Whirlwind Morning

I'm back at the Amsterdam Airport, waiting outside my gate area for my next flight. Schiphol (as the airport is called) is one of those terrible rambling airports with the security lines outside of each of the gates. With an hour before boarding, our gate still isn't open... While my computer clock says 3:37AM, it doesn't feel it. It is 9:37 here in Amsterdam, and I feel ready to face the day, despite the early, early start and lack of sleep last night; so so far, so good.

Since I last wrote, I did catch about an hour of sleep on the flight, before the cabin lights were turned back on for breakfast. I ended up turning on "Casablanca" while I waited for food, as I haven't watched it in a few years (watched it on one of the Sydney flights once). I didn't remember how it ended, but unfortunately we landed early, so I didn't get to see the last ten minutes. Hopefully they will have it on my next flight so I won't stay in suspense! Breakfast was nothing special. One of those airplane omelets and a sausage...

The man sitting next to me on the flight was returning to Utrecht (just outside of Amsterdam) from a conference in New Orleans. A specialist in soils (and particularly incorporating waterways in cities), he had done a lot of work in New Orleans following Katrina, and we had a good time talking about the collaboration (known as "Dutch Dialogues") which occurred following the storm. He also confirmed that I would have enough time to get out of the airport to see the city for a bit between flights.

Armed with that confirmation, and an early arrival (around 5:30AM), once on the ground I breezed through passport control and had a train ticket to Amsterdam Centraal Station by 6:00AM. I caught the 6:29, arriving by 6:50 in the heart of the city. The train station at the airport reminded me of the Austrian U-bahn station at the Vienna airport. And the similarities of Dutch to German (to my ear, at least) contributed even more so.

Armed with a general knowledge gleaned from briefly glancing at a map of Amsterdam a few days ago, I struck off in the still-dark morning (Amsterdam is pretty far north - sunrise isn't until around 8:00) to explore.

Some take-aways from my 90-minute run around Amsterdam:

1. It's awesome and I want to come back... I will come back.
2. They have a problem keeping their tourists alive; apparently people have been selling tourists some pretty intense heroine while pretending that it is cocaine. The signs all over the city (including big lighted ones) say: "CAUTION! WHITE HEROIN SOLD TO TOURISTS AS COCAINE. MANY HOSPITALISED AND THREE HAVE DIED. IGNORE STREET-DEALERS." So I heeded the advice and didn't buy cocaine...
3. Along the same vein, I passed many coffee shops (hint, "coffee shops" don't sell coffee), but as it was 7:00AM, they were not open.
4. Other things associated with Holland proliferated. I saw about 1,000,000 bikes chained to pretty much everything imaginable, there are canals everywhere (which are beautiful) and a few shops had wooden shoes.
5. In addition to an expansive train network, there is an impressive tram network that crisps-crosses the city.
6. The old storehouses that line the canals are gorgeous, and the silhouettes of the steep roofs as dawn broke were awesome. The whole thing reminded me of Bruges (canals, old buildings from the 1500-1800s), which probably isn't all that surprising given their proximity.
7. It was pretty quiet, but considering it was very early and still dark on a Saturday morning, I guess I am not all that surprised.

I passed a lot of pretty buildings and took pictures, though I don't know what turned out given how dark it was. I passed the Anne Frank house about 7:25 as I came around the last side of my big loop around the city. I'm glad I saw it, and it is incredible to think that the street and canalway hasn't really changed since she lived there. It's easy to imagine what the city was like when the Germans showed up (which was particularly poignant considering I had just watched "Casablanca.") There is a huge church two doors down from the house, and as I walked up the street the sky had started turning a bit blue. At 7:30, the bells chimed out "Tis a Gift to Be Simple;" it was all very nice.

I found a small bakery and grabbed some of those delicious waffle cookies with syrup in the middle and a tiny loaf of bread for breakfast. I enjoyed that as I walked back to the train station and took a few more pictures of the station and surrounding canals in the light, before catching a (pretty crowded) train to the airport.

I got to the airport at 8:30 and breezed through the passport station before walking for almost 45 minutes to get to my gate. Really. Terrible, terrible airport.

I'm excited for my *real* trip to begin, and am very glad that I had the chance to add a this little lagniappe trip into my day! In the future, I will definitely try to elongated connections at airports that you can easily get into the city from in order to see, if only for a few hours, a new city! We should be boarding in the next half hour, though there is still no one to do security checks. But so far, a great way to start the trip!