Si in Amsterdam
Simon Lockington

At the moment I’m in Amsterdam, waiting for my flight home via Hong Kong. I’ve been here for the fast four days or so at another broadcasting trade show called IBC. It’s the European version of the one we go to in Las Vegas.

Amsterdam is an awesome place, I’m always excited by coming here. What isn’t exciting is the traveling required to get here. This year we went via Hong Kong which is nine hours flying from Melbourne, wait in Hong Kong for two hours, then 13 hours to Amsterdam. Unfortunately this time we weren’t able to weasel any exit row seats which meant I had to sit in normal seats with little leg room, and zero chance of sleeping.

However this time for a change we flew Cathay Pacific instead of Qantas. The food was a hell of a lot nicer and the hostesses a whole lot friendlier and much more eager to please. They didn’t snap at you or spend their time bitching about the Union while serving the meals.

Getting through Amsterdam Airport is pretty easy, there’s no immigration cards to fill out, they take your passport, look at you, swipe it through a machine, ask why you’re here and let you go. All very easy, none of the interrogation that you get in Canada or Israel!

The taxi ride in the clapped out old Mercedes between the airport and our hotel wasn’t overly flash. The driver had body odour going on that was so strong it was making my eyes water and I was gagging for air out the window like a dog. While being extremely confident he knew where he was going, his frequent consultations with his GPS navigation system belied the truth. He eventually got us there, while skillfully dodging everyone on their pushbikes.

In Amsterdam, everyone has a pushbike and they like to ride around. Everyone from the town bum, through to corporate executives are cycling round on bikes that look like they were built around the time of the Second World War. There are no helmets involved and definitely no lycra. But everyone is riding round.

Normally, we stay at a very nice hotel in Dam Square called The Hotel Grand Kraznapolsky. A very fine establishment, with nice rooms, nice food, but a very grand cost to it (250 euros a night per room). However, the Kraznapolsky was all booked out so we had to go with another hotel that none of us knew. Unfortunately that hotel only had three rooms available to accommodate four of us, so Andrew and I would share a room.

We all have a shower and get changed to go off to a distributor meeting for one of the companies whose products we sell, mainly motivated by the fact they have good food there for us to munch on. The meeting went as expected, and given we had nothing to do for the rest of the day, we decided to go and find a place to have a few drinks at.

REMBRANDT SQUARE
We ended up, in no small part due to my outstanding leadership and navigational capabilities, in Rembrandt Square, where there are vast numbers of pubs and restaurants as well as buskers and other wildlife cruising about.

We settled in at an Irish Pub and got amongst some drinking and commenting on the various sights as they walked past. There were many sights to be commented on. Amsterdam rules.

After a lot of beer, it was decided to find somewhere to eat, so the quest for steak was on. With steak being the elixir of life, it is important to locate a good source early on in any trip. We commenced with some aimless walking in the general direction of a known good steak house in Dam Square. After a quick bathroom stop at a random McDonalds we made it to Gauchos Steakhouse where we had mouthwatering steak.

After being on the go for about 30 hours, we were all feeling a bit jaded and we headed back to the hotel at about 10pm.

The room that Andrew and I were staying in had two single beds that were placed uncomfortably close to each other so I set about moving them to a more ‘seemly’ distance, except the headboards were attached to the wall by Philips head screws which put that idea to rest.

DUTCH AIRCONDITIONING
Andrew had said that if he snored, I was more than welcome to throw something across the room at him and I had every intention of doing so, except that I was instantly asleep as soon as I hit the pillow. He says I then proceed to snore pretty loudly, but I think that’s unlikely. I slept well until 3am when I was suddenly wide awake, bathed in sweat, had a massive headache and was in general, totally uncomfortable.

I had thought that Andrew had turned the airconditioning off and shut the windows and therefore turned the room into a sauna and so I silently began cursing him. He too was wide awake and decided to go for a walk, so I checked the airconditioning settings which seemed ok, and the window was definitely open, so why was it so damn hot? At breakfast the following morning everyone was complaining about the previous night’s sleep and the temperature of the rooms.

