Layover in Amsterdam

Well, I've started my travels for Zain Africa Challenge 2010, Season 4. I left on Thursday at 4:15pm from Los Angeles International airport on a great big KLM 747 bound for Amsterdam. I got to sit upstairs in their business class only seating, but it was no big deal. Neither was their service. A short 9 1/2 hours later and we were landing in Amsterdam.

I had nearly 10 hours to kill before my flight to Nairobi, so I locked my carry-on bags into an airport locker and went through customs to spend a few hours touristing. It was easy to catch a train from the station at the airport that took my exactly into the city center of Amsterdam in about 15 minutes. That's a picture of the train station, above.

The first thing I noticed was, it's cold! About 48 degrees. I was glad to have packed my ski shell and a wool scarf in my carry-on because I was very comfortable dressed that way. The next thing I noticed was the traffic. There are more bicycles in Amsterdam than autos. You see them parked everywhere, cluttering the streets and they even have multi-level bike parking lots.

I dodged the bikes as I crossed the streets leaving the train station and saw a number of boating companies in the large canal there offering canal tours in long narrow glass covered boats. I bought a ticket on a tour that was just leaving and saw the sights of Amsterdam from the water for the next hour. Marion will be happy to know that there were no messy seagulls dive-bombing us, no rotten kids dumping buckets of water from bridges on passing boats, and that the glass roof would have protected us if they did.

After my boat ride I decided to walk around the city for a while. I had no plan of what to see or what to do. I knew what I wasn't looking to do. I had no interest in visiting one of Amsterdam's famous coffee houses, of which I saw (and smelled) several. That would be a stupid reason to miss my connecting flight.

I was more interested in the wonderful bakeries and cheese shops I saw. These Dutch love thier cheese; Gouda, Edam, Jarlsberg, big yellow wheels of cheese everywhere you look. I passed on sampling the cheese though and set my sights on a treat that I remember from previous trips to Germany; Dutch Patats. What the Germans call Pommes Frittes and we call French Fries, the Dutch call them Patats and they cut these Belgian potatoes into small wedge-shaped fries and fry them in I don't know what. Then they serve them hot in a paper cone and covered with a mess of your choice of sauces. I chose curry sauce, something between a red curry and a bar-b-que sauce. You eat it with a little wooden fork the size of a toothpick. Yum!

After that I headed back to the airport on the train and still had 4 hours to kill. I got some work done and posted this blog, but now it's just about time to board my flight to Nairobi on Kenya Air.