Morning in Amsterdam, Trip To Eindhoven

We landed in Amsterdam in the fog. It’s always interesting coming into final approach, dipping into the clouds, and being on the ground a few seconds later. I think the feeling of “Where the hell did that runway come from!” was shared by the pilot because the landing was quite rough.

As usual, customs getting into The Netherlands is thirty seconds to get your passport stamped, five minutes to get your bags (baggage claim at Schiphol is awesome), and walking though the “nothing to declare” gate into the main lobby.

My boss’s back, and his boss looking perky at baggage claim:


We grabbed train tickets to Eindhoven via Amsterdam Central, and jumped on the next train to the Centrum.



It might be worth noting that I had been wearing shorts and a light jacket up to this point. Amsterdam was -5°C. I was smart enough though and packed my jeans and sweatshirt in an outside pocket of my luggage. I pulled those out and went to head to the WC to change. The closest WC was closed, and the next closest was 150m away (quite a walk), and when I got there it was 0,50€ for the opportunity to use the facilities. Shit, I forgot that they charge for public restrooms here. I ended up walking back down to the lockers (where we were stashing our bags) and changing right in the middle of the hall. Not sure why I did not do that in the first place.

For the next few hours we walked around Amsterdam.

Amsterdam Central Station down at the end of the Damrak, the very center of Amsterdam:


I need to look up what this building is (it is at the other end of Damrak from the train station), but this is a stitch of 8 bad pictures, the original picture is 27”x18” at 300dpi:


Red Light. This was only moderately amusing at 10am on a Sunday morning. There were a handful of the porn shops open, but all but three of the windows were empty. The three we saw, well, you could tell that they needed to work the extra hours… woof.


The cool thing about these old cities are all of the sculptures and statues. I’m not sure what this one was, but it had some cool dogs and critters on it:


There was a bookstore that had a book dated 1620 that was 92 engravings of anatomy and human phisyology. The book was opened to a page of stillborn babies, very odd, but amazing detail:


By Noonish local time, we were all cold to the bone and getting tired. We headed back to the central station. We collected our bags and were on a train by 1pm.





We got down to Utrect (30mins south of Amsterdam) and there was an announcement (in dutch), we asked the nice cute dutch girls near us what the announcement was, and they told us that we had to get off in Utrect and take a bus down to ‘s-Hertogenbosch. So again I got to haul my over-weight luggage around between means of transportation. We got back on the train at Den Bosch and it was another 30mins down to Eindhoven. By 3:30pm we were in the lobby of the Crown Hotel across the street from the train station. Well, they did not have our reservation. What. Oh, you are probably at the Crown INN Hotel, about a block away. So, another block of hauling our crap around, we are finally checked into our hotel.

Nap Time. Just an hour. Then a bath, gotta work this cold out of the bones.

We got together for “drinkey-poos at half-six” (gotta love those English phrases), had a beer on the square, then headed to Gaucho’s for a steak. Gaucho’s is an Argentinean steak house that is “the” place to go when you go to Eindhoven. I had a pretty good steak and a side of fries (with mayonase!). We then walked a bit around the Centrum, and then went back to bed.

The entrance to our hotel was just to the left of the McDonalds, and my room is up and behind. I’m picking up my WiFi from the McTMobile.