Last week I got the chance to go to Amsterdam for the day. This was all rather exciting – new country, new city, millions of people eating calorie-packed syrup filler waffles – can you think of a better way to spend a day? Suffice to say I haven’t travelled for business for a couple of years, and last time it was a whole week away…
After arising at the crack of dawn a 30 minute bus trip delivered me to Paddington, at which point Heathrow is an easy jump. I turned up, hit the wrong button on the automatic ticket machine and had to queue and then (thanks to the joys of business class) found myself at the end of the priority queue. Unfortunately they had decided that everyone was going to have to remove their shoes, belt, laptops and anything else vaguely terrorist-ish before passing through the metal detector. And so, as you can imagine, this took a while. Even more stunning, as I was dressing on the other side I was a guy who was whinging because he had run afoul of the much-publiscised ban of liquids in hand luggage. Fool.
I then retired to the business class lounge. This was the first time I had flown business class – the joy of a late booking. And so I grabbed a Times and enjoyed by bowl of fresh fruit. And while I found that business class seats are really no bigger than economy class, the food on the plane was indeed a touch nicer, and we escaped relatively quickly – only to spend 15 minutes waiting for baggage to appear…
The rest of my day was less exciting than I had hoped. A taxi ride to a nearby industrial estate, followed by meetings, a return taxi ride and a late flight. Once we did finally leave we spent 20 minutes taxing around Schiphol’s five runways, before flying over the City (with the unexpected chance for photos) and spending another 15 minutes exploring the taxiways of LHR.
So I didn’t see anything of Amsterdam, but I did see a lot of the airports involved. On the upside, it did remind me as to why I’m a developer and not a consultant: living in a cushioned world in a (sort-of) air conditioned office insulated from the customer is a fine state of affairs.
