AMSTERDAM AND LONDON

TUESDAY 6TH JANUARY: AMSTERDAM TO LONDON



We had breakfast at the hotel after a lie-in, then went back to Haarlemmerdijk for more of a look around and a cup of tea at teabar. I had green tea with nuts, vanilla, and spices, and OMG IT WAS SO YUM – I bought some to take away with me.



We saw two sets of cousins along the way, too! On the way back to the hotel, we got slightly lost and somehow ended up walking the wrong way! Luckily we realised pretty quickly and eventually hopped onto the tram back and to the hotel with time to spare.



We sat down for lunch in a lovely café, but ended up having to get the food takeaway so we could catch our bus.





We ate the food in the airport, and it was DELICIOUS. Oh my word, the Brussels sprouts and beans cooked with garlic and onion were superb, and the roast pumpkin was delicious. The risotto was good, with whole cloves of garlic and tender but not overcooked pieces of broccoli, topped with slices of pecorino (I think).

At check-in, the assistant called over another staff member and asked her about the discrepancy between the F on my passport and the Mr on my ticket. I told her it was because I’m trans, and she was very accepting of that. “Don’t they change the passports in Australia?” she asked, and when we told her it wasn’t easy she shook her head and said, “It’s your life, I think.” She was awesome and I loved her. The end.

The flight was half-full and very short – we arrived about 20 minutes early. Despite my worries about my cold and the lack of PROPER decongestant, my ears didn’t get too painful. They popped when they were meant to, and so I counted that as a victory to the nasal spray. We got to watch the sun set from the runway in Amsterdam, and then again just as we were coming in over London. It’s the first time I’ve flown that way – we saw the Channel, and it’s true that England and France are very close together! We flew in to London on the north side of the Thames, so we saw the bridges, the Millennium Dome, and various other landmarks. By that stage it was getting a little dark, though, so we couldn’t make out much detail. However, we could see heaps of ice and white patches in a lot of the parks – it was exciting!



M picked us up from the airport in the pitch black of 5pm and drove us home via the chemist, where I picked up some blessed, blessed sinus tablets with pseudoephedrine! My ears started feeling better within half an hour of taking them. Back at the family K residence, A had heated up some delicious soup, and we sat around and had a chat for a while before D and I fell into bed at some ridiculously early hour and slept and slept and slept.


WEDNESDAY 7TH JANUARY: LONDON

Wednesday was a family day – I hardly have any time in London, I’ve just realised, so it was good to see heaps of people. We have one day in London, then to the Cotswolds from Thursday to Monday, Tuesday in London, Bologna from Wednesday to Friday, the weekend in London, then flying home on Monday.



In the morning D’s sister in law came over with her son T and our newest and snuffliest nephew Y. S, D’s cousin, also dropped in to spend the day – she is here from South Africa. The family is in the process of making a video for E and L’s wedding, so a friend came over with a mini-setup (2 lights, camera and mic, etc) to do some filming. Adam arrived for that, so combined with E (the cleaner) and L (the office assistant), the house was pretty full! I escaped at one point to have a nice long bath, and consequently missed H (D’s grandfather) popping in for a visit. L (D’s grandmother) was quite ill recently and had to go to hospital a couple of days ago. She is feeling much better now, but she and H weren’t able to make it to the Cotswolds after all.

I spent a bit of time fiddling with some chords on the piano, to get a small song out (it’s been simmering in the back of my mind since Ameland, but I needed a piano to write it), and D did some admin stuff. However, D wasn’t feeling very good, so he also had a bit of a nap, and I looked after him before we all piled in the car to go to R & B’s house for dinner. I hadn’t been there before, so that was nice. D’s cousins B & A were also there, and it’s always good to talk to them.

B was telling me about the time he spent on a small island in the middle of a huge lake in Germany one winter – it sounded amazing. There are two islands, one with a monastery and one with a nunnery, and the one he was staying on could be walked around in 15 minutes (I don’t know if that’s an exaggeration). When he was there, a heavy mist surrounded the island for the whole week, so he could only see a few metres in front of him at any time. He was there for an osteopathy conference, and really the only other people on the island were nuns and people visiting the nunnery on a silent retreat. It sounded like an incredible (and slightly eerie) experience!

