Amsterdam, Part 1

I've made it back from Amsterdam, and believe me, this was no small feat. The fact that I am in England this evening is a bit of miracle in many ways. But let me start at the beginning.

I left Southampton at noon last Friday and headed by train to Gatwick Airport via Clapham Junctions, which is this giant train station on the outskirts of London. Gatwick is basically the busiest single runway airport ever. There is a plane taking off or landing approximately every 30 seconds. Maybe more often. Anyways, you can't really go anywhere until your gate is announced, the gate is announced about 30 minutes before take-off, it takes 20 minutes to get to the gate, and by then the gate is closing. It's not an ideal system.

The flight was barely over an hour and upon landing you couldn't help but notice the pure and utter lack of ground gradient in the Netherlands. It's completely flat for as far as the eye could see, interlaced with rivers and canals, so it looked like a couple inches rainfall would cause mass flooding. So, we landed and at first every single sign in the aiport was in English. Then the Dutch sort of started wading itself in. And Dutch is one funny, funny looking language. It's best described as looking as if someone sat on their keyboard and called it a day. At customs they had two lines, EU passports and all passports (so EU could go in either line). I was pleased as punch because my passport got stamped and the EU folks got no such love.

Schipol Airport (as it is called) is very large and located somewhat outside the city, so you get to take these bizarre looking double-decker heavy rail trains to get into Central Station (in Dutch 'Centraal Station'). It was around this time when I realized that there is such a thing as Dutch people, and they are somewhat normal. They are slightly nordic in appearance, with a fair proportion of the blonde persuasion, but they sound kind of German. Oh, and as far as I could tell, every single one of them can speak perfect English.

I'll leave it there for the first installment. I recommend frequently returning, as things got rather interesting my first evening.