amsterdam, the arrival

How do I begin? Well, I guess Day 1 started with an empty corpse shell (me) practically dragging her bags through Amsterdam Schiphol Airport still mostly drunk from the flight (which was totally worth it). I rescinded my prior courageous and thrifty plan of navigating the GVB public transit system to reach my hotel (see previous sentence). My taxi was a brand new silver Mercedes Benz (Amsterdam-1, New York-0). I reached my hotel at last and full-on collapsed.

Consistent with my natural habit of overbooking, I had to rise, become non-corpse-like and go meet my new roommate, which was on the opposite side of Amsterdam from where I was. No problem!! Public transit to the rescue. Low and behold, everything was in Dutch and I made it there with no hiccups. I was a bit early, so I wandered the streets. I’ll have to post some pics from my initial wanderings another day. I lost my card reader, again. I swear it has legs!

General observations and notes:

• The Metro smells like horses.
• Business Class is the only way to fly.
• Children should be stowed with the luggage.
• Amsterdam has A LOT of flowers.
• The city has people from all over the world, surely there is enough room for me.
• Must figure out what a zone is.

Where’s the food?

Well, the shock of not sleeping for 36 hours can leave you a little confused. But of course Albert Heijn to the rescue, or Aha, as they call it. I may be spelling Aha wrong but I always think of the band when I hear it and then Take On Me begins cycling in my head for the next 20 minutes. Anyhoos, Aha seems to be the only supermarket, and my most favorite purveyor of stroopwafel, but that is for another time. I picked up a baguette, grapes and some kind of cheese I couldn’t identify, but it tasted like walnuts. Sign me up! Eat, pass out.