We visited in November, so it wasn't entirely surprising that the weather was a bit parky. Followed by a bit rainy. Followed by the kind of storms that close international airports. These storms were raging over the Channel as well, so not only was Schipol closed but so was Gatwick. We were flying (or not) with Easy Jet and they had no seats free until the following Wednesday. We were therefore forced to rebook with another airline, but - I am happy to report - Easy Jet happily refunded our tickets, as well as stumping up £50 a head for our accommodation
2. Trying to get home
. Accommodation was not easy to come by in a town full of people stranded by a closed airport. Still we found a room with two double beds and booked it. The hotel struggled to feed all these surplus people - we were out of town, near the airport, so there weren't restaurants in the area. Not to mention the foul weather dissauding you from going outside. We just kept ordering more drinks and waited for our food to arrive. And it was lovely when it did. Knowing that we had to be back at the airport for 0500, we didn't linger over the meal, but somehow did linger in the bar. It was hardly worth going to bed - and indeed, certain people did rather more pass out on their bed than actually go to sleep in it. Thankfully the storm cleared and we flew home the next day. Sadly, we had to go to Stanstead and hire a car to get back to Gatwick where we'd left our car.Visiting Amsterdam again last year (2006) I took the opportunity to visit Rembrandt's house as we hadn't had tome to do this before. We also managed to find one or two of our favourite bars from last time as well as finding the most excellent Mexican restaurant.
It was with something of a sense of a deja vu that I found myself in a bun fight at Schipol trying to rebook a flight home. This time the massed cancellation was a result of a terror alert and the allegedly foiled attacks. This blog probably isn't the place for a lengthy diatribe on Tony's war on terror or religious nutters, so I'll just briefly blame them both and move on
3. Oooh, we're getting closer
.Having managed to get another night at the hotel we were alredy staying at, we went out for a meal and got up the next morning with a day to kill (our flight was not til 10pm). However, as we put the news on it became clear that this was not a minor incident and another day's worth of flight were being cancelled. Our chums in the UK did us proud by researching possible routes home. We considered a ferry from the Hook of Holland, we looked at Eurostar (How much!!!) and finally settled on a cross-Europe rail journey back to Calais. This involved leaving Holland and crossing Belgium to France. It only took about 5 hours. From Calais we had no trouble catching a boat back to Blighty and from Dover, we got a taxi home. On the end, the trip was a lot of fun and I'm glad we didn't fly and have to put all our possessions into check in. However, I don't think I'll chance Amsterdam a third time!