Dinner was very tasty, and I got to meet the ancient cat, who is 20 years old and quite . . . well, I’d say scrawny, but she is so beautiful despite being decrepit that it hardly seems a suitable word. Aww. I do like cats. There were a few in shop windows in Amsterdam, and I took photos of a couple, but most of the pictures didn’t turn out so well!

AMELAND TO AMSTERDAM

SATURDAY

J woke up feeling rather sick – sore throat, blocked sinuses, yuck. This is probably due to a combination of jetlag and long plane flights, the super cold weather, stuffy and overheated rooms, and being surrounded by sick babies and children. Saturday was family day, and so the place was packed. There was something like 150 people at het Zwanewater for the best part of the day. We don’t have any photos, as there was a professional photographer going around and snapping pics most of the day. Saturday night was party night. Some people went to Nes for a birthday, while others stayed in. Most of the slagroom was asleep by 10pm, but the last person got to bed at about 4am.


SUNDAY

Sunday was verrah cold! We tried to go and get some flu medication – we caught the bus in the freezing wind into Nes, but everything except the restaurants was closed. It was bitterly cold and a bit rainy, so we abandoned our half-arsed plans to go and investigate another village and went home instead.




J spent some quiet time in the corner editing photos and talking to the various people who came along to watch over my shoulder, then we helped S & P make dinner. D had a rest in the slagroom, then we played card games with several cousins before dinner. A lot of people had left during the day, so the evening was a much quieter affair. Later in the night we looked out the window and noticed it was snowing! A couple of us ran outside in our PJs for a minute to watch it come down in soft, silent whirls.



MONDAY

Some of the slagroom party were leaving on the 8:30 ferry, so the room woke up at around 7am. A small amount of snow had fallen overnight, and it was freezing outside – even the Dutchies agreed with us on that! We had a nice relaxed breakfast, then J followed the lead of a couple of cousins and snuck into the good bathrooms in the tower suites (vacated the day before) for a shower that didn’t involved pressing a button every 30 seconds, and which could be adjusted in temperature to decently-hot instead of only-slightly-above-lukewarm. LUXURY! J felt almost human – a sick human, but human nevertheless! We finished packing and took our bags out, then decided at the last minute to make some rolls for lunch, which meant we were a but rushed and didn’t quite get to say goodbye to everyone before we were hurried into the van and driven by Nico to the ferry. Whoops!





We took the ferry and bus with cousin J, aunt and uncle S & P, and E and F’s family. E answered our questions about the island, the surrounding water, and Dutch culture. He actually owns a windmill (wind turbine, rather than an old Dutch windmill!), and was given a grant to construct it, but now apparently the government has decided that the turbines are wrecking the landscape and so they’re not renewing licences. I find this sad and a bit odd. It’s not like there’s much landscape to see, anyway – it’s so flat! (Joking, joking!)



S & P left us at the train station, so we went on our way to Amsterdam (with one transfer) with Julia. We enjoyed the frosty, icy scenery (and found lots of places where we thought wolves might be lurking!), J had a nap, and a few hours later we went to our hotel and J went to hers. We agreed to meet up later that night for a curry – we’d all been hanging out for some spicy food for days!



We were staying at http://www.wotif.com/hotels/hotel-nicolaas-witsen-amsterdam.html Hotel Nicolaas Witsen, which is on Nicolaas Witsenstraat, NOT Nicolaas Witsenkade, as a friendly local pointed out as we were wandering in a slightly lost manner along the canal. It was adequate, but nowhere near as nice as the Lloyd Hotel, and although there were no smoking signs everywhere the place still had the unmistakable scent of cigarette smoke throughout. However, it was a private room at last, and we both showered and had a nap before we set off for the Indian restaurant Balraj, on Haarlemmerdijk. We were joined by J, her sister A, and A’s partner C (all members of the slagroom), and we were all satisfied with our filling meal. It was maybe not as spicy as we would have liked, but delicious nevertheless (we should have asked for hot curries given that we were dining in the land of bland).



