Tuesday, 22nd of June, 2004

So… We’ve made it to London, and it’s rainy and cold - what a surprise ;)
Strangely though, the weather apparently was beautiful until we arrived. *sigh* Hopefully it’ll improve, although weather reports claim it’ll rain until Friday. I don’t mind cold rather than hot weather (walking around in hot weather, as you’ll have gathered from my previous post, does not agree with me…) but when it’s cold(ish), they heat the insides of everywhere, so it’s nonstop on-and-off with jumper, and I get sweaty anyway. Fun.
Another disappointment: Cory Doctorow is giving a talk in London on “Nerd Determinism, Nerd Fatalism, and the Copyfight” - next Monday. And I go back home on Friday. Oh well.

Housekeeping: please note there are some additional bits in red in the last Tour Diary entry - stuff I forgot to include before…

Where did I leave off? Just before the last day in New York, I do believe! Last day in New York, we had a plane to catch at 6pm or something, so had some time (leaving our luggage @ the lobby) to look around a bit. To our disappointment, the Museum of Modern Art (which I haven’t been to) is closed on Monday - trust us not to find out until we’d already decided to do museums then! So we wandered up to the Guggenheim. Always great to visit it simply because it’s a beautiful piece of Frank Lloyd Wright architecture. Good stuff there, then we walked through Central Park, and ended up having lunch at the same diner we breakfasted at on our first day…

The train out to JFK a reasonably uncomplicated affair, and not hugely expensive. You take the subway out to Howard Beach or something, and then catch the airport train to the airport. Bizarrely, the latter thing is a two-carriage train without any driver at all. Nor any staff on it. Completely automatic. Presumably they’re so precisely timed that they just go round and round, like toy train sets. Wheee!
Once at the airport, Ange wanted to look for some sort of universal power adapter for the MiniDisc player she’d bought - and none were to be found! Clearly more US isolationism at work, methinks…
There were annoying American kids on our flight, but other than that everything seemed ok. Due to time-zone changes between the US and Europe, we ended up losing basically the entire night for flying…

We got to Dublin airport and nobody on our Aer Lingus flight told us what to do about transfers. The line for customs was rather long, and our connecting flight was perilously close. We dashed off as soon as we could, round and up and across through the terrorist-check, and arrived just in time to see the stairway being pulled away from the plane. “We didn’t think you’d make it in time”. Well thanks.
On zipping back down to the baggage claim we discovered the transfers desk, where the girls were extraordinarily helpful. They told us our baggage wouldn’t have made that plane anyway, and put us on the next flight to Amsterdam - 3 hours hence. We got �6.50 breakfast vouchers and headed off to wait. Awesome upshot of this: They have free WiFi at Dublin airport! So Peter’s internet-addiction was fed nicely, and the time was used well.

Once we arrived in Amsterdam, it was an easy hop onto the train to Amsterdam-Centraal, and thence on a tram down to our hotel, the Quentin Hotel - a cute little place around the corner from the Leidseplein that FourPlay stayed at on our last European tour. Despite having left my Amsterdam map at home, I was proud to work out where we were going. Mostly my remembered mental map of Amsterdam was on-target.

Amsterdam’s a beautiful place, and even though it was hardly warm after the US, it was very pleasant to be there. Ange was enchanted straight away, and decided we could move there sometime *chuckle* - and its easy-going nature, combined with all the fabulous old streets/canals/buildings made an immediate impact compared to America. The overall feeling was “Why does the US think it’s so great?” Annnnyway.
Our hotel room was absolutely tiny, but still very cute and perfectly comfortable. Although my feet were aching (and didn’t stop aching - better now in London, although not 100%), we just had to wander the streets. After all the delays, we had less than half a day left, but Wednesday was to be our only full day in Amsterdam. I decided we’d go looking for Lambiek, a very cool comics shop/gallery and compulsory place of visitation in Amsterdam. I’d forgotten my map though (remember?), and we thus trooped along Prinsengracht for, well, some time before I decided it definitely wasn’t right.
Heading up the perpendicular street (if that makes sense, given A’dam’s amazing concentric-circular layout) we stumbled upon a very cool record store, Get Records - which I don’t think existed when I was last there. Perhaps I was just ignorant. We immediately discovered just how cheap US CDs are… At near �20 per CD with an exchange rate of about double for AUD$, most albums were just priced right out of our range, despite Get having a wonderful selection. I bought the new Shadow Huntaz EP and the guy behind the desk commented that I was an Australian with great taste in music ;) We asked him where Lambiek was an discovered I’d been one street out - it was on the non-canal street that goes around just inside Prinsengracht’s “orbit”.
Lambiek’s main shop is being renovated (it truly looks like it’s going to cave in, although many of Amsterdam’s buildings have looked like that for decades I’m sure), so it was confusingly on the other side of the road, and in smaller premises. Still quite a good lot of stuff, but very little artwork on display. I found a few old comics and we headed on. I found the internet caf� that I referred to in my 1999 Tour Diary (back when it was called Internet Caf�, much to my amusement) and we had some great cheap internet and a strong hot chocolate… or was it pear juice? These details are what make my tour diaries, um… suck, I think. Anyway.

Exhaustion set in, and we ended up having delicious schawarma pita with marinated chillis and endless salad from one of the places up from the Leidseplein - a meal that was in fact my staple diet on previous visits to the ‘Dam. Our New York schawarma was probably better, but lacked the essential chillis and cabbage an’ all.
Next day, more of the same. We visited the Van Gogh museum, which was fun (especially some of his contemporaries, Fauvists and the like). We walked and walked, looked around the Jordaan and found very little, ate more schawarma… Ended up having Thai for dinner, with an Australian Thai waitress.

I organised with Al Reynolds to meet up with him at Schiphol Airport on the Thursday, as it’s quite near to where he lives, about an hour before we had to go through customs for our flight to Barcelona. So we headed up in the morning to Centraal station, and tried to find the platform for the Schiphol train. After some waiting we discovered that the train on the platform wasn’t going to the airport - and nor was the next one when we changed platforms! On inquiring, we were informed that there were no trains going to Schiphol, because of some electrical fault somewhere, and we’d have to take a train to some other station and change there for the airport. Time was running out fast, and I was getting increasingly jittery as we waited for the first train, then got off and waited for the other train in god-knows-where, Netherlands (actually not far out, but anyway). By the time we got to the meeting point our appointed (haha) hour with Alastair was long gone, and I couldn’t find him anywhere there. We checked in upstairs and headed back down, but the time was gone (he had a meeting he had to get to in the arvo). So I missed out on meeting one of my fave sf authors. See the Cory Doctorow note above for more vexing sf scheduling… in addition, the timing change (to June) that made it possible for us to go to Sónar (which I don’t regret for a minute) meant that I couldn’t find a way to fit in a visit to Edinburgh and a meeting with Charlie Stross. Oh well. Next time.

And I think I’ll leave it there for now. Next time (hopefully tomorrow), I’ll give a full review of our Barcelona/Sónar experiences, including a storming set from Drop The Lime, the awesomely awesome Four Tet and the ever-charming Kid Koala…

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