Did you ever get that feeling?

Oh, what a day.  You’re probably going to think I’m nuts, but...

For the past two days, I have felt like Wayne and I were not alone in the hotel room during the day.  I can’t describe it, just felt like we were being watched.  And then each night, as I went to bed, weird stuff seemed like it was happening.  First, I heard music coming from near my CPAP machine as I had it on and was lying in bed.  Second, it sounded and felt like a second person was breathing on the machine.  Sure, it could just be the current difference, but the machine is rated to work on both.  And, when I held my breath, it made the same noise as if I were breathing.  Case of the wigged out redhead, I guess.  Anyway, not much sleep, and I told Wayne about it this morning.  Soooo, went to the concierge to ask about ghosts in the hotel.  He quickly responded that it was an older building and that, yes, it was very likely haunted.

At least I’m not the only stark raving madperson here!

For the most part, a nice day otherwise.  We went with Sue & Ivan to Keukenhof Garden, a little outside of Amsterdam.  This is the most lovely time to be there, the blooms are in full force.  We were picked up, transferred and headed out.  As we went, we saw more flower fields and learned why the tulip bulbs ordered from the gardens don’t go out until the fall -- they send them fresh, not dried!

Keukenhof is the world's largest flower garden, and is near Lisse, Netherlands. According to the official website for the Keukenhof Park, approximately 7 million flower bulbs are planted annually in the park.  The gardens are open annually from the last week in March to mid-May. We were fortunate, as the best time to view the tulips is generally mid-April.  The garden is situated on 15th century hunting grounds. It was also a source of herbs for Jacqueline, Countess of Hainaut’s castle, which is the source of the name Keukenhof (it literally castle's kitchen, and the bulbs themselves were cooked and eaten during WWII food shortages). The source of the bulbs, by the way, was Turkey originally!  Rich merchants took over the grounds after the Countess's death. The current garden was established in 1949 by the mayor of Lisse. The idea was to present a flower exhibit where growers from all over the Netherlands and Europe could show off their hybrids – and help the Dutch export industry, as the Netherlands is the world's largest exporter of flowers - and I had thought it was the Big Island of Hawaii! Keukenhof has now been the world's largest flower garden for over fifty years.

We got there at about 10, and then spent 2 1/2 hours roaming the place.  My only objectives were the windmill and Wilhelmina, and we hit both.

After we roamed around and took a lot of pictures of the fields, we headed back to Amsterdam and our hotel to get our checked luggage and head to the AmaCello.  Of course, when we get to the hotel, the luggage was not there, and had been transported (despite prior arrangements).  Needless to say, I was anxious and irritated, as my MacBook was in that bag!  And Wayne’s contained both his MacBook and our cruise vouchers.

Ivan and Sue shared their cab and we headed to the port.  Wayne and I headed to the boat, came in, and explained our plight.  Despite reassurances, we both wanted to see our luggage.  About five minutes later, it was brought out, and we retrieved our computers and headed to the  lounge.  BIG sigh of relief shared by both of us.

Check in was the smoothest I have ever seen.  We have only 140 passengers on this five level boat (three levels have cabins).  They checked us in by cabin number, after which I took a long nap (sleeping with a ghost in the room is not possible....I’m not crazy, I swear, I’m going to research that building!), and we headed to our inbriefing and safety briefing. Before the briefing, we ran into fellow cruisers Josimar and Jacques, and chatted for a bit (1/3 of the cruisers are MacGeeks, 2/3 Scientific America Geeks).  As we went into the room and sat down, Wally and Wendy showed up and sat with the five of us.  Crew introductions began, and we went over the rules of the road.  The crew is largely eastern European, and they worked hard to keep the mood light.  I am wondering what tomorrow’s safety drill will be like.  Our tip of the day was to draw the curtains in the evening, unless you want to wake up in the morning with people from the neighboring boat looking in and waving hello. :)

Dinner followed the briefings by 15 minutes, and it was a fabulous experience!  It is almost like a tasting experience, where you can sample as much or as little as you want.  We sat with Ivan and Sue and discussed the day, and enjoyed ourselves.

