Open thread - I'm back

Just got back from Amsterdam, got in from the airport a bit ago.

Really amazing trip. It truly is a gorgeous gorgeous gorgeous city, fun, and filled with surprisingly nice people (since they often get a bad rap - but do watch them on the streets, they have a nasty habit of bumping right into you when walking towards you on the sidewalk).

The food was good (again, it gets a bad rap), and they had really good ethnic food - we had Italian, Indonesian, and Moroccan, all really good. The town seemed incredibly safe - you can walk around at night, seemingly without much worry - we even walked through a park at 2am, without a problem (local friends said it was totally safe). Folks working in stores, the hotels, etc., all speak English and were terribly nice to us little ole tourists, which also made the trip really nice.

And finally, there's a ton to do. Yes, yes, you can get high etc., but that's only a small part of the town. It's a quite walkable, beautiful city, practically every street is on a canal, the buildings are each a bit different and equally beautiful and strange, and the nights are made for walking - everything has a soft glow, beautiful for a romantic stroll or some great night photography.

My hotel was amazing, the Amsterdam Centre Hotel, I highly recommend it - it's near the Leidespleine (or however you write it), which to me at least is much preferable to Dam square and all the tourists. My hotel in particular, the people working there could NOT have been nicer, and the beds were the most comfortable thing you'd ever slept on.

The Amsterdam taxis, however, are the biggest rip-off on the planet - seriously, I haven't seen a taxi system this corrupt since I lived in Buenos Aires, or perhaps NYC circa the 1980s. Several of us got seriously ripped off by cabs, and I won't even tell you how much a cab charged me to go from the main train station to my hotel - let just say, 5 times the normal price would be about right. And not having a clue as to cab fares, I paid it. I know several others that also got screwed. Had it happened to one or two of us, it could written off as bad luck - but when several people I meet get screwed within a period of days, that is one corrupt taxi system. It just bugs me because apparently it's the big joke in town, how corrupt the cabs are - we went to a comedy show and it was all funny funny funny how the cabs rip off tourists - well, it really wasn't funny after they took me for a ton of money. Amsterdam needs to take the problem seriously, and I get the sense it doesn't, and it really left a very bad taste in my mouth.

Then there's KLM. Incredibly nice folks working there, the food was fine, the service was great, but the coach seats rank up there with one of the most painful flying experiences of my life (and I'm told we had coach plus, or whatever it's called). The seat in front of you is RIGHT in your face, and that's before they recline. Then some brainiac got the bright idea of taking up half of the under-the-seat space of the seat in front of you to deal with the in-flight movie apparatus. I fly a lot, and this was one of the most uncomfortable pain flights of my life, it was literally painful how bad the seats were. I hate to say it, because they seem an awfully nice airline, but I honestly wouldn't fly KLM again, the seats were that bad - literally painfully cramped. Someone is trying to eek out a bit more cash out of that airline, and they're ruining it just like the US carriers have become second rate boxcars that I also won't touch (if you fly a lot, you know what I'm talking about, our flight was almost nine hours from Amsterdam to DC, that's a long time to be in pain). Let's hope the merger with Air France doesn't poison that airline as well, since so far the seats on Air France have been great, but I hear they're shrinking as well.

But aside from the thieving taxis and the unfortunate KLM, I really loved Amsterdam. Had a ton of really interesting political conversations as well with folks, I'll get to those later. But suffice it to say that the Netherlands have a conservative government that is doing some things even further to the right of George Bush, in terms of "homeland security." I'll get to that later.

Anyway, good to be back. Kind of :-)

JOHN