From Amsterdam with smug
10-11 hours of sleep after 30 hours of work, travel and seeing some sites and I have a bit of energy to post this first thrilling entry!
The travel went about as well as one can hope for, <snob>at least when flying coach</snob>. It did start with Andy sending a nasty e-mail to Ranjan because AGAIN the boy or his pet travel agent didn’t listen and we wound up with 3 of the 4 sets in the middle instead of having a window seat. Air France service was pretty good and the food was actually edible. Andy managed to get some sleep but Biggi didn’t sleep at all and I managed about 45 minutes or so at the end of the flight. I made up for the lack of plane-sleeping in the car, managing darned near 4 hours of sleep on the 5 hour ride from Paris to Amsterdam. Our chariot is an Opel Zafira, a decent if boring minivan-esque machine. We made it to Amsterdam with a minimum of traffic & fuss, not that I really remember much of it. Having a car in Amsterdam is not at all cheap, 47E per day!
Amsterdam itself is of course a pretty cool place. There are bicycles everywhere and when walking around you need to keep your head on a swivel so as not to get run down. You notice quickly that the bicycles are all pretty old and crappy. Andy & Biggi tell me this is because there is a very active bicycle stealing ring in the city so there’s no point in owning a nice one when it will just be stolen anyway. After a short time in our room at the NH Barbizon Palace we took a walk around the city a bit and had some Chinese food for dinner at a completely forgettable restaurant. Biggi decided that she had been awake long enough and so we headed back to the hotel to drop her off, comfy in bed with the TV and a Corona. Andy & I headed back out.
Our first stop was at a bar called Rock Planet, a small, college-bar sort of take on a Hard Rock. Still a cool place with lots of rock memorabilia on the walls, cold beer and great rock music playing really loud. And of course a coffee shop next door, which helped take the edge off us and the loud music. Deciding after 2 Grolsch that we should probably do some walking while we were still able, we headed out to walk around the red light district. It was still on the early side so things were just starting to warm up, but the ladies were already in their windows for your shopping pleasure. The majority of the “windows” are actually doors to small efficiency hotel-room sorts of setups. While most folks would picture a fairly wild party area, it’s actually a fairly typical European shopping style of place. Hard to describe but I think the best I’ve come up with yet is New Orleans, only stoned.
We kept walking around looking for a likely place to have a couple of pints and wound up just outside the touristy area. The bar looked fairly typical at first glance, but 1/2 way through our first bier it became obvious that we were not from an island that spoke a language with a heavy French influence, and they were. We hung around for one more beer cause hey, 4E for a 1/2 liter is cheap in Amsterdam, then we moved on.
We wound up at the Cafe Trinity or some such, after I thought Andy was done but he found a 3rd wind as we were walking back to the hotel. This place was in the red light district, if barely, but had good energy and Grolsch on tap. Plus the 3 barmaids were a lovely mix of dark, mocha and “holy crap girl you need to at least look at the sun every so often.” But still, all nice to look at, and very nice to chat with as well. Which Andy got to do more of, because a couple of young Brits wandered in and after amusing one of the barmaids when I told the one that turned out to be Gus that if he didn’t want to pay 5E for a Bud then he should stay home and drink instead of going out in Amsterdam. The other one turned out to be Sam, who almost immediately pushed my American buttons by starting in on a rant about how few Americans have passports. Well we had a good drunken conversation, Andy kept chatting up the barmaids (at which point I wondered aloud to him how the married guy wound up talking to the lovelies while I was talking to 2 blokes from Manchester – he reminded that’s cause I’m a dumbass, point to Andy) and all-in-all had a good time.
We left Cafe Trinity and discovered Biggi still awake! Though she claimed to have just re-awakened and taken an Ambien to make sure it was the last time. Before long we were all 3 asleep and we’ll leave Day 2 for the next post….