Exhausted, we headed back to the room, and, now that the blog is written, will crash for the evening.  Wayne has a 2 am teleconference call - yuck!  Tomorrow morning we leave port headed down the canal to the Rhine, and classes begin.

As with last night, welterusten allemaal!

Our first full day in Amsterdam

Although we went on our first Mac Geek cruise to take advantage of the seminars, and to see exciting new ports, Wayne and I now love to come back to renew those friendships, of which we have made a few.  First and foremost are Ivan and Sue Samuels, now retired from the optical career field, and enjoying travel.  We had an initial drink with them last night, a little over 2 year since last meeting up at MacMania 11.  Also in that group are now Don & Barb McAllister (who won’t be here), Wally & Wendy Cherwinski, Jacques Rizzi and Josimar King.  It is always a pleasure to meet up and greet with them.

Of course, the travel ain’t half bad, and the classes are awesome!

I wanted to write a little about our hotel, the Amrath, before talking about the day.  It is a fascinating building, and its view was impressive as we walked a half kilometer here from the central train station yesterday.  It occupies what used to be the Shipping House, and is right on the Grand Canal, built between 1912 and 1916 by an impressive group of architects from the Amsterdam School.  An office building, it sits on the very spot where Cornelis Houtman set out on the first voyage to East India in 1595, and is decorated with many symbols referring to the prosperous trade enjoyed.  It is made of many different, beautiful types of bricks, stained glass, hardwood, and relief stone.  Not to mention all of the granite.  Its central stairwell, going up three floors, is spectacular, and surrounded (and covered) by stained glass windows and roof.    The last shipping company left the Shipping House in 1981, and the building served as offices for the Municipal Transportation Company of Amsterdam.  In 1997, the building was bought with the intention of establishing a five star hotel, in which it was successful.       

Now on to the day!

We woke up early - 3 am - and couldn’t get back to sleep despite being exhausted, so Wayne checked on what time the Golden Hour was for sunrise.  Turns out from 6:17 until 7:35 or so.  So we washed up, read the news, sent emails, and waited to go out.  And it was cold.  41 degrees.  I teared my mascara off in the dry extreme cold.  This little bunny wanted to run back into the hotel, but we continued on and got the opportunity to take some interesting shots.  When we got back, my hands were so cold that they started to itch like there was poison ivy involved.  Blech.  From there we were off to a hearty breakfast in the hotel.

We set off this morning for the Anne Frank house, located outside of the central city.  It took about 20 minutes to walk there, and when we got there, the line to get in was perhaps three blocks long.  The Anne Frank House is located on the Prisengracht canal, dedicated to preserving the location where Anne and her family hid from the Nazis during WWII. The museum acts as an exhibition space to highlight all forms of persecution and discrimination, in addition to preserving the hiding space. Initially, after Anne’s diaries were published, visitors who wanted to see the secret rooms started coming to the house shortly after the book was published and many were informally shown around by the employees who had hidden the families. But by 1955 the company had moved to new premises and the entire block to which the building belonged was sold to a single estate agent who served a demolition order with the intention of building a factory on the space. A campaign to save the building and have it listed as a protected property was started by the Dutch paper Het Vrije Volk. Campaigners staged a protest outside the building on the day of demolition and the property received a stay of execution. The Anne Frank Foundation was set up by Otto Frank and Johannes Kleiman on 3 May 1957 with the primary aim of collecting enough funds to purchase and restore the building. In October of that year the company who owned it donated the building to the Foundation as a goodwill gesture. The collected funds were then used to purchase the house next door, Number 265, shortly before the remaining buildings on the block were pulled down as planned and the building was opened to the public in 1960.  Over the years the building has had to be renovated to protect it from large visitor numbers, and as a result it closed temporarily in 1970 and in 1999. On 28 September 1999, Queen Beatrix of the Netherlands reopened the museum, which now incorporates the entire building between exhibition spaces, a bookshop, and a cafe, and featured the offices in the front house reconstructed to their state in the 1940s.  A very moving museum, you see where an entire family remained hidden for a long time due to the beneficence of kind neighbors.  The space in which the Frank family remained is unbelievably cramped, and the fact that Anne retained any positive outlook on life was amazing.                                 

