Day 1 - Sunday - Getting to Amsterdam

Well, here we are – yay.  The first day has been largely uneventful other than a spilt glass of wine and a saw thumb, but I’ll get to them shortly.

We left Wellington on Friday evening, thanks to neighbor Dave getting us to the airport, and headed to Auckland for a night at the new Airport Novotel, which I can highly recommend.  Compared to the awful airport motels we've had to endure on previous trips, this was pure luxury, and the breakfast on Saturday morning, probably one of the best hotel buffets I've come across.

We left Auckland on Singapore Air at 1 pm, for the 10 hour first leg of the flight.  30 hours of flying isn't much fun, no matter how you do it (said he who’s never flown business class, but I stand by my statement, irrespective), but it went remarkably quickly, and the 3 hours sleep in the Singapore Transit Hotel makes for at least some proper sleep on the journey.  Having said that we did manage about 4 hours sleep, and a couple of hours dozing on the 13 hour second leg from Singapore to Amsterdam, so arrived in Amsterdam at 7 am, with all our bags, feeling remarkably fresh.  I did manage to bump my red wine glass against my TV screen during the second leg, which sent a couple of drops onto the centre of my white shirt……. The remainder of the glass of wine made its way directly to my crutch, which although wet and uncomfortable for a while, did make me feel pleased at the decision to wear dark blue, rather than tan trousers.

Getting to the hotel involved a short bus trip into the centre of the city, followed by a shorter walk.  The hardest part being finding the first street name.  Getting off a bus in the centre of a city on an overcast day, gives absolutely no hint of which direction is where, and being a directional dyslexic anyway, it always takes a bit to get my bearings. 

The hotel room wasn't ready, so we changed clothes and headed out into a rather cool (12 degrees) Amsterdam morning.  The rest of the day involved familiarising ourselves with the centre of the city, checking out a couple of the local restaurants for breakfast and lunch, walking along the sides of the many canals, being amazed at the number of bikes and cyclists, avoiding being run down by the trams, scooters, bikes and buses, and checking out the red light district.  Bicycles are the favoured mode of transport in Amsterdam, and they are just stacked everywhere – I’ve posted a photo of the side of one canal, and the bridge over it, and you can see the bikes everywhere. 

The lunch was a very enjoyable Greek tapas style meal, which was really great.  It didn’t end so well, when I lent back to check out if there was a queue at the counter, and the chair collapsed underneath me.  It was a slow motion tumble, which I am not prepared to put down to an excess of either alcohol or weight, but more the poor design and materials used in the chair.  The dent in my pride was the biggest injury, and I felt like a right tit collapsed on the ground.  The only other injury was to my thumb which I made very known to the restaurateur, in case he had any notions of blaming me for the demise of his chair.

With a couple of hour nana nap late in the afternoon, and a walk around the red light district at night, we were up until 10:30, so we’re definitely into the time zone, which bodes well for this first part of the trip.