Hup Holland!

So for the foreseeable future, my intercontinental work trips have ceased. 

In a way, I’ll miss them.  As an Englishman, I’ve always felt an affinity to the Continent since my first day trip to Calais in my dim and distant mid-1960s school days.   Being able to see France from the promenade at Dover made it seem within touching distance, in a way that the Americas or Africa or the Middle East never was, and the Far East and Australia might as well have been the other side of the Solar System (never mind the world) for all the likelihood of my ever reaching them.

Most of my travelling, for work and play, has been around Europe, and often has taken less time than my old commute from the Kent-Sussex borderland to central London – especially so when for a period of time that commute consisted of a drive up the A2 and through the Blackwall Tunnel to Docklands, or around the southern M25 from Dartford to Heathrow, or the old coach ride up the A2 into Central London via either Docklands or London Bridge – horrific journeys, all. The rush hours are clearly misnamed when a points failure or broken down lorry can add hours to your snail’s pace journey. 

All European cities seem to have a similar and familiar feel to them too – heavy traffic especially in rush hours, the same high street chain stores like Benetton and H&M, Adidas and IKEA, the same food outlets like McDonalds and KFC and Pizza Hut.  Of course, there are many differences too: Madrid and Rome are generally warmer and prettier than London, the waiters in Geneva surlier and less friendly or polite than everywhere else I’ve ever been (but the backdrop of the lake and the Jura mountains and the Swiss Alps tends to compensate for that).  More dogshit on Parisian pavements.  An interesting atmosphere in certain Amsterdam backstreets (breathe in deeply and feel the smile come over your face).  An air of disquiet, almost danger, in places like Bratislava and Riga and even parts of Warsaw, hanging over from the Cold War and the Fall of Communism. 

And once you get beyond the inevitable traffic fumes, they all smell different as well.  The ubiquitous trams make a pleasant and efficient alternative to cabs and buses, even if they can be cold and uncomfortable.  And of course the constant babble of foreign languages is an interesting and at times entertaining, though always incomprehensible, soundtrack to your day.

 

My European wanderings completely failed to prepare me for the more distant destinations I’ve been fortunate enough to visit, though.  Spreading my wings beyond European boundaries has been an adventure, at least to this old country boy.

Even the most run down and shabby parts of London and Warsaw cannot compare or prepare you for some of Nairobi’s and Beirut’s neighbourhoods.  The pungent spicy smells and the dusty, shabby apartment blocks, with lines of grubby washing draped across their crumbling balconies, and the constant hubbub of street vendors and hustlers and wailing half naked urchins can quite literally take the breath away.  The cripples and beggars trying to sell matches and cigarettes and clothes pegs, usually one at a time, often with a starved and listless child clutched under one arm, shuffling between the endless lanes of traffic in Cairo are pitifully depressing.  The armies of poorly paid migrant workers, literally dying daily to transform Qatar into a worthy venue for 2022’s FIFA World Cup, provide a sad and scruffy backdrop to one of the wealthiest and increasingly spectacular cities on Earth.

And the journeys to these far-flung destinations can be challenging too.  The Gulf States are relatively easy to get to now, with many direct flights from major European airports as their importance to the business world increases with each new towering office block or oil deal.  The flights are of a reasonable length too – direct from Warsaw to Doha takes about 5 1/2 hours, daily with the excellent Qatar Airways.  The direct Emirates flight from Warsaw to Dubai takes a bit longer but is probably more comfortable with its wide-bodied A330 jet versus the Qatar A320.

Beirut could be a little trying, changing at Frankfurt with the probability of lost baggage and arrival at a grubby and inefficient airport.  At Nairobi, the entry Visa (purchased at a desk just before passport control) had an official price of £20 but could cost twice that, depending on the mood of that day’s official at the desk.  Almaty was a long night flight, arriving at a Soviet era airport where efficiency and courtesy were not included in the local dictionary, and on coming home the line through security wound round and round the Departure hall and could take an hour or more to complete – and that was just to get to the Check In desks.  A similar line then wound through passport control to the gate area.

Trips to the US mean running the gauntlet of surly and trigger happy Homeland Security operatives and equally unfriendly immigration clerks at the Arrivals desks.  It also means having to collect your baggage and check it back in again if you’re a transit passenger, because the US Government, in its infinite wisdom, believes no other country on Earth can be trusted to properly scan baggage onto a flight and everyone, no matter the age or gender, is a potential terrorist and thus needs to be treated with suspicion bordering on persecution and outright contempt.  Thank you, Osama.  I have travelled through and to the US five times now, once through Orlando and Cincinnati, once through Newark NJ and three times through JFK, and have never had anything remotely like a pleasant experience (and two of the trips pre-dated 9/11, when terrorism was something that did not happen in America and Saddam was generally reckoned to be an okay guy).  Frankly I have no wish to go there again.

South America is just a long way.  My trip to Santiago meant gruelling night-flights both ways, and I was fortunate  enough to be travelling Business Class (I haven’t had that pleasure since).  I shudder to think how Economy Class must have been.  But my weekend trip to the Pacific Coast at the hippy haven at Horcon, and the earth tremors we had one sunny Sunday afternoon in Santiago made it all worthwhile and a memorable trip.  24 hours or more each way, door to door, is still a hell of a journey though.

And on all of those trips, that wonderful border-free Schengen zone seemed a distant dream.