We also had the amusing experience of being told that it was illegal to sell pseudoephedrine over the counter – instead, we got a nasal spray, which works in the opposite way as a decongestant, and also received instructions in Dutch-English on how to use said spray. Fun times! Anyway, we were almost herded back into the hotel by various locals, who were very excited by the idea that it was going to be minus 15 degrees during the night. We missed that, instead falling into a lovely NON-BUNK bed and sleeping. Mmmmm, sleep.

REGARDING AMSTERDAM: COLD, JETLAGGED AND HAVING AN AWESOME TIME!

Well, here we are in Amsterdam, sitting in our bed at Lloyd Hotel, where we decided to have an hour of sleep at about 4pm and woke up at 11pm. Heh. So much for willpower. I can barely remember the alarm going off! And so we have decided to try to stay awake until 2 or 3, and then catch another few hours of shut-eye at a reasonable time. Yay for free wireless access at this place, so I can write to you from bed!



Flights from Melbourne to London were OK. We were in the VERY LAST ROW, which turned out to be quite alright. The first flight to Singapore felt like it was about 48930 hours long, but the longer one went by smoothly with lots of sleeping and delicious curries (mmmm, PICKLES!) There weren’t any screaming children, and despite the usual whatever kind of service and the fact our movies on demand didn’t always work (oh, Qantas, why so average?), it was fine. I watched Mamma Mia! And despite a couple of issues, which I managed to ignore slightly, I LOVED IT, OMG. SO MUCH FUN. And the crappy sound quality meant that Pierce Brosnan didn’t sound half as bad as I expected!



For a second I thought we had free wireless in Heathrow Terminal 5. I got the laptop out and all (after changing in the bathroom and drinking a cup of Earl Grey tea and sharing a sandwich from Eat). I wouldn’t have been TOO surprised, given that it is so far away from anything resembling society that it might as well be . . . well, to get there we went on a sekrit bus with a bunch of tired and/or obnoxious Australians complaining about/loving the cold (STEAMY BREATH!) for about seven hours through a variety of concrete tunnels, and I thought perhaps instead of flying they were going to bus us to Amsterdam.



Alas it wasn’t so. So we got on a half-full plane for the 45 minute flight. The squalling child in the row behind us was more than made up for as I went from side to side of the plane to watch the sun rise – it was gorgeous!



More flight pics

As we came in to land I started squeeing about the frost that was all over the grass, and the fact that some of the wee irrigation channels and whatnot had ICE on the side of them, and that the houses were all pointy and that I saw some WINDMILLS . . . I squeed quite a bit. We touched down and managed to guess our way onto the train to Amsterdam Centraal. When we got out of the station . . .

IT WAS COLD!!!



It was bright and sunny, but OMG, my face just about fell off! Dan got us some tram tickets, and the conductor on the tram was very nice – he got us exactly where we wanted to go. The room at our hotel wasn’t ready yet, but the kind staff member locked up our bags ready for us to return, and we set off to explore.



Walking was nice, even though my trousers seem to be basically the coldest item of clothing in the world – not cold as in ‘letting the cold through’ but cold as in ‘taking the cold and MAKING IT COLDER’. WTF? Tomorrow I will wear thermals underneath! Then again, what can you expect when you are walking around in weather that is COLDER THAN BEING INSIDE YOUR FRIDGE?! I kept having to make detours to crunch the frosty grass, or make finger prints in the frost on picnic tables and cars. I’m really grown up, yo.



We were in Amsterdam for a couple of days in 2005, and back then we went to a couple of museums and wandered around trying to find a vegetarian café that had been recommended (we found it, it was good). This time we were not looking for anything in particular, and it was very enjoyable. We took off in any old direction, along canals, through slightly higgledy-piggledy alleyways, into a shopping centre called SISSY-BOY HOMELAND to keep warm for a bit.