Enquires at reception revealed that they turn the airconditioning off at 11pm because of local neighbourhood noise restrictions. That’s just great.

Infact we came to the conclusion that the Dutch don’t know a hell of a lot about airconditioning. Everywhere we went it was very stuffy and hot

Breakfast at the hotel wasn’t much better. There was tons of bread, but no toaster in sight. The grumpy waitress came up and demanded to know if anyone wanted any eggs. Don asked for two eggs sunny side up and got some kind of waste product from Chernoybl, Andrew asked for poached eggs but was admonished by the hostess for making such a stupid request and then relented and said he would have nothing, which resulted in him getting a single boiled egg.

Off to the trade show to show some clients around various manufacturers products. IBC is a large convention held at the Amsterdam RAI convention center. Anyone who sells anything to do with television production is there and it’s always interesting. It’s also pretty hard work spending the day walking around the various stands, talking to people, waiting, and talking some more. By the time you’re done, all you want to do is lay down. Which is what we did. The organizers had built a ‘beach’ outside by the canal. They’d trucked in tons of sand and brought out the deckchairs. A great place to sit outside and relax for a bit. An unexpected highlight was the group of girls on the ‘beach’ who had decided that sunbathing topless was the order of the day. The beach became very popular from then on and there were no objections from the crowd.

The end of the day found us in a line of about 300 people waiting to get a taxi back to their respective hotels. We were kept amused by watching some street performers on stilts who had dressed up as some kind of creatures either from Star Wars/Star Trek/Stargate/Aliens etc. Who were either doing some kind of street theatre, trying to make a statement, or giving directions. I was kind of surprised that they didn’t get their stilts knocked out from under them in the torrents of people gushing out of The RAI to beat everyone else to the taxi line.

I should point out here that pretty much all the taxis are nice over here. Most are very modern Mercedes Benz vehicles, the type you’d see in Toorak in Melbourne, and the drivers in general are nice.

PORCELAIN DOGS DON’T WALK VERY WELL
Infact all the Dutch people I talked to are nice. Nobody is in a rush in Amsterdam, things just cruise along at their own pace. If a horse and cart blocks the road for no apparent reason (and it happens), it’s a long time before any cars start honking. They’re in no rush, it’s all good. Cyclists just cruise around from place to place in no rush which makes a nice change from the lycra wearing angry people you often see on bikes in our part of the world.

They walk past in no rush and look at the street performers, one of whom was trying to walk a porcelain dog while wearing a pot plant on his head. Word to the wise son, porcelain dogs don’t walk too well… I think that guy had been smoking a bit too much of Dutch’s finest… I think the Porcelain dog was lucky that the mohawked punks that had walked by a couple of hours ago weren’t cruising past again.

Well I should really qualify this by saying all the Dutch people I talked to were great. Andrew on the other hand seemed to be able to make them go from placid to snappy in a matter of seconds. On one such occasion Andrew was enquiring as to the state of our dinner upon hearing ‘It’s coming’ he replied “Yes well so is Christmas”. Another memorable statement from Andrew in that same conversation included “You don’t really care do you, be honest now”. When our dinner did eventually arrive, I think Andrew’s had a little extra ‘special’ sauce on it, cause while he didn’t think much of his meal, ours was great.

The following morning Andrew seemed to wind up the Pancake/Waffle making woman a the hotel we had breakfast, I don’t know how he did that, then later that day a hot dog vending woman started on him. Not quite sure how he managed to get all these catering people snappy, but they weren’t having any lip from him that’s for sure.

It’s not overly cheap to be in Amsterdam, everything is in Euros what you’d expect to pay in dollars at home. The steaks we were having were around 22 Euros a hit and taxi fares were pretty much the same in euros as what you’d pay in dollars at home.

The bonus is everyone speaks English, I didn’t encounter one person who couldn’t speak the language.

This time we didn’t do the canal cruise or the red light district cruise, we did that last time although I could have been easily convinced to do that again.

I love Amsterdam, it’s an awesome, laid back place and I could definitely live here.

Si