After this excursion, we walked to the “floating” flower market, which has been in place for the last 200 years.  We saw some amusing and beautiful plant bulbs and seeds for sale.  Watch it Dad & Pam, you may be getting some bulbs soon...one thing I noticed during our walking this morning is the complete deference that is shown not to pedestrians, but to the bicyclists.  Cars and trucks don’t stop for pedestrians, and the bicyclists apparently curse at the pedestrians who get in their way.  For a city with as many two wheelers as Amsterdam (which doesn’t even rate on the scale of Beijing), it makes for a disconcerting walk.                       

After the morning walk, we wound up at CHIN (short for Chinese Indonesian) Sea Village floating restaurant for dim sum lunch.  By that time we had racked up about 6 miles walking, and enjoyed sitting down to the meal.  The number of houseboats of different styles became a topic of conversation, with discussions of how one might need to live in a boat while trading down along the canals and rivers of Europe.  Waste management and boat upkeep (of which there looked like there was none) is also a curiosity.

Following lunch we went to Nemo, a science center The museum has its origins in 1923, and is housed in a building designed by Renzo Piano since 1997. It contains five floors of hands-on science exhibitions and is the largest science center in the Netherlands.  The floors are divided by concept and age.  The main concepts on the first floor are DNA and chain reactions which include a room with giant dominoes with contraptions like a giant bell and a flying car. Also on the first floor is a show on the half-hour, which features a large chain reaction circuit.  On the second floor is a ball factory where small plastic balls are sent on a circuit where participants are to group them in weight, size and color and then send them to a packing facility where the balls go into a small metal box. There are five stations at which the people stick magnetic barcodes on the boxes and send them off to start the circuit again. On the second level there is also a small cafeteria and a movie and performance hall where various acts and movies about science are shown. The second floor also features a display on the water cycle a display on electricity and a display on metals and buildings.  This floor targets younger children. The third floor, starting to gear towards adolescents, has a giant science lab in which people can do science experiments such as testing vitamin C in certain substances and looking at DNA. On the fourth floor, for teens, is a section about the human mind, it has such experiments as memory tests, mind problems and sense testers. There is also a section geared towards learning about your body as a teen, and about sexuality.  One section is called “peep show,” and it was crammed with adolescents looking at sex ed tapes.  There was also a wall of dolls in various, um, positions.  Only in Amsterdam.               

Dinner (after a nap) was with Sue and Ivan at a wonderful Indian restaurant, Ganesha.  If ever you are in Amsterdam, and crave Indian, go there.                                             

Tomorrow to Keukenhof Gardens, and then set sail.  Welterusten allemaal!

A little bit about Amsterdam

These facts were compiled with the help of the CIA world factbook and a Lonely Planet guidebook or two.

Amsterdam is the largest city and the capital of the Netherlands. The city is located in the province of North Holland in the west of the country. It comprises the northern part of the Randstad, with a population of approximately 7 million. Amsterdam's name is derived from Amstelredamme, a dam in the river Amstel. It began as a small fishing village in the late 12th century, and became one of the most important ports in the world during the Dutch Golden Age. During that time, the city was the leading center for finance and diamonds, a fact capitalized upon in the Bond movie Diamonds are Forever. The 17th-century canals of Amsterdam were added to the UNESCO World Heritage List in July 2010.

Amsterdam was granted city rights in the early 1300s From the 14th century on, Amsterdam flourished thanks to trade with the Hanseatic League, moving the city away from land reclamation and farming

In the 16th century, the Dutch rebelled against Philip II of Spain and his successors. The main reasons for the uprising were the imposition of new taxes, the tenth penny, and the religious persecution of the Protestants by the Spanish Inquisition. The revolt escalated into the Eighty Years’ War, which ultimately led to Dutch independence. The Dutch Republic became known for its relative religious tolerance. Jews from the Iberian Peninsula, Huguenots from France, prosperous merchants and printers from Flanders, and economic and religious refugees from the Spanish-controlled parts of the Low Countries found safety in Amsterdam. The influx of Flemish printers and the city's intellectual tolerance made Amsterdam a centre for the European free press.

