In Amsterdam.
July 3, 2008 at 4:23 pm | Trip | 5 comments
Well, I’ve answered one half of the cliff hanger from the previous post already!
Tuesday morning I was discharged from the hospital and said a fond farewell to the doctors and nursing staff that’d helped me so much, they even went so far as to drive me to the train station, which was a mere 15 minutes hobble away!
I caught a train to Chur, which happened to be a measely half hour train ride away and disembarked with difficulty looking like a pack mule, as my 15l rucksack was woefully inadequate for the amount of stuff I had to carry and I’d resorted to strapping stuff to the outside of it with my cargo net!
After sitting down at the station’s café I dumped my bag-cum-fishing-net on the floor and had an unsettling feeling that something was missing
“Shit! My camera!”
I’d left my camera on the train!
Of course by the time I’d hobbled back up to the platform the train had dissapeared.
Sweating profusely from the summer heat and unaccustomed three-legged parambulation I stumbled into the lost and found office to find a rather self satisfied attendent who informed me with a less than well concealed smugness that he did not have my camera.
Oh well… Last I’ll see of that, time to buy a cheapo compact I guess… Money go THATAWAY!
So yes, I apologise for the lack of photographic evidence of my journey, I’d intended to get some spectacular photos as we rattled quietly through the alpine scenery in the sunshine but… T’was not meant to be!
Many hours later I arrived in Amsterdam at 11pm and hobbled into a taxi and tried in vain to explain the difference between “Hostel” and “Hotel” to somebody who really only spoke Farsi.
He dropped me off at my hotel.
“Sorry sir, we have no vacancies”
Ok, this was starting to look bad, budget splitting as my situation had been a few moments ago it looked as if I’d have to call another taxi, and another, and another until I eventually found a hotel with a room.
“Vacancies” A neon sign flickered gently across the street.
“Yeeeah! Thank god!”
I flopped thankfully into the first room I’ve had to myself for months and fell asleep watching a Dutch subbed version of “Mars attacks”, has anyone watched this film all the way through? I’ve seen the beginning about 5 times now!
The next day I was tasked with acquiring a fresh supply of Fragin, which is a class A drug new to the market tha… No seriously, it’s a blood thinner to prevent DVT (Deep Vein Thrombosis) in bedridden cripples like myself!
I hauled my recalcitrant body the 200 exhausting yards to the Apotheke.
“Ah yes, you’ll need a prescription for this”
I hadn’t been given a prescription? Had or? I searched through my “Pockets of holding”and after inspecting enough scribbles of paper to rival the library of babylon I resigned myself to a wearisome trapse to the tourist doctor to get myself a prescription.
2 hours and a full mile and a half round trip later I’d given up and gone back to the hostel, that was 10 yards round the corner from my hotel of the previous night, with a box of asprin and some calesthenics in mind.
I spent the rest of the day in a cafe across the street smoking a box of 25 cigars I’d bought for 10 euros and trying the Rosé beer they had, that even the waiter screwed up his nose in disgust over when I ordered it.
It was… alright… More like bacardi breezer than beer but, better than a 69cent carton of wine for example.
The evening I whiled away in the common room of the hostel talking to a lovely canadian couple who shared their purchases with me, which as previously elicited little obvious affect to myself… I must be doing something wrong…
Upon the morrow I sat in the common room steeling myself for another attempt to find the tourist doctor when
“You check out today yes?”
“No, I was thinking of staying a few more days”
“No room!”
Grr, I really did not want to pack up all my stuff into that ever shifting, clattering mess I’d assembled it into previously.
Still, to their credit they arranged another hostel for me, at an admittedly pricey 30 euros a night and I wandered off via tram to find my bed for the night.
No problems, found the tram, found the hostel, yay for things going smoothly!
My stuff dumped I still had to find my Fragmin, and after half an hour of arguing with the girl behind the counter over my swiss prescription I had an order placed and was told to pick it up tomorrow.
Right… One last thing, a book!
Amsterdam’s not short on English bookshops and I found one no distance at all from the chemists.
“One man and his mission to fight his evil half brother to rescue his love/dog/budgie”
“Miss Pennywhether couldn’t decide which suitor to entertain at this evenings ball and was in a terrible muddle”
Hmm, I seem to have found a bookshop specialising in literary diarrhoea.
I eventually settled on a Sharpe novel and retreated back to the hostel.
