Holland Round Up
I’ve posted a bunch of photos on flickr with captions which generally give an idea of what I saw in Holland. (The flickr stream is broadly reverse chronology). In case you’re interested it went like this: flew into Amsterdam via Singapore and arrived at about 5am, failed to get the coffee order right straight up, was picked up by an employee of the Netherlands office and we drove to the site. We stayed on site so I got to see a fair bit of sand, the office, the inside of my room and the campus which included a bunch of old and new construction equipment.
That’s not to say it was all bad, we had a kind of summer camp vibe going and when we knocked off in the evening, one of the guys barbecued up a storm and we drank various beers (I always seemed to be handed the Atlas extra sterk 12% ). So it was generally fun and I did some interesting work but not so good on the sightseeing front.
Towards the end of the week, we headed out a bit in the evening (sun goes down at about 9pm) and checked out Harderwijk, having a rather pleasing dinner at the Bakhuus where we retired to the bar after a big plate of all-you-can-eat ribs each and sampled the liqueurs. I had a sambuca with coffee beans floating in it and set on fire briefly before drinking which was pretty fun. The waiter and bartender chatted us up nicely for an hour or two before we ambled home.
I was also given the day off on Friday before heading home so a coworker and I caught the train into Amsterdam and had a wander around. We debarked at Centraal station and headed up towards Dam Square, then hung a left and checked out the red light district. I wasn’t expecting the red light district to actually be real, I was expecting it to be a bunch of lame tourist shops harking back to the time of sailers coming in to Amsterdam for some “entertainment”. Boy was I wrong, Amsterdam red light district is still the real deal as we found out when I decided to duck down a little alley to get to The Oude Kerk. We got a few meters down the alley and then realised that there were prostitutes behind all the windows in the alley jiggling their jugglies at us and inviting us in. It was eyes forwards as we embarrassedly charged to the other end of the alley past the pimps having a ciggie in the doorway.
Apart from that, the red light district was mostly dodgy tourist shops, porno DVD shops and marijuana seed shops. Many of the coffee shops offered “feel good” coffee as well. But we didn’t check out any more alleys.
After we escaped the red light district we kind of got ourselves a bit lost looking for a decent jewellery shop (my co-worker wanted to buy something for his wife) and walked through a nicer area with al-fresco restaurants with views of the canals (which were quite pretty if you didn’t look at the actual water).
Then it was time to head to the airport for the home run. The trains were very easy to use with the only hiccup being you need to pay cash. The flight home was gruelling with an eight hour stop in Singapore. In hindsight we should have immigrated and had a look around Singapore but it was night and I was tired and didn’t feel like doing much yet was bored out of my brain. Even the Tiger Champions Bar was dead (but if you buy beer, the chips are only a dollar extra).