The 17th century is considered Amsterdam's Golden Age, during which it became the wealthiest city in the world. Ships sailed from Amsterdam to the Baltic Sea, North America, and Africa, as well as present-day Indonesia, India, Sri Lanka, and Brazil, forming the basis of a worldwide trading network. Amsterdam's merchants had the largest share in both the Dutch East India Company and the Dutch West India Company. These companies acquired overseas possessions that later became Dutch colonies.

Amsterdam lost over 10% of its population to plague in 1623–1625, and again in 1635–1636, 1655, and 1664. Nevertheless, the population of Amsterdam rose in the 17th century (largely through immigration) from 50,000 to 200,000.

Amsterdam's prosperity declined during the 18th and early 19th centuries. The Dutch wars with England and France took their toll on Amsterdam. During the Napoleonic Wars, Amsterdam's significance reached its lowest point, with Holland being absorbed into the French Empire. However, the later establishment of the United Kingdom of the Netherlands in 1815 marked a turning point.

The end of the 19th century is sometimes called Amsterdam's second Golden Age. New museums, a train station, and the Concertgebouw were built; in this same time, the Industrial Revolution reached the city. The Amsterdam-Rhine Canal, which we will be cruising through,  was dug to give Amsterdam a direct connection to the Rhine, and the North Sea Canal was dug to give the port a shorter connection to the North Sea. Both projects dramatically improved commerce with the rest of Europe and the world.  Shortly before the First World War, the city began expanding, and new suburbs were built. Even though the Netherlands remained neutral in this war, Amsterdam suffered a food shortage, and heating fuel became scarce. The shortages sparked riots, known as the Potato rebellion, in which several people were killed.

Germany invaded the Netherlands on 10 May 1940 and took control of the country. Some Amsterdam citizens sheltered Jews, thereby exposing themselves and their families to the high risk of being imprisoned or sent to concentration camps. More than 100,000 Dutch Jews were deported to Nazi concentration camps. Perhaps the most famous deportee was the young Jewish girl Anne Frank, who died in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp. At the end of the Second World War, communication with the rest of the country broke down, and food and fuel became scarce.

Because of the war and other incidents of the 20th century, almost the entire city centre had fallen into disrepair. As society was changing, politicians and other influential figures made plans to redesign large parts of it. There was an increasing demand for office buildings and new roads as the automobile became available to most common people. A metro was built connecting Amsterdam Central to outlying suburbs, and plans for a highway began.

The incorporated large-scale demolitions began in Amsterdam's formerly Jewish neighborhood. Smaller streets were widened and saw almost all of their houses demolished. During the destruction's peak, the Nieuwmarkt riots broke out, where people expressed their fury about the demolition caused by the restructuring of the city. As a result, the demolition was stopped, and the highway was never built, with only the metro being finished. Only a few streets remained widened. Large private organizations were founded with the aim of restoring the entire city center. Efforts for further restoration are still ongoing. The entire city center is now a protected area, with many of its buildings made monuments.

The long trip here

Well, the trip that caught my eye early last year (and we started planning for the same day) is finally here.  So we packed our bags, left Eliot with the kitties, and had Lee & Dianne drop us off at the airport.

We’re headed out on a river cruise of the Rhine on the AmaCello, part of the AMA Waterways river cruise fleet.  Much, much smaller than we are used to, only 150 passengers, and all of them geeks of one kind or another (there’s a simultaneous science geek cruise, offering a side trip to the Max Planck Institute and the Supercollider).

We will be boarding in two days!

