Amsterdam – Days 1 and 2

We had a great flight in from Seattle, and immediately went into a long day of meetings for work. To be honest, I don’t remember a lot from yesterday. When we finally got to the hotel last night, we’d been up for about 36 hours, with only a short nap on the plane here. My only initial thoughts were “Wow, the weather is just like Seattle!” and “It’s really flat!” I’d say both of those probably don’t qualify as incredibly profound thoughts…. Other general thoughts – everyone here speaks English. Folks are very friendly and helpful. Public transportation is wonderful, and much cheaper than taxis (a 20 minute ride was about 40 Euro, or about $66 US. The lower value of the dollar right now makes this a very expensive place! And everyone here knows more about the US politics, and especially our upcoming election than I think many Americans know.

At the end of the day, we had dinner in a very nice place in downtown Amsterdam. We then had a nice walk to the bus station. One of our hosts was walking us to the station to make sure we didn’t get lost. The streets are very narrow, and can be confusing (imagine 36 hours no sleep, a dinner, and trying to read street signs in Dutch).

Today, we caught the train and traveled to Lelystad for a series of meetings with two of our partners. Lelystad is a small city on “reclaimed land”. This means that the entire area used to be under the sea, but sea walls were built and the land was drained. Our host said it took 10 years for the land to completely dry. The area is beautiful, but looks a lot like suburbs in the US. In fact, one of the areas we drove by was an outlet mall with many of the same stores you would see at a US outlet mall. Even the same concept, put it about 40 minutes drive away from a large city, preferably in a more rural area, and see if everyone will come. Unfortunately, from the looks of it, I think it is getting the same results. At mid-day on Friday, no one was coming. Maybe it’s busy on the weekends….

Tonight we had dinner in a restaurant in Haarlem. This is not pronounced like Harlem in New York. Double emphasize the “a”, make the “r” really hard, and almost swallow the “m”. No I won’t demonstrate when I return, as I am not able to say it correctly, although I did practice. This restaurant was across from a beautiful church. The church campanile was playing as we arrived. I hadn’t heard campanile bells since I left KU! The restaurant building was over 200 years old. It used to be a place where they printed money for Holland, and has now been turned into a hotel and restaurant. Unfortunately, it was too dark for pictures. We arrived at dinner at about 6:30, but by the time the entire process finished it was after 10pm. Dinners are long affairs here, and people generally don’t go to dinner until later. The restaurants both nights didn’t really start to fill up until 9pm. For me, that’s more like bed time!

Saturday we will have time to visit some of the sites in Amsterdam. More to follow tomorrow!Carol