We followed some street signs to HOMOMONUMENT, which is exactly that – a kind of platform over the water of a canal dedicated to men and women who have been persecuted because of their homosexuality (but not you bisexuals and other queers, sheesh!). We saw an ad for Kiki on Steroids, but it’s only open from Wednesday to Sunday (it was Monday) and closed on the 4th of January (we’re back through on the 5th). ANNOYING!




After that, it was time for a snack, so we went to Sara’s Pancake House. Unlike the person who wrote this review, we had adequate service with a smile (and, like everywhere, the switch to English without even needing to ask), I had a plate of deliciously moreish poffertjes, and D had a kind of pizza pancake. Yes, it was overpriced, but we weren’t complaining – it was warm and we were fed!




We decided to walk along the canals back to Amsterdam Centraal, then catch the tram to the hotel. We managed that without too much hassle, wandering along the less-touristy parts, watching the street cleaners do their thing, seeing the front of a van fall off and the driver almost drive over the top of it, taking a detour through the Bloemenmarkt (so many tulip bulbs for sale!), trying to catch the last bit of the sun as it gave up its feeble attempt to rise to a point that made it look like anything more than early morning or late afternoon . . . Did I mention it was cold? IT WAS COLD!



At about 3pm, we made it back to the Hotel, got our bags and found our room. It is a lovely room – sparsely furnished, but with a big, super-comfy bed, a nice hot shower, and lots of polished floor space. Our views are quite nice – waking up at 11pm and looking out the window, we were treated to a complete change, with strings of lights sparkling over the water. The basketball court down below is now completely frosted over. It’s beautiful.




Well, I’ve just spent 2 hours editing and uploading photos, so now I will post this, then try to sleep for a bit more. Tomorrow we’re off to Ameland, where the top temperature is forecast to be OVER ZERO DEGREES! (The low is minus 4, though.) One of our Dutch relatives is driving us from Lelystad, which is very kind of her, and which might mean we get to stop off somewhere and look around. We shall see!

More Amsterdam pics here!

ANOTHER PLACE ANOTHER PROMISE

We will be staying at Hotel Nicolaas Witsen on the 5th of January, between Ameland and the plane to London. OMG WE LEAVE NEXT WEEKEND! HALP!

Tomorrow I hope to get down to the Kathmandu clearance store on Smith St and find the following on special: merino thermal tops; walking socks of woolliness; corduroy trousers (I tried them on months ago, so I REALLY HOPE they still have them in my size).

Other things to think about. We have to coordinate all the clothes washing in between working Christmas hours at our shops. Which packs will we take? Which books? Shall I take some uni reading with me? Laptops? Which coats (thick coat and thin jumpers/shirts, or thinner coat with bulkier jumpers)?

All of this thinking is making me hungry!

A PLACE TO STAY, A FRIEND TO SEE

We have booked a night at Lloyd Hotel in Amsterdam for the night before we head up to Ameland. Close to the station, which is nice, and a private room, which is also nice (I feel a bit wary of dorms and shared bathrooms being trans and all).

And EXCITEMENT! I am going to visit one of my online friends in Italy! I am flying from London to Bologna on the 14th of Jan, and returning on the 16th. DB will be staying in London and catching up with family and friends over that time.

Oooh, now it's feeling a lot more real. And soon! Ahh, so much to dooooo!

NEXT TRIP, ARGH!

We will be leaving on December 28th for the Netherlands, and more specifically for Ameland for a kind of family reunion thing. We're looking forward to it, although we are both so busy with uni and Christmas retail work that we haven't really thought about if much. After Holland, we will be spending a couple of weeks in England, including a long weekend in a cottage in the Cotswolds. We return to Melbourne on the 20th of January.

It is going to be cold over there in the back-to-front season! COLDER THAN COLD CAN BE. We need to stock up on winter-type things. Do any of you Northern Hemispherians have suggestions? What kinds of trousers do you wear? Will I be OK with jeans over thermal leggings? Or are jeans crap because they get damp and really cold? Lots of thin layers, or a huge coat to take off inside (because central heating is much better/more existent there than here)?

Also, does anyone have a suggestion for a good hostel (with a double/private room) or good cheap hotel in Amsterdam?

Thanks in advance!