Now, departure lounges are not my favourite places at the best of times. They’re currently giving Cardiff’s departure lounge a bit of a makeover. Judging by what they’ve finished, if they’re going for ‘early 21st century tacky’, I’d say they’re succeeding.
Still, I did find a corner of the quaintly named ‘Beer House’ where I could actually see out onto the apron for a bit, and that’s when I produced the sketch of the Flybe plane. Not mine – I was with KLM.
Before I left home, I’d done a bit of research on the route from the airport to the hotel. The average taxi fare would work out at about 50 euros. Google told me that I could do it for about 6 Euros if I took a bus to the Olympic Stadium, got off, walked around the corner, and took another bus to Surinameplein. Fair enough.
Not as easy as it sounded, frankly. For a start, I was on the wrong bus stop. I got on the right bus, but it was going the wrong way. So I got off again. Then I got on the right bus going the right way and got off at the right place – Olympic Stadium. All I had to do was walk around the corner. Well and good – but which corner? Thankfully, one of the useful things about Amsterdam is that every local person I’ve met speaks English. Very good English at that. So I broke the habit of a lifetime and asked a stranger for help, and eventually found the right turning. It was getting on for about half nine, and I should have been at the hotel within a few minutes. Half an hour later I jerked awake when the bus I was on came to the end of the line. I’d fallen asleep as it sailed way past my stop, and to add insult to injury, I had to get out of the bus, and wait 20 minutes in the freezing cold before getting back on the same one to go back the way I’d come.
Well, soldier on. Things began looking up today. For one thing, the best and quickest way into town was by tram. I love trams. I spent an hour and a half riding from Birmingham to Wolverhampton and back on a tram last Sunday, and considered that paying 4 quid for the privilege was cheap at the price. So I made my first Amsterdam sketch at the stop while waiting for my tram – a 17 – to come along.
Unfortunately a lot of today the weather has been what I believe the locals call pisshingdown, so opportunities for sketching have been fairly few and far between. As the rain eased off a little, though, as I was passing the old town hall which is also called a Royal Palace, I chanced upon a Sandeman walking tour about to start. I don’t know if you’re familiar with Sandeman tours. Basically they present themselves as ‘Free tours’ – which they can be. But at the end you’re offered the chance to pay your guide whatever the tour was worth to you. Which means you have the opportunity to pay nothing if you have the brazen cheek. I paid. Our guide was called Kendra, an American whose lived for 14 years in Amsterdam and has just passed her Dutch citizenship exam.
Now, in the last couple of weeks, when I’ve told people that I’m going to Amsterdam, a certain number – men mostly although not exclusively – have smiled and asked if I’m going to be eating ‘funny’ cakes or smoking ‘funny’ cigarettes, and if I’m going to be ‘visiting’ the Red Light district. To which my answer was of course, no, no and no, this is a cultural trip where I will be broadening my mind and employing my meagre artistic talents in immortalising the uniqueness and beauty of the city yuttah yuttah. So of course, Kendra first of all took us through the Red Light District and past a lot of cafes offering various ways of intaking cannabis. Which is still actually illegal in Amsterdam, but let that one go for now.
To be fair, I did enjoy the walking tour, which only passed through the red light district briefly, and learned quite a bit about the history of the city .
The biggest disappointment of the day was finding out that since last year, if you want to visit Anne Frank’s house, you have to book online. I tried booking at 6am this morning, only to find that all of the times for the whole of this week are sold out. Thankfully, I did manage to book a ticket for the Van Gogh Museum for 9 am tomorrow. Speaking of museums, after backtracking to a place I’d seen during the walking tour to make the street corner sketch you can hopefully see as part of this post, I did take a gamble that I’d be able to get into the Rijksmuseum just by turning up. This was at about 3 pm, and it worked. In fact the queue for the cloakroom to put my backpack away safely was far, far longer than the queue for tickets.
They have a Van Gogh self portrait which simply blew me away. I’ll maybe say more about this tomorrow after I’ve visited the Van Gogh Museum. Rembrandt’s The Night Watch was breath taking too – I think it’s bigger than my house. On the whole though, I have to say that for my money the Prado was slightly more impressive. And that, my friends is pretty much all of the exciting stuff for today. I did walk to a Metro station and rode to the next station down the line, but I have to say that I wasn’t blown away by what is obviously a very modern system. I felt the platforms were bleak, and the whole thing was just a tiny bit soulless.
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