One of these days we’re going to fly somewhere and have everything work as planned. The flights will arrive on time, the staff will be courteous and helpful, and the baggage will be there when we need it.
Today wasn’t one of those days.
Deb and I had a reasonably uneventful flight schedule. We were even blessed by having an empty seat next to us on the Amsterdam flight, allowing us to use all three seats in a vain attempt to sleep. We arrived in Amsterdam with the usual buzzing head and slightly off-kilter dizziness that accompanies sleepless overnight flights, but in the end we arrived with everything in our possession.
Terry wasn’t so fortunate. At our layover in Toronto, he received a text that one of his bags had been inexplicably left behind in Chicago.
Chicago. I can understand some mess-up in the originating city of Sioux City, Iowa, but two bags checked in and one of them somehow falling off the belt in Chicago is a mystery. He was told that it was already on the next flight to Toronto. He spent much of the layover making sure that it continued the journey to Amsterdam.
When we arrived in Amsterdam, Deb and I sat and watched the luggage in the cavernous baggage claim area while Terry stood at the service desk to fill out the necessary paperwork to get his bag delivered to the correct address. It was here that he learned that the bag was still in Chicago and not enroute to Toronto. And they couldn’t guarantee that it would arrive in the next couple days while we were in Amsterdam.
And so began the laborious process of filling out addresses of where we will be for the next five days. This is a bicycle tour. We will be in different places nearly every day. Once this was all on paper, it all had to be typed into the computer by the woman who was trying to handle more than one person at once. The interruptions by hysterical women whose bags had been damaged in transit only served to delay the process.
We left the airport a little later than planned but we had planned for some down time. The next task was to figure out the city’s public transit system.
One thing that became immediately obvious was the advantage of having luggage with wheels. Deb and I did not check any bags, rather, we packed light and stuffed everything into a couple large backpacks, which worked well until they had to be carted all over Amsterdam. I usually carried Deb’s bag for her so I appeared like some comical beast of burden, carrying two enormous backpacks. However, I didn’t feel too out of place, there were a lot of other tourists here with luggage in tow, however, most of them had wheels.
The first place resembling a restaurant we spotted after leaving the train station was a pancake house, so we made a beeline for it and were soon seated inside the tiny, rather warm eating area. The outdoor seating area was full. We all ordered some form of Dutch pancakes, mine had bacon and cheese in it and was super delicious. The Dutch may not be known for their cuisine, but they do know suiker (sugar), and that was present in many forms, making this a delightful meal.
Next stop was a grocery store. A popular chain around here is Albert Heijn and Deb came away with a few bottles of water and some snacks foods. Water here seems to be a scarce commodity. Much of Amsterdam was reclaimed from the Zuider Zee (North Sea), so there is water everywhere, but just not to drink. Unlike the US, you can’t just order tap water in a restaurant. It has to be bottled water for nearly 5 Euros. Bottled water was 30 cents each in the grocery store.
Thus further burdened by water in the backpacks, we moved on.
One advantage of the smaller boat is the ability to navigate the smaller canals. We left most of the other boats behind and had a nice tour of old Amsterdam from the water.
It was fascinating seeing the architecture from the water, a lot of this town is built straight up because of the scarcity of land, resulting in narrow, tall buildings that appear to be squished into place.
Part of this tour went through the so-called “red light district”, and our boat captain was describing how the legalization and regulation of prostitution was good for the business and the people involved. What we’ve read and understand, however, paints a far different picture, with the trafficking and exploitation of women being a big problem.
Several of the canals were off limits to tour boats, as the tourists would come through and take lots of pictures without paying for any of the services offered.
Being the middle of the day on a busy Sunday, there were no red lights and this area looked exactly like nearly every other area of old-town Amsterdam.
The tour passed old churches built in the 1600’s, including the oldest building in Amsterdam, and also the modern-looking city hall, which the captain told us was the ugliest building in Amsterdam. It did look out of place.
Great tour, felt good to let the boat hold the luggage for an hour, great way to view the city.
Now it was time to go to the hotel, so we went back to the train station and purchased a two-day public transit pass to allow us to tour the city tomorrow. We found bus 22, which goes past the hotel, and confidently crowded on, with luggage in tow.
I was watching the progress on Google Maps, wanting to be sure of the correct bus stop at the hotel, when I noticed that the blue dot was going in the wrong direction. We figured out that we had the correct bus, but the wrong direction. So we ended up riding the bus until it reached the eastern end of its route at Muiderpoortstation and turned around, heading back through Centraal Station and finally dropping us off in front of the hotel. A bit of a longer ride than expected, but we made it here.
Names can carry expectations, and the Westcord Art Hotel was a name that conjured up an image of an ornate building in a swanky art district. What we found was a rather nondescript brick building which looked more like an apartment building than a hotel. The rooms, however, live up to the name with an entire wall being an abstract oil painting.
Finally devoid of my pack-mule load, we headed out to find something to eat. A ten-minute walk from the hotel brought us to an area with a few restaurants. We stopped in a small place offering mid-eastern take-out food. During the ordering process we learned that they do not take American credit cards. Having no Euros, we moved on to the next place, with similar results. We found an Italian restaurant which said they accepted Visa and sat down to eat.
The Dutch are not known for their cuisine. In America, I can go to an American restaurant and order American food. Here there is a lot of mid-Eastern restaurants, this Italian eatery, and others offering foreign fare, but nothing offering traditional Dutch food. The pancake place we ate at earlier was a rare exception. So we ordered what we thought was a fairly safe and recognizable food: pizza.
The ambience here was decent. All the tables were outdoors along the street. However the cobblestones made it difficult to stabilize the furniture, so the tables and chairs rocked like a boat in a hurricane. On the table near ours, the waiter served some sort of fancy drink and one of them went over, breaking the glass and sending the colorful liquid all over a stack of four menus, the waiter, one of the patrons, and the sidewalk.
The food would have been an embarrassment to the Italians. The Dutch are known for their cheese, but this pizza came with no cheese at all, instead being marinara sauce spread on a thin crust. We ordered a spicy meat on it, which came as slices about as thick a tissue paper, spread sparingly over the sauce.
When the meal was over, none of our credit cards would work. They told us they accepted Visa, but five Visas and one MasterCard later, the bill still was not paid. We ended up going to a nearby ATM machine and withdrawing some Euros at usurious rates to pay the bill. A lot of countries we have been to, including Norway and Kenya, happily accept American plastic. Here, apparently, not so much.
We stopped at another Albert Heijn on the walk back to the hotel and picked up some chocolate. The pizza may be deplorable, but the chocolate is fantastic.
To bed at around 8:30 because we have been up for nearly 36 hours, and now I am wide awake at 3:30am finishing this up.
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