An Englishman and a Canadian invade the Netherlands

Suddenly I find myself in the Netherlands.

Much, I imagine, to the surprise of most of my friends and definitely coworkers (including my boss – when he found out I still somehow have banked time for the year, and I still somehow got it approved) …and it is fantastic.

I’ve been here two days, and I could live here.  The cobblestone streets are quaint, the ‘winter’ (if you can call it that) is still in the last throes of autumn, there are bicycles literally everywhere, there are still LEAVES on the trees (!) and it is impossibly mild.  The people are a bit rude, and the prices are costly, but it is really, really lovely here.

I landed in Amsterdam yesterday, after flying standby from Yellowknife, which was a bit of an ordeal.  My booked flight was cancelled due to the plane having not showed up the day before, so I had to catch the next one, which was to Edmonton, not Calgary, and then I had to find a flight to Calgary, which was actually pretty easy, thankfully.  I still got to Calgary much earlier than my flight to Amsterdam, so I waited a bit for the ticket counter to open, and then when it did, I made friendly with the old gentleman manning the ticket counter, and in return, he gave me a confirmed seat on the plane.  KLM is great, by the way.  The food was actually pretty good, the movie selection was superb (I say as someone who only enjoys European films) and the alcohol was free.  I got a little mini bottle of wine, and it was pretty good.  Not like our airlines at all. 

The film I watched on the plane was really good, actually.  I watched a film called The Danish Girl, which was a true account of the first transgender person in Denmark to undergo surgery in the 1920’s.  It did a good job at showing the struggles that the couple went through as the husband realized their true identity, and the public response to it at the time.  I’d like to see if I can’t get a copy of it to show in Yellowknife sometime for NWT Pride.  At some point…says the person who just resigned.  Sorta.

I got into Amsterdam at 08:00, after a sleepless plane ride – who knew an infant could cry for eight hours straight?  Needless to say, I was glad to get off the plane.  Getting through customs was possibly the easiest I’ve experienced in recent years, but it took me a little while to find Jamie.  We did, eventually, find each other – although as I told Alan by text message, it was a little like trying to find a really tall, English needle in a sprawling supermall of a haystack.  The arrivals hall enters directly into a giant mall, a train station complex, and a bus station. 

We left immediately for Haarlem, as soon as we figured out how to use the trains here, which is admittedly confusing.  Now that we’ve got the hang of it, the train system in the Netherlands actually seems to be incredibly efficient.  Just a steep learning curve. 

It was a short ride to Haarlem, a city just outside of Amsterdam, near the shore.  With a map I printed out before I left Canada, we walked from the train station to our hostel.  Jamie has a mildly injured foot, which has been exasperated by all of our walking, so it was a slow walk, but it would have been a slow walk anyhow.  Getting around is confusing at first. 

The hostel was basic, nothing to write home about, but the town is really beautiful.  I could easily live in Haarlem.  We checked in and immediately hopped on a bus to the city centre to walk around.  We found this beautiful old church, with the biggest organ I’ve ever seen – something like 5000 pipes on it.  Apparently Mozart played it when he was 10 years old.  The floors were made of tombstones, and I think we found some original stained glass.  It was lovely. 

I fell asleep at some silly hour, but in my defense, I had been awake for over 24 hours.

This morning, after a simple breakfast and 12 hours sleep (I apparently slept through a drunk guy banging on our windows at three in the morning?), we took a morning stroll through a park and headed to the centre of town for some more wandering around.

On the way, Jamie’s suitcase fell completely apart.  We both found this hilarious and tragic.  We stashed our bags at the train station, and went in search of a new bag for Jamie.  We ended up finding a market in the centre square (Grokt Markt), and I ate every free sample in sight.  There were a lot of free samples.  We wandered around for a few hours, found Jamie a new bag, and had coffee in some very strange, slightly unexplainable (to us non-Dutch reading humans, anyhow) art gallery-café-very expensive designer store.  It was really neat inside though. 

Surprisingly, an actual sex shop.  I was half-expecting it to be a music shop, or something.

Cheese for DAYS

After that, we bid farewell to the suitcase, and hopped on the train to Utrecht.  Just a little while ago, we walked to our hostel, where we are now, and in a little while, we are going to go out for dinner and later tonight, to an underground music party we got invited to.  It is a Saturday night, and when we checked in, we asked if anything was going on tonight – and found ourselves on the guest list to a music party which is being held in the basement of an old squatter’s house, and is going from 10pm – 4am. 

We both sincerely hope we aren’t still awake at 4am.