When I decided to head to Brussels before the London training, I figured I would take the “chunnel” train from Brussels to London on Sunday, but I didn’t quite know what to do with my Saturday. My original plan was to sleep in and just visit the city, but I’ve also been lucky enough to meet some amazing people in my life, and I carry around a mental Rolodex of where these people live.

My first thought was to look up Rosa Mei. We went to high school together and even slept together for a week. It was quite platonic, however, as we were both staying at Twin Oaks farm in Virginia during Special Projects Week and neither of us wanted the top bunk. She manages a dance company, and when it was hard to find patrons in New York she moved to Belgium, although I wasn’t sure where.

Turns out she is in Antwerp and at age 46 has just had two children. I’m not a huge fan of children in the best of times, and visiting newborn twins is right up there with a root canal. I was still game to visit but once our e-mail correspondence sort of petered out I didn’t pursue it.

Then I remembered that another classmate of mine, Grayson, lived in the Netherlands. That’s close, right? Be-Ne-Lux and all that?

So I wrote to her and mentioned I had never been to Amsterdam, so she and her husband Marco arranged for child care, a train trip from where they live to the city, and they offered to show me around.

Amsterdam is over 200km from Brussels, but Thalys has a high speed train that gets there in less than two hours. It was fairly inexpensive, so I was up for the trip. Out at 8:50, in at 10:30, back out at 18:00 and home by 20:00. Four hours on the train for seven hours in the city.

I knew I would like Marco when I was sent a link to a Google document of his that had laid out the entire visit. It included a map of the train station with the place we were to meet circled in red. We would then take a boat ride on the canals to see the city from the river, walk through the red light district to a nice café for lunch, head over to the Hermitage museum to see some van Gogh, a visit to some jewelry stores to look for a present for Andrea (she gets jewelry whenever I visit a new country), drinks and back to the station in time for the train.

The outbound train went smoothly, with stops in Antwerp, Rotterdam, Schipol before Amsterdam. I love traveling by high speed train. You zoom along at over 150 mph and it is still pretty smooth. No metal detectors or pat downs, and you can get up and move around whenever you want.

I didn’t print out the instructions because I was pretty sure I knew where to meet them, but I was wrong. I wandered around the station looking for the particular chocolate store Marco had indicated on the map and I couldn’t find it. On my third pass or so I heard my name – Grayson tracked me down. It turns out the store had closed. (sigh)

We had just enough time to make the boat ride. Now, you have to understand that it was *cold* in Amsterdam and the ground was covered in snow. In fact, imagine that some light snow has begun to fall because it had. The last thing I wanted to do at that time was get on a boat.

Luckily, we got *in* a boat – the boats were heated and had clear covers over them. Despite that there was a time when some snow actually made it into the boat (through some sort of vent I would assume).

The boat tour was cool, but I was so eager to catch up with Grayson and meet Marco that I have to admit I only paid attention to half of it. We went out into the harbour and then back into the old part of the city. I remember seeing the Dancing Houses but then we had to turn around since the canal was iced over. The tour continued but the audio commentary failed to sync up with the view outside the boat. Much of the time you could hear broken ice scrape along the sides.

After the ride we headed off to lunch. Along the way we made a detour through part of Amsterdam’s famous Red Light District. It wasn’t quite what I expected – I was thinking more along the lines of Bourbon Street in New Orleans with its wide street and elevated picture windows – but the area is made up of narrow alleys with shops selling sex novelties (with interesting window displays) and then there are street level glass doors, behind which stand young ladies available for hire. Marco figured they would be pretty bored as it was the middle of the day but the few I saw working were animated and dancing around. I think it was due to the fact that they had on little clothing and did I mention it was frackin’ cold? I did laugh when Marco told of a friend of his who liked to spend several minutes haggling with one of the ladies only to walk off.

In any case, we found the restaurant and some much needed heat, and I finally got some time to chat. Back in 2003, Marco’s H1B visa was about to expire for the second time, so he needed to leave the country for awhile and with young children they figured it would be nice to live near Marco’s family as they could help with baby sitting duties, etc. This being soon after 9/11, Grayson told a horrifying tale of the move and trying to get three children and bags through the airport when the bags ended up being checked three times. Grayson had spent some time in Amsterdam before meeting Marco so she had decided to learn the language, and now she speaks it like a native (at least to my ears).

After lunch we wandered through the streets some more on our way to the Hermitage museum. The architecture was similar to Brussels, and although I didn’t take many pictures I did get a shot of a cool looking art deco theatre.

The Hermitage is the acting host for the van Gogh museum while it is being renovated. I always considered myself a fan, so I was eager to see such a large display of his work. The exhibit took up half of the museum over two floors and featured over 75 paintings.

It was cool, but I was surprised to find that I loved half of the works and really didn’t care for the other half (I almost wrote “hated” but that is too strong a word). I couldn’t help thinking that if I was in art school and turned one of those paintings in for a grade I would have failed (and according to my friend and van Gogh fanatic Frank, Vincent did get kicked out of art school). Marco pointed out that he couldn’t look at any one of the works without thinking “millions of dollars” and I had to agree. There were some famous pieces such as “The Bedroom” and a couple of flower still life paintings, but it also contained lesser works as well as some of his letters (mainly to his brother Theo) and some of the art he owned that served as inspiration (he had a thing for Japanese art). It was a lovely way to spend an afternoon (and it was indoors) and I think if I return to Amsterdam and the museum restoration is complete that I would visit the collection again.

While we were in the museum the snow stopped, the wind died down and it got a little warmer. This made walking around the city much more pleasant. Marco showed me some more famous sites, such as the Begijnhof Chapel. When the chapel switched from Catholic to Protestant, one of the worshipers refused to be buried in it and is instead buried near the gutter in the street at her request. We also did some shopping. Ever since my trip to Syria in 1994 I have tried to purchase a nice piece of jewelry for Andrea for every new country I visit ([see my chart][7]) and since this was my first trip to the Netherlands I was hoping to find something for her.

That done we found a warm place for drinks and conversation, and then headed back to the station so that I could catch my train to Brussels and they could head home. Once again I fell in love with train travel, if for the only reason that Grayson and Marco were able to walk with me and see me off.

I was a lovely way to spend a Saturday and I hope to be able to return some day, preferably with Andrea, more time and when it is warmer.