May 29h, 2009. The venture is off to a miserable start. We were supposed to leave Wilmington around 4PM this afternoon to hook up with a red eye that delivers us to Amsterdam 8:35 Saturday morning. Even though it is a beautiful day in North Carolina, there are t-storms in Philly and ground stops cause us to sit three hours on the tarmac before lift-off.
We touch down in Philadelphia and hustle to the International terminal, fully aware our Amsterdam connection is long gone. The only good news is that there is no line at the Special Services desk where we try to cull options from the cranky woman behind the counter (perhaps her day hasn’t been pleasant, but we baked for hours while stressing out about missing a flight to Europe…shouldn’t we be the cranky ones?). The sad lesson is that there’s only one flight per day from Philly to European destinations, so we’re screwed. The few remaining European flights tonight wouldn’t have a connection that would get us to Amsterdam any sooner than waiting for tomorrow evening’s departure.
We ask what’s left? Only Brussels, which is boarding now, but we would miss the connection and arrive later than the direct flight tomorrow…yada….yada…yada….
But a friend of Kim’s used to work in Amsterdam and urged us to take the train to visit Brussels during our excursion. So why not arrive in Brussels Saturday morning and hop a train the rest of the way? We toss it around as the attendant grows increasingly agitated that the flight is leaving, so we tell her two tickets to Brussels (she is quite astonished when we tell her to forget the Amsterdam connection). Then we race to the departure gate --- we make it a point to travel carry-on for just such emergencies, so you can imagine we were somewhat laden.
We reach the gate out of breath and after turning in our boarding passes discover there are still people on the ramp waiting to get on the plane! Suppressing our urge to run back to Special Services and deliver a series of backhands to the cranky attendant, we wait our turn. Our seats are a few rows apart, but a Belgian woman beside Kim assures her a train ride to Amsterdam would be quite easy. I pass along Rudolph’s e-mail address to Kim so she can ask him for any details he might be able to share (Kim has her blackberry along) – isn’t it awesome to have foreign friends for such emergencies?
Things aren’t going according to plan, but we’re off! They close the doors and nobody is sitting in my row so Kim moves beside me, a positive omen at last.
Saturday, May 30th, 2009. So we complete the red eye and arrive in Brussels Saturday morning. Getting in to the country is a breeze and after scoring some lunch items to enjoy on the train, we try to get on board one headed towards Amsterdam. The station is in the basement of the airport, and sure enough, a fare to Amsterdam is no big deal (and less than a hotel would have cost in Philly last night). The attendant selling tickets informs us there’s only one transfer between here and Amsterdam, so we head to the platforms.
After identifying our train, who do we see through the window but the Belgium woman Kim sat beside for a few minutes at the beginning of our flight. We climb aboard and settle in beside her. A few minutes later we are like old friends, amazed that Gertie is returning home after a business trip to Dayton, Ohio (where I travel for business each month). Gertie alerts us when we arrive at our stop and we quickly promise to look for each other in the Dayton airport when heading home on a Friday evening. Of course Kim and I are still novices at the train game, but Gertie scrambles off and points to a train exclaiming “that’s the one you want”.
Now settled in for a longer haul, we eat lunch and try to make sense of the train schedules. Confidence that we are indeed on the right train lags as we pull into Antwerp, so I ask a disembarking woman whether we’ll end up in Amsterdam and she tells us we better get off with her because this is not the one we want. In what would become an embarrassing repetition, I addressed the woman in Dutch (quite similar to the Flemish spoken in Belgium, somewhat like the difference between English spoken in America and the UK) and after pausing for a moment she exclaims, “Oh, English” and addresses us in perfect English!
Antwerp is a cavernous train station and we are utterly lost, but the woman from the train appears out of nowhere and urges us to follow her. She shepherds us to several platforms (the first time was wrong because she thought we had tickets for the express Thalys run). The outpouring of friendly assistance is the warmest welcome one could hope for, and now we relax for the first time since the trip began, seeing Schiphol (the Amsterdam airport) is one of our scheduled stops.
A useful lesson from the train trip was that the entire EU is somewhat like a single country. I was surprised the train rolled across the Belgium-Netherlands border without stopping to check passports…isn’t that convenient?
Arriving at Schiphol, we had to undergo another learning curve to score a train ticket to the Amsterdam Zuid station (just one stop away). Of course this was rather basic and shortly we had only to make the promised “ten minute walk” to CitizenM from the final station. This however, turned out to be the most frustrating part of the trip. Our confirmation instructed us to simply walk past the WTC (World Trade Center) and “follow the signs”…but there weren’t any for CitizenM! Without the promised signage, the only thing we had to go on was their address on Prinses Irenestraat, and two people we asked had no clue where that was. We made wider circles around the station and eventually cornered our lodging.
At Last….CitizenM!
Our exasperation evaporated immediately upon entering Citizen M – what a cool place! They also have a location right at Schiphol Airport which opened last year; this one only opened last month.
After moving in and feeling good about our plan to park at Amsterdam the entire week so we weren’t schlepping luggage around, it was time to call Rudolph and see if he wanted to join us for dinner. Rudolph foreshadowed how tightly Netherlands train’s run to schedule when he told us he would be at the CitizenM “about 6:08PM”, lol. Really was great to meet Rudolph and the three of us immediately started gabbing over a drink from the bar at the hotel. Draft Heineken’s for the boys, but Kim had spied a Genever Cosmopolitan on the menu. Genever is a Dutch liquor, similar to gin. Rudolph would answer roughly 100,000 questions about his country and culture, but piped up without prompting that the best way to savor genever was straight up with a beer chaser – Kim promised to do things the proper way next time.
The chat continued long after our drinks had been emptied, so after an hour or so we headed out to find dinner. Following the suggestion of one of the CitizenM crew, we turned left on Beethovenstraat and agreed on Fidelio’s, a restaurant several blocks away. The food was unremarkable, but the chat continued non-stop until around 10:30 when Kim and I were physically ready to drop though neither really wanted the discussion to end. We parted back at CitizenM since Rudolph still had to catch his train home to Den Haag. Kim and I had another beer in the lobby before climbing into our incredibly comfortable bed…an hour and half BEFORE our re-scheduled flight to Amsterdam would have lifted off from Philly! J
No comments:
Post a Comment