Amsterdam; Monday, 09 April, 2007

With the end of a heavy cold still rattling around my lungs and consequently insufficient sleep for the previous three nights or so I headed out from home to the airport. This would go some way to explain why I managed to leave my trusty camera, memory cards and batteries sitting on my bed rather than in my bag, sadly I wouldn't find this out for another couple of hours, and not until I had got to my hotel room in Amsterdam, by which time I would have missed any opportunity to turn round and go back, though as my train was the last that ran for a while due to 'a fault on the train which cannot be rectified' this wouldn't have been a particularly good option, but I also missed the opportunity of spotting this whilst in international departures at Gatwick where I could have picked up a replacement cheaper!

After an event free flight I landed at Schiphol airport, though the runway you land on from the UK could well be in Belgium given the amount of taxiing it takes to get to the terminal building, at points you felt the pilot was getting bored as he accelerated up the taxiways obviously giving thought to potential take off speeds. Nearly 10 minutes after landing we finally pulled up at a gate and actually managed to get into the terminal building.

Schiphol is one of the largest airports in the world, and as it only has one building it is consequently a very long walk from anywhere to anywhere else. It was a further 15 minutes (and a brief toilet stop) before reaching immigration and baggage reclaim, and our bags still hadn't come round by that time! After a short wait the bags came up and for once mine was in the first 20 or so off.

I walked through customs into the main arrivals hall and then walked another couple of hundred meters to the train station to catch the train into Amsterdam. 20 minutes later I found myself at Centraal station, and after getting a 96 hour transport pass and negotiating the chaos of the building works outside the station and the bank holiday timetable got on a tram to the hotel. The total distance from Schiphol airport to the hotel must be less than 10 miles, yet it took nearly two hours from the point at which we landed until I was actually in the hotel. At which point I discovered I had left my camera at home!

Feeling a little miffed, I caught the tram back into town, just as all the shops were closing. Thankfully I found a camera shop that fitted every single criteria that I had created for the perfect replacement camera shop. 1. They spoke English (admittedly a very selfish criteria when you are in another country, but this is the Netherlands and most do...), 2. They had a sale on, 3. Today was the last day of the sale, 4. They were still open, 5. They had some ex display cameras that they wanted to get shot of. 10 minutes late I left with a perfectly working, but slightly worn, ex-display Kodak camera reduced from €159 to €99 with a 1GB memory card thrown in for free!

Finally back on a sort of even keel I had a wander around the centre of Amsterdam for a couple of hours, learning how to use the camera (badly, sadly the downside was that all the original guides had gone and the only instructions left were in Italian, Spanish and Portuguese, so not even Dutch!), before finally stopping for dinner and then heading back to the hotel for an early night to catch up on some sleep.