mad_atta

This is fantastic. I can't wait to read what, if anything you recall of Amsterdam...

Jailer

TOS requires at least one useful piece of useful information in every trip report, and I have an inkling that this might be the segment. If so, I’ll issue a “Useful Information Alert” so it does not fly by unnoticed.


Many on this Board do not seem to care for the Hotel Pulitzer: it’s a bit unpredictable and oddly configured. True, but 50 canal houses smooshed together makes for an eclectic mix of rooms and spaces. With no two rooms alike, I forked out an extra 1,000 points a night (really 800, with 5th night free) to ensure an executive room and a free buffet for two. Even so, I received an email offer to upgrade to a canal view room for a mere 50 Euros….As if I was going to pay more than I paid for all our nights in Paris and Amsterdam for what I likely would get/or likely could talk my way into anyhow.

I’d planned to walk from the train station, but it was raining pretty hard so we took a cab, and as luck would have it just as we arrived the Pulitzer owned boat was getting ready to go on a canal cruise, so we handed off our luggage and jumped aboard. Their saloon cruiser is a hundred year old beauty that has been recently refurbished; it’s the boat that Winston Churchill toured around Amsterdam on right after the war. We learned afterwards that the cost was 38 Euros per person, but I noticed that the tour was on Pulitzer’s menu of Starpoint redemption opportunities.

The guy on the cruise who should have been hanging with President Obama recommended The College Restaurant as fabulous and reasonable and as his Board just raised $350 million for a philanthropic cause, he struck me as someone who knew a good value. And,

******************Useful Information Alert********************

we just returned and it was everything promised and more. The restaurant is part of a hotel and both are run by a hospitality college with students working under the direction of their instructors. Everything about it was wonderful, and this would be a place I would not miss when in AMS. And, while it was more than a 10% drain on my allotted wad-o-cash, I’m thinking that the meal could have been twice as much.

***************All Clear*************************

After the cruise that first night we wandered randomly and, as I knew would happen, we came upon, although kept to the edge of, the red light district, which proved a bit shocking to her. She peppered me with questions; although why she assumed that I was an expert on whores I haven’t a clue.

“What does it cost?”: I don’t know, maybe a hundred Euros.

“What do they do when not in the windows?”: Take college classes, raise their kids, do laundry; since prostitution isn’t criminalized here the women aren’t abused by the police or their handlers and since they don’t go to jail their children aren’t taken by social services (I didn’t expand on the sex slavery trade from Eastern Europe and Asia).

Coming onto a Gay Film Cinema, she wondered what that was and it then occurred to me that the liberal and explicit sex education/coming of age program put on by our church went mostly over her head. “These are films that show homosexual acts.” “Oh, I wondered if “gay” meant something different in Holland.”

As I surmised, AMS was all about Anne Frank for my daughter, and Anne’s house was the first place we went our first morning in Amsterdam. Otto Frank was still alive when I was last here, which seems odd, as he has been gone a long time. While waiting in line to get in I asked little J-low what I once wondered aloud here on FT, what would have happen if Anne lived another two weeks, was liberated and survived? My daughter thinks that maybe Anne’s Diary would not have been so famous.

Little Miss J-low is starting to enjoy the hotel bar a little too robustly, and while the manager provided use with a couple of coupons for a couple of drinks due to our upgraded executive room, I just assumed that I’d get to drink both mine and hers. If little Miss is going to run up as big of a bar bill as Mrs. J., next time perhaps she can stay home and babysit while the old folks have their day in the sun.

Jailer

Sorry, the arcane distracted me from the critical:

Of course we were given a fabulous room with a canal view: 50 Euros my foot.

l etoile

Solely in the interest of helping to contribute to a young girl's well-roundedness and basic education, I will tell you, based on questioning performed for research and research alone in March, 50 euros is the starting price for, um, basic services and you can negotiate from there.

I knew this research would prove useful somewhere ...

Jailer

Sounds like a fine bargain but, darn it all, this would have to be my first budget vacation in a couple of decades.

Jailer

Philosopher Robert Nozick, in Anarchy, State, and Utopia, argued that a truly fair and just society is a society that one would chose to be born into randomly, that is in a state of ignorance. In order words, where you want to be born if you were the next one out of the shoot: rich/poor, white/colored, boy/girl, citizen/illegal immigrant, city/rural, etc.; you know, your place in that country simply determined by chance?

Talking last night to a 19 year old Dutch female student (no, not someone I met in connection with the topic of the two above posts), she concluded that while she would not always live in Holland, Holland is where she would wish to be born randomly if she was being born tomorrow.

If I dimly recall my statistics accurately, one is not a random sample that lends a high degree of predictability. Nonetheless, I do not entirely disagree with this young lady. I vividly recall 40 years ago how I felt that being an American was like winning the lottery, a six out a hundred blessed long shot. Yet, trying to look at this dispassionately, today America is not the nation to want to be born into randomly. There is too much institutionalized poverty and while there is hardly a caste system, I suspect that there is less chance for upward mobility than the UK, which is often cited as an example of a country with a staid class system. There is too much divisiveness in the United States, it is wearisome being/having your leaders tell you that you have to be policeman to the world, and I notice from my extensive research in OMNI-land that the United States is the only industrialized nation where a child is less likely to graduate high school than his/her parents.

