Luxury in Rotterdam
Trip Start
Mar 20, 2000
1
19
21
Trip End
Aug 12, 2000
Rotterdam,
Netherlands
Sunday, July 30, 2000
We did manage to change our tickets to an earlier flight - just as well, as 9 August turned out to be Singapore's National Day. We would not have been able to do anything (such as sorting out our banking) as everything was closed. On the last day, we ran into a bit of a panic as our flight to Denpasar did not appear on the teletext screen. It turned out it was merely delayed, along with many other flights, because of the air show segment of the National Day parade, and if we had just looked at the next page of the teletext we would have found it. As usual, our flights on Garuda were quite comfortable, considering the price we paid, with none of the problems with our ears that we get when we fly SIA. The flight to Singapore was good - almost all Europeans on route to Bali (Singaporeans probably avoid Garuda) so no loud Asian passengers and no waiting for the luggage as almost everyone was in transit.
We arrived in Rotterdam on the weekend of a big Carribean-style carnival and had trouble getting accommodation. We found a cheap hotel (if you can call eighty guilders cheap) near a canal behind the station (recommended by Lonely Planet) but they were renovating and did not really want guests. The second day they did not have time to clean the room (the cleaning woman was taking a day off after the big parade) and gave us a thirty guilder discount. If only we had found out earlier that Holiday Inn had a special deal on. I was flipping through a local paper when I saw an advertisement, which seemed to be saying that we could stay at Holiday Inn in an executive room for ninety guilders per person, with a three course dinner thrown in and a champagne breakfast the next morning. I took the ad to Holiday Inn to check, as I can't really read Dutch, and we ended up having a night of luxury in a room that normally costs over 500 guilders without breakfast. The dinner, although worth fifty guilders each, was nothing special, but they did include wine and coffee. The buffet breakfast, however, was wonderful, with lots of salmon and other delicacies and the room itself was the most comfortable place we stayed on the whole trip. Unfortunately we could not stay any more nights as it was booked out until Sunday, the day we were to fly out.
Raymond's Travel Page
