Day 1
Getting there is Half the Hassle
(and getting back is the other half)
k, maybe there are a couple of other things I should say that are
relevant to me and traveling. First, is that I absolutely hate
flying. I'm not afraid of air travel, and I don't just dislike it. I
hate it. I hate everything about it.
That's one thing. Another thing is that I absolutely detest having to sleep somewhere other than my own home. Sure, I'll be happy to go anywhere you like during the day, but come nightfall, if I'm not in my own digs, I'm one unhappy camper.
The third thing is that I have recently come to the conclusion that people suck. I mean, they really suck. The less time spent around people, the happier I am.
Ok, maybe all of this stuff has a lot more to do with why I haven't been on many vacations recently than the whole time and money thing. Well, they count, too, or at least are good enough excuses that people will accept at face value.
What you should take away from all of this is that perhaps I'm not the best traveling companion you could find. Whatever. In any case, it'd be redundantly idiotic to say that I wasn't really looking forward to the first day. I never do. Everything always goes wrong, I have a nervous breakdown, and usually get as far as the first layover before I decide that the whole thing was a big stupid idea, and that it's time to go back home.
I don't want to minimize this here. The first time that I went to Europe (since infancy), the plane was eight hours late and had a leak in the cabin. Really. The two times I've been to England since then weren't any better - during the first one, the plane landed at the wrong airport (really), and the second time, the pilot couldn't find the airport to land at (really). Maybe I have ultra-poisonous air-travel karma, but I think I have pretty good reason for dreading it.
Not that it's the only delight
that awaits me. I mean first, I had to negotiate The Road of Eternal
Construction (aka Route 3), and at the end of that, I was rewarded with
being in Boston, which is pretty much a good excuse to turn back and go home
right there.
Getting a little ahead of myself, I will say that Boston, and the people who live there, is the antithesis of Holland. I already kind of knew that, so I realized that if I kept plunging ahead, I might end up someplace pleasant. Of course, it's always darkest before the Dawn (so to speak), so I had to go to Logan airport.
Because I got there three
hours early, it only took an hour waiting in line to get checked into the
flight. The people who got there later weren't dealt with quite so
promptly, which is probably why the plane sat on the ground for an extra hour
while we waited for everyone to get checked in.
Mental Note: Americans are "Type A" personalities; Europeans aren't. Might as well get used to it now.
And here's another thing about flying to Europe: They leave late in the afternoon, so you'll get to Europe right about the time you'd normally go to bed on a Friday night (which, by the way, was what day it was), except for there, it's Saturday morning, and everyone's just getting up, and you can't get a hotel room for another six hours, and everyone expects you to be all awake and perky and shit.
I really hate this.
Which meant that I got to Frankfurt when I was ready to go to sleep, only after sweating my butt off, because for some reason, they had to keep the plane heated to about 80 degrees, and even crankier than usual because they'd managed to thump me in the shoulder with the drinks trolley at least three times an hour for the duration of the flight.
So, I was in just the right
mood when our laid-back arrival offered me the opportunity to sprint nearly the
length of Frankfurt airport - which is quite a distance indeed.
Traveler's journal: For some reason, when flying from Frankfurt, Amsterdam is considered to be a domestic destination, whereas London is not. I guess them brits really aren't buying into this European Community thing at all.
You know, given my physical condition, or total lack thereof, I really shouldn't be doing things like sprinting through German airports, as entertaining as the laid-back Germans might find it to be.
They were terribly proud of me at the gate for the Amsterdam flight. The only reason why the plane left at all was because they had a big debate about whether I was going to have a heart attack right there on the plane, or whether they should just pre-emptively stretcher me off before they closed the door. They eventually decided to give me a lot of coca cola with lots of ice, then noting the degree to which I was perspiring, stood around taking bets on whether the guy sitting next to me could hold his breath for the whole flight,
You know, torturing that guy with my b.o. is probably where things started improving for me. By the time I got off the plane in Amsterdam, I was quite chipper indeed. And I was in a great mood to meet my hosts, who were waiting for me, bearing signs depicting our favorite shoot-em-up video game.
