As it turned out, the night was very young! I had a nice dinner at a Cantonese restaurant in the Red Light District. The owners of the hotel had recommended it to me and when I told the staff that I was staying at that hotel, they got all happy, invited me in and gave me a great table. The service was excellent the food was great. I had a wonderful time chatting with the staff until the restaurant got busy and then finished my dinner watching the world course by down the Warmoesstraat.
I had a couple beers and then, having an early flight and needing to catch the 06:00 train to Schiphol, I headed off to bed early. I was dead tired. It had been a big day and the beer was helping. So why is it that I could not sleep a wink yet all night! I was in bed by nine and I think I must have checked the clock every fifteen minutes all night long.
Needless to say, I was able to get up, get dressed and get to the train station well before the time I had to be there for the train. I was therefore able to get the earlier train and was at the airport before I had planned to be.
My flight, more than two hours away was preceded by one about an hour away. I got to the check-in desk and had the choice of three lines. One had only one person in it, another had only a couple in it, the third had a dozen people in line. I stood behind the one guy. In much the same way that the trip had begun with a problem at check-in, it appeared that the trip was going to end the same way.
The guy was arguing about how he had to get onto his flight and how he was supposed to be in Hong Kong at 08:00 tomorrow morning. It turned out that his flight had, in fact left on time an hour ago and that there were no other flight that day that would get him where he wanted to be in time.
Quietly, I sidled over to the line where the couple were standing. Whatever this discussion was about, thankfully, I was spared the details. The entire transaction was being handled in Dutch. It took much longer than I would have expected but since it was all in Dutch, they could have been discussing the weather for all I know. I considered sidling over to the line with the dozen people in it.
The wait was uneventful, I had coffee and a roll and read from my book while waiting for the security checkpoint to open. It did and I got into queue for the security screening. Although I had divested of all metal I knew of, I still set-off the magnetometer. The gentleman who was working security gave me a very thorough frisking. Ah well, welcome to Amsterdam!
The flight home was a nice one, I got on the bus and was back home by noon. I've been working on transcribing these stories for the last three hours now. It is time to upload them and go get Saga from the pub.
I hope that wherever you are this evening, you have wonderful things ahead of you!
Don Bergquist - 18 February 2007 - Thames Ditton, Surrey, UK
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