Below Belief

A riotous start to the holiday in the quiet town of Harrogate. Just the prospect of leaving the country tomorrow is a good enough excuse to go for a celebratory drink at the Real McCaw, second best to the Reform Club, with our expert witness Mark who has the difficult task of making sure we do actually travel Europe and don’t just shack up in Amsterdam until we get a sun-tan. We start off on the right foot by turning our celebratory drink into a celebratory few and by leading swiftly on to a surprise reunion of old school friends and much much later Club FX.
Heavy heads make last minute packing very disorganised but luckily the pilots of flight BA5026 have no such problems and the trip goes smoothly and quickly. The weather is clear in places, giving great views over the North sea of oil rigs, ships and white horses but sitting by the window is the cause of two stiff necks by the time we arrive in Amsterdam Schipol airport. We show our travelling naivety by waiting for more than twenty minutes at the luggage conveyor, and wonder why the same old battered suitcase is doing the rounds and yet our bags still haven’t arrived. We just decide they’ve been flown to China by mistake and are thinking greedily of the insurance claims when we realise that around the corner is the rucksack-bin and ours have been crushed under a huge pile of out-of-gauge luggage since we arrived.
Amsterdam is all we expected. It seems that our travelling attire is an instant passport for all manner of hassle from local people. From offers of beds for the night to pleading beggars we have it all thrust rudely in our face within the first five minutes. We realise with some trepidation that we’re going to get this every time we arrive in a new place and since arriving in new places is what we’ve come to do, we had better get used to it now.
Christian, a Dutch friend of Chris’, who has unwisely offered us his floor for the night meets us outside the station and we are quickly whisked away to his neatly decorated flat to meet Swedish girlfriend, Sandra and flatmate, Falko. We spend the evening celebrating the start of our holiday for the second time with red wine, beers and calvados along with delicious pizzas from a Turkish takeaway. The only thing to dampen our spirits is that Kaus, Christian’s playful four month-old kitten sneaks out of the door when the pizza man comes and goes unmissed for two hours. Despite much calling and searching in the bushes outside it looks like curiosity got the better of Kaus and at least one of his nine lives has been given over to the perils of night time Amsterdam. Soft sax music, more calvados and a muppet theme tune recital on the organ is the only thing we feel we can do to lift our sorry moods. Since the cat’s world has, up until now, consisted solely of the three-room flat, it seems unreasonable to expect Kaus to find his way home.
We finish off the night in a bar called Gamborino’s which by day is apparently full of writers and poets searching for inspiration as they observe the punters passing through. By night it is just a pleasant place to enjoy a few beers with friends. We return through the streets singing ‘Always look on the bright side of life’. It seems Amsterdam is the perfect place to kick off our European adventure.

This entry was posted on Saturday, August 31st, 1996 at 2:07 pm and is filed under Europe. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.