Part Two
Planes, Trains & Automobiles: The beginning.
April 15th hadn’t come soon enough. The winter trimester (not to mention this publication) had taken its toll on my energy. Anywhere away from home, school and the excuse I called a job sounded good. The further. The better. At some point earlier in the trimester I decided to go to Europe. It was my tradition after all. I was overdue a visit to the Atlantic to visit friends and places before the end of my golden year—April 29, 2006. There were still a few things to finish checking off on my “to-do-before-30 list”. One item was to visit and experience one new country; it would be Slovenia. Before I got that far, I would traverse through Iceland, England, the Netherlands, Spain and Italy.
Arriving into London’s Heathrow airport at 11:45 a.m., Major and I had the interesting task of getting to Stansted airport between 4:30 and 6:00 p.m. Heathrow is a good 20 minutes from the metropolitan train to the city center, and Stansted is almost an hour out of the London’s city center. A good part of our afternoon went into finding a pub and getting a couple of dishes of “bangers and mash.” The remaining time went to finding out how to get to Stansted. For a while, we enjoyed the scenery and laughed at the bartender’s commentary on gratuity. Soon enough we were on our way. Major was off to Venice, Italy, and I was on my way to the Netherlands. We would meet up again in just under a week.
“Hey. I made it to London, England. I’ll be in AMS around 9:40 p.m. and should be able to catch up with you close to 10:30 p.m. at Rotterdam Central. Let me know where to find you. F,” is what the text message read as I sent it to Selma. Her last e-mail from a couple of weeks back expressed welcome and a lot of disbelief at my potential arrival. All my plans to revisit her never worked out. Now, I was only a few hours away.
As the flight attendant announced our arrival to Schiphol, Amsterdam’s international airport, I started to become more lucid. It had been 32 hours since I slept last. Making my way off the plane and down to the baggage claim area seemed very familiar. I switched on my mobile. I was hoping the text message I sent a few hours back made it to Selma. If it had, she hadn’t acknowledged it. “No worries,” I thought as I walked through customs and toward the train ticket counter. The train to Rotterdam was due to leave in 15 minutes. I sent Selma another text message knowing the train ride was an hour long giving her enough time to text me back. I was tired, and it was starting to hit me.
On the train, I drifted in and out of consciousness for what seemed like 20 minutes as the train started to slow. “Hmm. Not the stop that’s on my schedule!” Realizing I had gotten on the wrong train sent a jolt of adrenaline through my body. I was now awake and quickly moving to the exit door to get off. Before long, I was in route back to the airport staying on the train until it reached Amsterdam Central. It was now 11:10 p.m. I began to wonder if I needed to give up getting to Rotterdam and Selma till the next day. It was something I was hoping to avoid.
Amsterdam’s nightlife was in full bloom. The fresh smell of “weed” drifted through the air like an overdose of bad cologne for a night on the town. Obnoxious tourist, drunk and lost, seemed to be flooding in and out of doorways everywhere at once as if it was a synchronized bar event. Some of the doorways belonged to bars while others were to live sex show stages. Off in the narrow side roads, I could see the red doors and lights of the famous Red Light district crowed by packs of men. And like wolves, they seemed to have saliva dripping from their mouths as their evening ‘dessert’ was now available to service their needs for the right price. “Life’s common denominator—sex.” I kept on walking. I needed sleep, and I needed it soon. It was then that my mobile’s alert went off.
“…That only took two weeks,” I spouted off opening the message. “Where are you?” is not what I was expecting to read realizing she must have waited for me at the station in Rotterdam. Changing direction, I asked where I should go to find her. Moments later the message came back and said, “Den Hegg.” I knew the name but not the town; it was a 30-minute train ride. So, I was off.
Along the way, Selma sent me the name of the bar, which I couldn’t pronounce and was certain to miss looking for it on my own. The possibility of missing her in Den Haag was big and would mean homelessness for the night. Ha ha ha. It was now 12:25 a.m. A line of taxi cabs had formed just outside of the station. I asked one of the drivers where I could catch tram #6 at which he replied were no longer running. Not after midnight. “Great!” I thought. “I’ll pay you whatever it costs for you to drive me to where that tram goes,” I said with an obvious look of eagerness showing him the names on the text message I had received earlier. He motioned a “yes” with his head, and we were off.
“In a cab. Be there in 10 minutes. What are the cross street names?” was the last message I sent to Selma. The cabby knew the place about as well as I did—not at all. Before too long, we arrived at a gas station where he got directions to the opposite side of the street. I could see the plaza. It was packed. I paid the guy and started walking. The first bar I went into and asked for directions (pointing to the names on my mobile screen) was worthless, as the bartender hadn’t heard of it before. A small sharp pain shot into my chest. “I could very well be in the wrong plaza,” I thought knowing I was going to miss Selma my first of two nights in the Netherlands. Worse. I would be homeless.
As I walked toward the next pub attempting to decide on a better plan of action till morning, I heard someone call my name. I was a familiar sound. Through the loudness of the plaza and now raindrops, I heard my name again only closer this time. I stopped walking and turned to see Selma. A Master Card commercial started to play in the recesses of my mind. “Plane ticket from London to Amsterdam: $75. Taxi cab fare from the train station to a plaza in the middle of nowhere: $20. Someone calling your name in a crowded plaza after 40 hours of not sleeping: Priceless!”
For all of a few seconds, every crappy part of my trip disappeared. There, only a few feet away, was the blonde Dutch I had crossed the ocean a second time to visit and to share a very small fraction of my life’s time. She hadn’t noticed me standing next to her so closely as she had apparently just started yelling out my name. But, when she did, she started laughing. We hugged for a moment and joined the rest of her drinking crew for a few more beers. Despite my tiredness, we stayed out till 3:00a.m. when we caught the next train to her place in Rotterdam. I passed out sometime after four.
No comments:
Post a Comment