I never realised how short the flight to Amsterdam was. By the time we were off the ground, the seat belt light had gone off and the drinks people had come round so that we could get a can of beer (I blame jns), we were almost landing again.
The difference between the Thameslink train from London Bridge to Gatwick (10 pounds for a single, 8 minutes late, and absolutely full) and the train from Schipol to Amsterdam (6.50 Guilders single, which is more like two quid, with plenty of space and an astoundingly smooth ride) was worth mentioning. Sigh.
After discerning our way through the mysteries of the strippenkarten and the curiously (for a Londoner, anyway) trusting entry gates, we got the Metro to the hotel. Well, we actually got off the Metro, looked confused, finally trudged long a verge to the hotel proper, where all the people who'd spurned public transport were already happily esconsed in the bar. Plus ca change.
An expedition into town gradually formed; I was one of those who got an insane taxi driver to take us into town, complete with 'fun' tramline riding. Unsurprisingly, perhaps, the lure of the coffee shops proved irresistable to some. (A lot of people just stuck with beer, though.) The fifteen or so London.pm-ers and associated friends eventually met up with Skud, sky and a host of others, and we walked around the city towards... something that claimed to be an NY state house. Nice place, though. Last Metro home, and a nature trek back to the hotel. I slept, in preperation for this morning. (Seemed like a plan.)
Oh, and in the obPerl section, richardc seems to have taken on board my ranting about message-ids in mailing lists from Tuesday night. (I summarise a busy-ish (400 posts a week) list, and it has a Pipermail archive I like to link to so people can see what I was talking about without excessive effort. Unfortunately, the URLs aren't in the email, so I have to manually match them. Wouldn't it be nice, I said, if the archiver used a header added by the listserv that could uniquely identify the message?) Might get something out of that this week.