 

Things will change now, though.  I’m back working in Europe, for the first time in 4, nearly 5 years.  And at one of my favourite locations over the past 15 years or so – Amsterdam.  Best of all, the project is a long-termer.

I first came to the city way back in about 1998 or so, in a previous incarnation.  I travelled from London by train via Brussels, and stayed one day.  The journey itself was a pleasure, travelling First Class on Eurostar, then on Dutch Railways via Antwerp and Rotterdam, even though it took a good 7 or 8 hours in total (this was before the London – Channel Tunnel high speed link opened so we had to follow a Network South East commuter service through Kent).  I stayed at a hotel quite close to Rembrandtplein, visited a bank the next morning for a one hour presentation, then caught the train home again.  As I had some preparation to do, I saw very little of the city, but decided that Centraal Station is one of the most beautiful pieces of architecture in Europe, and certainly the best looking railway station.  I’ve seen nothing since to change my opinion too much (Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris, St.Peter’s Basilica in Rome and the wondrous Sagrada Familia Cathedral in Barcelona are all better, but that’s about it, at least in my experience).

Then in 2000, in my last job, my very first project was in Amsterdam, at a little Turkish bank in a southern suburb close to the airport.  I was here for maybe three months.  I stayed in a hotel in the centre, close to the station, but for the life of me can’t remember which one, there are so many in the area.  The ride out took maybe 40 minutes each way on a tram that wound through the touristy bit, past Zuid station and out into the leafy suburb – the bank was right at one end of the line and my hotel at the other so I always managed to get a seat.

We had two or three projects running in town then, so there were perhaps a dozen of us in the city at any given time, staying in a selection of central hotels.  We would meet in the evenings for dinner and a few beers, usually in the Old Bell pub in Rembrandtplein that sold a good selection of beers, including Irish and English favourites, and served up a menu that included things like lamb and mint pie with fries, cottage pie, various burgers, and fish & chips – all very tasty I recall.  Sitting outside watching the world go by in the spring and early summer was a pleasure new to me, and one I’ve continued to enjoy ever since in my travels.

I moved from that project to Warsaw, and my world changed completely – as I’ve written elsewhere on this blog.  In all my travels since, I’ve only made one other two day work trip here, in 2001, for a brief (and mildly successful) workshop.

 

And now I’m back. 

This time I’m residing in an apartment not a hotel.  It’s a good size, comfortably furnished with a selection of IKEA’s finest, and a five minute walk from the bank’s head office by Zuid station.  Certainly it’s one of the better apartments I’ve had over the years.  I’m working at another location, in that same leafy Amstelveen suburb, and perhaps 15 minutes stroll from my old Turkish bank.  It’s no longer there, having been taken over by one of the majors and moved elsewhere in the city.  Getting to work is easy and free – there is a shuttle bus running every 15 minutes or so between the two offices, as well as to a third possible workplace across the street from the futuristic Amsterdam ArenA stadium, home of Ajax (the best known football club in Holland and one of Europe’s finest), and by coincidence right next door to the bank where I had my brief workshop back in 2001.  It really is a small world in which I work.

I’ve been here just about a fortnight now, and I’m settling in.  I spent the weekend, as the sun came out, wandering around the city centre, getting my bearings and trying to find the Old Bell.  Somehow, although I knew where it was (I had spotted it in a similar excursion to the city centre when I had a daytrip for my hiring interview in early August), I couldn’t find it this time, but found instead a reasonably authentic Irish bar that served up a decent Irish breakfast all day, and a good cold pint of Kilkenny.  The city was crowded with tourists, as it always is – there is no on and off season here, the crowds are constant year round – and seemed to have changed not at all over the years.  Well, that’s not strictly true, actually: when I ventured into the Red Light district, it seemed seedier than I remembered, and most of the little windows that house the hookers displaying their wares (so to speak) were closed and shuttered.  In fairness, it was a Sunday afternoon, so it may have livened up considerably later on, but my previous two visits way back on my first project had both taken place on midweek evenings when they were full and busy so it’s perhaps not a fair comparison. 

The coffee shops were unchanged, the same sweet mary-jane smell drifting in fragrant clouds into the little side streets and alleys that mainly house them.  They seemed less crowded, but again this may have had something to do with the timing.  Perhaps there has been a further relaxation in the drugs laws because I saw several people wandering around the crowded streets openly puffing away at their joints as if they were regular cigarettes (which in a sense they are in Amsterdam).  It was all very familiar and somehow comforting.

As they have everywhere else, the price of things has definitely increased  and seem to be on a par with London, probably a bit less (as London has just been identified as the most expensive city in the world in which to live and work, in some survey I spotted on the web last week).  Certainly prices are higher than in Warsaw, but not outrageously so.  The OMV-Chipkaart makes travel on tram and metro and bus very good value: I bought one for EUR20 and still have about EUR12 to spend, despite a couple of return trips to central Amsterdam at the weekend.

 

 

So there we are.  I’m back in Europe, settling into a city and job that both promise much for the foreseeable future.  My first impressions of both are good, and once I’ve established a routine and stabilized finances I’m sure I’ll find plenty to do and write about. 

I might even get those books finished – The Match is probably 70% done so I hope to self-publish, probably via the wonderful world wide web, early next year, and I have a couple of ideas for other things firming up in my mind as I write.  Details will of course follow on here. 

In the meantime, onwards and upwards.

Happy travellin’.