And there we are! Not much of note really, but tomorrow my mate Alex arrives and the fun begins!
Rotterdam
July 31, 2008 at 10:55 am | Trip | 5 comments
Moons pass, seasons change, governments rise and fall, yet still the blog remains un-updated.
Ok some hyperbole involved perhaps but it has been a while.
I’ve been trying to write this post for the past few weeks but never get past the blank page on wordpress.
It feels as if my head is a saucepan which will overflow if I put the metaphorical ladel in to extract some info…But anyway, to the point… Last weekend my father and his girlfriend (which honestly sounds like a rather disrespectful term for someone of the previous generation) came to visit…
‘”I’m quite interested to try some”
“Well, then, shall we visit a coffee shop?”
“No need, I have a gram right here”
I hand the bag of grass, rizlas, filters and lighter to my dad, who expertly rolls a bi-generational spliff.
A few tokes all round, Jenny’s feeling a little light headed (not unusual if you’ve not smoked it before), James is feeling chilled out, whereas I can barely stand up and eating my pancake is a task akin to simultaneously solving a rubix cube while writing a thesis on the hidden nature of quarks and trying to play chess with Deep Blue.
I’d love to give a coy, in depth analysis of my father stoned, as it would probably prove amusing to those that know him, however I forgot (ahah!) to mention to the crowd that the name of this particular weed was “Amnezia”, which I thought was a cute nickname, rather than a bold statement of fact.
The simple chilled out effect was fun to see in my dad though, as when he was refused a glass of tap water by the waitress who’d just served us around 20 euros in food in drink I was expecting him to go ballistic…
You see, James is the last stalwart defender of common sense and decency, and sees it as his divinely appointed duty to stand up for these values where others would not.
So when he relaxedly replied “Oh, ok” I bust into a fit of laughter.
I remember him telling me of a time many years ago when he’d been refused a glass of water by a cafe owner, his reaction at this point was to reach behind the counter, grab a large carving knife and insist that he was given a glass of water.
To those of you that don’t know my father this may paint a rather agressive picture of him, but to appreciate the irony of these tales you have to consider my father is the principle of an EFL school, and is one of the most well spoken and highly educated people you could care to meet, so I find such tales from his past endlessly amusing.
The next day they had to fly back to blighty and I had to catch a train back to Rotterdam.
I’d been staying in a hostel called De Mafkees for the past two weeks and had been told that two weeks was the maximum anyone was allowed to stay.
So imagine my surprise when I checked my emails and found a email from Hedi, a member of staff at the hostel (a kinder more intelligent girl you couldn’t hope to meet), telling me that everyone (apart from Lizbeth, who told me I couldn’t stay) had piped up for me with the “big boss” and said that I should be allowed to stay as long as I like!
Over the past couple of weeks I’d got to know the staff at the hostel really well, such friendly and interesting people made such a change from the heartless staff at the hostels in Amsterdam that sent a poor cripple laden with motorcycle gear trapsing from hostel to hostel for a week!
Before I left for Amsterdam to meet my dad, when I thought I was going to be kicked out, the night shift guy Niels even said I could stay at his place for a while, and seeing as even though 10 euros a night for a hostel was cheap, paying in beers/stew for a place to stay was even cheaper, I decided to take him up on his offer anyway!
And that’s how I ended up in a squat at 9am drinking beer.
Seeing as Niels worked the night shift I had decided to stay up through the night and tag along back to his place at the end of his shift.
11:45pm - 7:45am in a hostel is a weird time.
Old men in their boxers, Iranian ladies teaching you the Farsi word for marmalade, and anorexic Swedish girls that wake up at 5am, down three Rosé Weickes beers and then ask if you can roll.
On the way to Niels’ we stopped at one of his old squats.
It was exactly as you’d stereotype a squat, broken glass on the floor, A for Anarchy scrawled on the walls, suspicious looking pools of dried liquid, still, looked like it must have been a cool place when people were living there.
When we got to his current place it was a whole other story, clean, tidy, a helluvalot nicer than my house was in fact!
In a way it’s a shame that I’m not staying longer, I’ve got a bus booked to Munich on Friday evening!
Oh and in an amazing stroke of news, they’ve found my camera! Nearly a month after I left it on the train it gets handed in to the lost and found.
That’s right up there with Elvis-tap-dancing-on-the-loch-ness-monster’s-head in terms of likelihood.
Still.. all’s well that ends well right guys?
Once again, Adeui!