Day: August 19, 2008

I woke up with a mild hangover this morning, courtesy of Amsterdam’s finest. The construction noises didn’t help either. Breakfast was, if possible, even worse than yesterday and I didn’t stop burping it until close to noon.

Michel and Isabelle dropped their luggage off in my room while we went for a canal cruise this morning. It was a nice, easy way to wake up and then we parted ways. They picked up their luggage and took the train to Rotterdam to continue on their merry holidaymaker ways and I took the tram to the conference to see all the fun I’d been missing there.

Apparently the food here is horrible too (though I had no plans to sample it). I chatted a bit with the booth folk, uploaded my presentation to the speakers’ presentation system and then took in the poster sessions and the exhibitor hall. A few posters caught my eye and I found out that a company working in Victoria is planning a massive hiring spurt for software developers so I could have a job in Canada in the next few months if I wanted one. I’ll have to keep them in mind when my contract is up because, were I to come back to Canada post-EBI, the two places that I’d consider are Montreal and BC. The exhibitor booth is shockingly barren of good schwag. Everybody is only giving away cheap-looking pens. T-shirts, people, t-shirts! My preferred conference remains Javapolis, but I don’t think Ben will allow me to attend this year (and it was my turn on the rota too!)

The plan for tonight is to be a good boy. I’m going to go grab a bagel from the shop I found yesterday and then head back to the hotel. I want to go over my talk a few times and have an early night.

The conference program held nothing of interest for me and Michel and Isabelle – who I had not seen in ages – were in town. So I didn’t go to the conference and made the tactical decision to waste my time with fun friends instead of wasting my time trying to not fall asleep in a dark auditorium listening to recycled keynote lectures. We shall speak of this no more.

I woke up to a very noisy hotel room. I’d always been led to believe that Ibis hotels were good. Hopefully, this is the one exception that proves the rule. To put it bluntly, this Ibis Amsterdam Central has no redeeming features except that it’s close to the train station and that the rooms have 4 walls and a bed. Right now, the hotel is a construction site because planned renovations are taking longer than expected. I woke up to the pleasant noise of an impact hammer and various drills. The breakfast buffet has to be one of the worst hotel breakfasts I’ve ever had the displeasure to have. The “eggs” are so bland that the amount of salt and pepper needed to add some taste to them is frightening. They would also make good wallpaper paste. There is no bacon. Let me repeat this. There is no bacon. This might be very North Americal of me, but THERE IS NO BACON. This is a crime against humanity. Ok, so I exaggerate a bit, but it doesn’t change the fact that the decor is cafeteria-chic and looks onto train tracks and that the food is even less appealing than the decor. Like the rats from Ratatouille say: “food is fuel”, so I managed to find some things to eat.

Michel and Isabelle were still a bit jetlagged so they said they’d catch up with me around noon-ish. I didn’t want to waste too much sunlight to I went to the Rijksmuseum. The Rembrandts are… stunning! I’d never really looked at one. The light, the detail, the vibrancy of them! Beautiful. Took my breath away. There were also some Vermeers (he painted The Girl with the Peal Earring – but that painting is in the Hague) that were impressive, but Rembrandt steals the show.

After that, I went to the Van Gogh museum to wait in the queue while Michel and Isabelle were en route. Amusing moment: two French tourists were waiting behind me. One said to the other: “everybody is so civilized. Everybody is waiting quietly and nobody is cutting in the queue”. The other replies; “we’re not in France here”. :D

Finally the dynamic duo arrived and we met up and chatted about silliness while we waited to get in. The Van Goghs were impressive, but less so than the Rembrandts. What was impressive is the sheer amount of them. Pictures I’d only seen in books, not two feet away from my nose with only a little metal rail separating us. I didn’t know that old Vincent had had an Oriental period where he tried to replicate the Japanese woodblock print style. I bought a really cool poster of one of those.

We went to a “diamond museum” afterwards which was one part small, tacky exhibit room and nine parts large, tacky shopping area. The stuff was not particularly nice and bloody expensive. We went walkies after that with no real aim in sight.

Isabelle is an even bigger shutterbug than I am! She’s always snapping away at random things. The memory card on her camera is rated for a few thousand pictures and I’m certain that she’ll fill it in before the end of their trip. She kept telling Michel to “act natural” when she wanted to pose a scene with him in it :)

We had tea and lunch at a little bagel shop and then we went walking along the canals and in the flower market. Isabelle kept saying “photo opportunity” but the first time she said that, Michel heard “hippopotame chauve” which, translated, means “bald hippopotamus”. We kept teasing him about it. The weather was off and on. Raining a bit then a bit of sun, then more drizzle. Lather, rinse, repeat.

We went walking in the red light district. In daylight, it’s not really a pleasant sight. The hookers are past their sell-by dates and the whole area is grimy. Isabelle waned shortly after to she went back to her hotel while Michel and I made plans to sample some of Amsterdam’s finest, have dinner then see the red light in hopefully better light (when darkness would hide the worst of the grime).

The coffee shops are very generous in their portions and we discovered tat Amsterdam’s finest is potent as hell! We sat on the banks of the Gentlemens’ canal and shared a doobie. Now granted, it was a big doobie and had no tobacco in it to cut things down, but still. da-yum! I hadn’t been that stoned in years! We managed to fight back the giggles and had dinner in a nice steakhouse near Rembrandtplein.

Even though the night-shift of hookers in the red light is of better stock than the day-shift, it still leaves something to be desired. If I’d been single and carefree, there would have been only three or four ladies of negotiable affection that would have tempted my fancy in the dozens and dozens that we saw. The district is also packed with drunks, dopeheads, pickpockets and generally smelly and unpleasant tourists. We didn’t linger. Michel hailed a cab and dropped my off at my hotel on the way to his.

I talked with Katy on the phone, watched the olympic highlights and went to sleep.