Yes, I’ve had a charmed lifestyle, although now reduced to Europe on $100 per day, but I worry over shrinking opportunities and increasing indebtedness. While pundits have for years pointed to the innovations and inventions of Americans, the U.S. world share of patents continues to decline percentilely, and the seeds sown by a crumbling educational infrastructure do not bode well for the future.

SanDiego1K

I'm looking forward to the budget part of the trip.

It's nice to see that the Competitours experience is proving useful - at least so far as giving Jailer information. Was that a 2pm conversation or a 2am one? I understand that rates go up as the day wears on and that age goes down and attractiveness increases.

Jailer

So far, I do not disagree with one single word of your post.

l etoile

I had wondered about that. These were daytime prices.

Jailer

As Cousin Craig6z will attest, I am a tad manic when I travel. Why, here is a snippet of a pithy conversation that we had in MAD this last March:

Z: “I can’t believe that you went to the Prado twice.”
J: “I can’t believe that I didn’t go three times.”

When we are travelling, Mrs. J. has wondered aloud why it is that at home she wakes up first, but on holiday I am up and going before 0600 hrs. Well, that higher-mile-earning-power-in-the-sky simply built me to vacation, not to work, and so that she understands this fully, I intend to leave all my trip reports to her in my will; there may be little else.

And so, lacing up my running shoes the first morning in Paris I ran from the Hilton to Parc Monoceau, and it is locked—damn—and there is a sign that the Parc does not open to 0700--damn. No worries, back to the Hilton gym to work out, but it is locked until 0900--damn. I unhappily kill half an hour and run back to the Parc and something seems odd….

….I am passing everybody, and I am not fast, so everyone else is really s-l-o-w. In fact, one day I quantify this and I passed 85 people only to be passed by three. Trust me, in SoCal the opposite might apply.

But in AMS, at 0-dark-thirty it is an obstacle course of bikes to get to Vondelpark. And, as soon as I build up to cruising speed, a woman, maybe not my age but still no spring chicken, blows by me. In addition, the Pulitzer gym is open 24/7.

I mean, did the Protestant Revolution just blow by France? And, while capitalism came to the Netherlands in the 1600’s, it appears that capitalism did not come to France until the last Presidential elections—maybe.

Jailer

Well, I have touched on gay porn, amputation and the Dutch/French question. My objectives met, my work here is mostly done, other than the end of trip reconciliation after the credit card expenditures hit, ultimately proving (I am sure) that I am a, if not the, most frugal of travelers. Indeed, while I have not bothered to read that Europe For $50 Per Day drivel, I am convinced that those namby-pamby lightweights did not even factor in airfare from North American, as I have. Why I do not write my own budget travel guide, I have not a clue.

So, with the goals of this trip report officially met, any further remarks, either from the Netherlands or from the U.K., should be considered as bonus material.

flyphilrun

Well, of course it did. They killed them all.... St. Bartholemew's Night Massacre.... which is also one of the reasons there is so much good wine in South Africa

By the way.... totally absorbing trip report. Loved it/hated it. Wonderful!

Craig6z

Hmmmm, I distinctly paraphrase a conversation we had a few days before you departed:

6z: So are you going to take advantage of the lower drinking age and get Jailette to learn to appreciate wine?

Jailer: Not going to happen. She's anti alcohol; all that brainwashing in middle and high school worked. She'll wait until she is 21.

6z: Don't fool yourself. What do you think her and her Facebook posse do at the expensive private liberal arts college she attends? Remember she has your genes, which three decades ago were mutated by all the G&T's you mainlined at Cambridge.

Great report, BTW.

Cheetah_SA

Quite so! Refreshingly unique.

Jailer

If you don't fall when you ski, you aren't improving. If you have no travel regrets, the trip bar was set too low.

This trip glass was over 90 per cent full. I had wanted to see the Han van Meegeren's at the Rijksmuseum. I know that they have some in the basement, but I couldn’t talk myself in to see them. I guess that they are still embarrassed after 65 years.

On a more personal level, what parent cannot but regret when their child rejects the Gospel of their parental advice. I have parsed down over 30 years of international travel to: take old clothes and toss them when they are dirty. "But Dad, I don't have ratty clothes like you do." OUCH! Of course, as we have established, I do not have the kind of money that Jailette has.

In the next day or two I will be tallying up my credit cards; this brief interlude will allow you punters to gamble amongst yourselves. My, this has all the excitement of Oscar night, except with rattier clothes.

In terms of meeting budget: we did not arrive home until after midnight, so I think that it is only fair that I allot myself 15 days @ $100 per day for us both, so my target for the trip is $1,500 instead of $1,400, fair?