Ok, so Rona and Eldrid weren't the ones carrying the signs.
Well, I was finally there. Not that reading about it here really conveyed how uncomfortable the flight was, or the fact that I was going to need a lot more than three or four days to physically recover from the things, but I really needn't say that, because anyone who's flown across the Atlantic recently and tends a bit to the large size knows precisely what I'm talking about.
So, I met the fragging family,
all four of them. Headed by a woman who calls herself "Mother 10," her son
Gerwin, and her two daughters Eldrid and Rona (who we've already met).
This is one terminally cute family, or would be if I found them in the
US. Instead, I found them in Holland, where being "nice, polite and
terminally cute" seems not only the norm, but a requirement. The Dutch are
probably the nicest people in the world, which has both positive and negative
aspects, although I prefer to dwell mainly on the positive. Not that
they're the only nice people in the world, but unlike the Swedes, for instance,
the Dutch also have a sense of humor, even if it is terribly polite. To
illustrate, note that prostitution and marijuana are both legal in Holland yet
the average Dutch person is far too nice and polite to ever make use of such
services.
Nice, cute and good looking. And perky. And a bunch of other nationally mandated features that you'll find in Dutch people, all of which they have in abundance, and all of which are exactly the sort of qualities that I normally hate in people. Somehow, the Dutch manage to pull it off, though, so I didn't have to go into any homicidal rage right there in the middle of the airport. Which is a good thing, 'cause otherwise, I wouldn't have had any place to stay.
They were there waiting for me, and had been for the last hour and a half. Perhaps they'd never seen an American crazy enough to fly out to spend a weekend with total strangers before, but they had been quite anxiously anticipating my arrival. They had followed my first flight's progress on the Lufthansa web site, they had watched me on the Frankfurt Airport's "Running Fat American Tourist Cam," and they had arrived at Schipol airport long before I did, which was quite a feat given Holland's single-digit speed limits.
Mother 10, hereafter referred to as "Mom" despite the fact that she's far too nice to be my real mother, greeted me with a hug and that awful European kiss-kiss thing, and I was far too shell-shocked from the flight to defend myself. In retrospect, I explain this away by claiming that I was trying to be polite.
I didn't have a thing on them for polite. They ushered me out to their car, and immediately handed me a glass full of cola. Aside from all that touchy-huggy shit, these people definitely knew how to get on my good side.
While we were standing there in the airport parking lot, politely
sipping soft drinks at each other, Gerwin demonstrated how to eat a
"speculaas."
Ok, you can stop shivering. Yeah, I know. I should probably say right now that there are two key aspects to Dutch food. First, every time I ask what's in something, the response I get is "Secret Herbs." Thus, I have determined that all Dutch food is made of top secret Dutch herbs. For all I know, those herbs include marijuana, which could well explain why they're always friendly and polite and in good humor.
The other thing I learned about Dutch food, which is of prime importance here, is that most Dutch names for food seem designed to make a native English speaking person shiver. Thus, we take something as innocent sounding as a cookie that's more or less a big ginger snap, and call it "Speculaas." If you ever plan on going to Holland, you're just going to have to get used to this shit. I already had some practice before I left, which is the only thing that prevented me from horking my cola all over Gerwin when he said "This is a speculaas" and stuck the thing in his mouth.
Interesting that one other feature of the Dutch is that most of them seem to be able to speak English better than I can, yet they are all somehow completely oblivious to what their names for food does to our appetites. Because of this, and because I wasn't quite as prepared as I might have been, they still had a prime opportunity to give me that polite, shallow, "We're not laughing at you; we're laughing with you, you crazy farging American" smile as I did that universally recognized head-grabbing face down dance that says "Pardon me, but I seem to have filled my sinuses with carbonated beverage."
It was after all the reassurances that I would indeed be ok in just a minute that we piled into the minivan and took off for the great northern coast of Noord Holland and the town of Den Helder. For me, this is where the first day of my vacation, the day of travel, ended, and the second day of the vacation (when I was supposed to have actual fun) began.
So, follow me to the second day of my vacation!
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