The trip to get here was long - we started at 9pm on Sunday (Hawaii time) and wound up in our room in the Grand Hotel Amrath in Amsterdam at about 11:30 am Tuesday (Netherlands time).  The flight pattern went from Honolulu - Orange County - Houston - Amsterdam.  And took forever!  Our longest segment was 10 1/2 hours.  I need to look at cruises on my side of the planet in the future.  It would not have been so bad, but I have been crippled with the traveler’s disease since yesterday, and have not slept in 25 hours. Until a little bit ago.  We took a short nap after checking in after literally taking planes, trains and automobiles.  I was so tired and impacted by, ahem, the effects of the disease I was wobbly on my feet.  The desk captain looked at me and went, “Oh, bad jet lag, I see.”

For the first time in our overseas (South America and Europe, to be precise), we wound up in a room with a comfy king size bed, and a tub made for someone of Dad’s size, not Will’s!  Yeah!

First impressions - Amsterdam airport was not nearly as hectic as all those years ago when I was headed to Moscow to meet a certain Will with his family.  All my luggage made it, none of my connections were delayed, and I didn’t have to deal with Aeroflot.  And it was like coming to a country filled with me - glamazon women of my height wearing 4 inch heeled boots tooling around there airport.  To be certain, there are a fair number of short people as well, but we’re no longer in the land of the menehunes. 

I’m still a bit tired, but we need to stay up, and I need to figure out if I have managed to damage my FTP client.  I’m still trying to post the blog from Costa Rica!  Hopefully some of my MacGeek friends will be able to help me out.

Northern California meets southern Argentina

At 55 degrees south latitude, Ushuaians claim to live in the world’s southernmost city, although the Chilean town of Puerto Williams on the southern side of the channel is a legitimate challenger. Ushuaians note that theirs is a true “city,” but the word wards persist. Ushuaia is Argentina’s fastest growing city, partially because of economic opportunity and partially because of its status as a duty free port.

Ushuaia’s houses are painted in pastel colors to brighten things a bit. Winter temperatures drop well below zero, and the sun rises only briefly during the season. Summer, the climate is pleasant, and it can even get warm. Strong winds can and do blow up in an instant and calm in the next, especially in summer.

The Argentine Navy once operated a penal colony on Isla de los Estados, a tiny island off of Tierra del Fuego’s eastern coast. The prison at Presidio de Ushuaia functioned during the Devils’s Island era, and was considered escape proof. Argentina was vying with Chile for the disputed territories in the area and the penitentiary offered a plausible excuse for maintaining military presence. Residents at the time were mostly nomadic hunters and trappers who considered themselves not Chilean or Argentinian, but Patagonian.

After the turn of the century, the jail was relocated to Ushuaia and it became a favored holding place for political prisoners until after WWII. Though it has a rather unpleasant history, Ushuaia owes its existence to the institution. The train that brought in prisoners returned northward with local wood. In 1947, the prison became part of the Naval base, and has now been restored as the Museo Penetencario.

I spent the early morning today working out, having a late breakfast, and then heading into town with Wayne after washing up. We walked down to the Falklands War Memorial (right by the one casino in town), headed up to the Anglican church, Iglesia de la Merced, billed as the southernmost Anglican church in the world, and then up to the Presidio. Once we finished walking about, we wound up at Galway’s Irish Pub, where we hoped to get a pint of Ushuaia’s own Beagle Beer. Unfortunately, they were out, and we were worried that we wouldn’t be able to taste the beer named for HMS Beagle.

As luck would have it, we found a three pack at duty-free as we headed back to the boat, so we were able to sample the beers over the rest of the day.

The big event of the afternoon was the decontamination of all our outerwear for the trip to Antarctica. We had to wash the soles of our shoes, and then vacuum all the remaining outerwear and our backpacks in order to avoid bringing in any foreign flora with us to the continent. We will be a group of 40+, and only 20 people are allowed on King George’s island at any given time, so I think there will be quite a bit of downtime on the continent tomorrow, given that we are able to make the flight due to visibility and winds. Wish us luck!

It was still light at dinner (sunset is after 9 pm), so our evening meal with Ivan and Sue was more than pleasant. Glaciers still abound as we move out of the Beagle Canal and towards the Straits of Magellan.

Wish us luck!