Well I finally made it to Amsterdam, it took 2 delayed flights and a cancelled flight but I made it.

I guess I should explain that a bit better. I left work on Thursday with my bag on my back and got the tube out to Heathrow Terminal 4 just as planned except that my flight had been delayed by 2 hours (8:30 -> 10:30) by fog at Schipol airport. Pain in the arse but hey what can you do. So I bought a book and started reading (this was about 6pm).

So it gets to 10:15 and I am still sitting there reading my book, managed to read a large amount of it and the flights board still shows my flight as being delayed rather than giving a boarding gate to go to. All the shops are shutting up and it’s looking pretty dead, so I decided to wander up to the KLM counters and see if I could find out what the hell was going on. Just as I get to the counter they get the news that of course the flight has been cancelled and there are no more that night.

sigh

What happened next was almost like a Monty Python skit, imagine the worst co-ordination and organisation in history and you are getting close. We had to go back through customs (yes I had to explain that I hadn’t left the country and convince them I didn’t need to fill in a landing card), pick my bags back up at the arrivals gate, head back upstairs to the departures lounges again, spend 3 hours in a queue to get allocated a new flight sitting on the floor and then get a bus to the local Park Inn with the rest of the passengers.

Since I was booked on a flight leaving at 6:30 the following morning I got about 3 hours sleep all up (bus came to pick us up at 5am). This time I was flying with BA (KLM didn’t have any spare seats) so I re-checked my bags in and went through again.

Checking the board this time I actually had a departure gate HOORAY so I meandered my way up there and took a seat to wait for boarding. Then came the announcement………. The flight was delayed……. seriously seriously delayed. Shit, double shit!

So BA decided to jamb us all on the plane anyway and just wait on the tarmac until the air traffic controllers could give them a take off time. Which ended up being 9:30, yep 3 hours after the original take off time, I could have had a few more hours sleep.

The actual flight only took 45min once we took off, so I think I have endured possibly the longest trip to Amsterdam ever.

Last night we went out and got a great feed at an Indonesian restauarant which made me think of Raya Thai a bit. Then we wandered around the streets a bit just checking out the night life. Amsterdam is a fantastic city. Really chilled out, really picturesque canals and streets, really good bars and cafe’s and………. absinthe bars. Wound up having a few of those to drink, at 75% alcohol it isn’t weak by any standards, no hallucinagen effects at all really, apparently that used to be because there was lead in the old recipes.

The red-light district is kind of bizzarre, it’s quite funny actually, lots of families wandering around (yes I am serious) and we were offered cocaine 5 times in the space of 15min.

Due to being absolutely shattered from the lack of sleep the night before I wound up hitting the sack pretty early (midnight) and got a decent sleep in.

Today we went out and grabbed a good breakfast at a local cafe, jumped onto a tram and headed out to the museum/art gallery area of town.

The Rijksmuseum(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rijksmuseum) was first stop, lots of cool stuff there, a mixture of paintings, armour, porcelain, carved wood, silverware etc.

After that we headed on down the street to the Van Gogh Museum(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Van_Gogh_Museum) which unsurprisingly is chock a block full of his art. It also has a lot of art from his contemporaries and influences. I bought a couple of posters to hang up in my room in clapham to brighten things up a bit (grey old winter is approaching fast).

The plan for tonight is to head on out to an argentinian steak restaurant that we had recommended to us, if it’s as good a quality as the other food we have been eating here it should be great. Really makes you realise just how crap London food is when you finally get around to eating something decent.

Anyway there is free net access at the hotel so I will probably try to whack something else up online later on in the trip.