Travels in Europe--an unexpected and rather nightmarish adventure

I made plans with my friend Haika (from my Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center days) to visit the Christmas market in Dresden Germany, something she's always wanted to do. We planned the trip for the early part of December, a time period which is usually best given our usual Christmas schedules and preparations. We decided to meet in Dresden on December 8th and leave on December 12th, which would give us three whole days in Dresden to explore the market and perhaps see a bit of the city. I looked online for direct flights to Dresden from Oslo but there were none. The next best thing was to fly via KLM from Oslo to Amsterdam and then get a connecting flight from Amsterdam to Dresden, which I booked. 

December 8th arrived and my husband drove me to Oslo airport. The weather was cold but otherwise fine. Snow was predicted but not until late in the afternoon. Except for a slight delay, our flight to Amsterdam took off as scheduled. But while I was sitting at the gate waiting to board, passengers got the news that the Amsterdam to Dresden flight was cancelled. No reason was given, although the KLM website attributed this to weather conditions--thick heavy fog at Amsterdam Schiphol Airport. I later found out another and more likely reason--a baggage worker slowdown and chronic understaffing. That was probably the major reason for the cancellations, because as it turned out, many flights leaving from Schiphol airport had been cancelled on December 7th, and those passengers were rebooked for December 8th flights. Many December 8th flights were cancelled and rebooked for December 9th (my flight to Dresden being one of them). 

I was informed via a text message from KLM that I was rebooked on the December 9th flight, and that I had to retrieve my luggage in Amsterdam, but it was not on the carousel. I went to the baggage service desk and was told that it had been moved to a storage area for my rebooked flight on the 9th (that I had not yet agreed to). Since it was now at that location, I was not allowed to get my luggage back. The woman at the desk was most unhelpful and rude, and I told her exactly what I thought of her and her airline. I filed a lost baggage claim form online on the off chance that my luggage was lost and not relocated, and asked that if it was found, that it be sent to the hotel where I was to stay in Dresden.  Considering the absolute mess that Schiphol airport became on the day I arrived, I had zero belief that my suitcase would be with me on my rebooked flight. I also had begun to disbelieve that the flight to Dresden would actually happen. Schiphol airport (I have another name for the airport that sounds like Schiphol, but I won't write it here) was inundated on that day with passengers who had been stranded in Amsterdam for one and even two days. I met several people who had plans with family and friends that were disrupted due to the cancellations. I fell into that category since my friend was flying from Michigan and had planned to arrive in Dresden on Friday afternoon. Our flights were supposed to get into Dresden around the same time, and we had planned to travel to the hotel together. It was not to be. 

Thank God for WhatsApp. I was in continual communication with Haika, so that she knew what was going on. Her flight from Michigan to Frankfurt to Dresden arrived in Dresden on Friday afternoon on time, so she got to the hotel in the mid-afternoon of December 8th, which was good because she was tired and needed to sleep. But she was experiencing a problem of her own; her luggage had not made it onto the plane from Frankfurt to Dresden, and it didn't end up arriving at the hotel until Saturday evening, so she was without a change of clothes (as I was) from Friday afternoon until Saturday evening.  

At this point, I stood in the airport, knowing I had several options: accept the rebooking for the following day and find a hotel to stay in at the airport overnight; try to find a train from Amsterdam to Dresden; or try to find a bus from Amsterdam to Dresden. And had I wanted to wait on line for four or five hours with hundreds of other stranded and displaced passengers, I could have argued with KLM customer service about getting my suitcase returned to me (I wisely chose not to do that after waiting one hour in a line that did not move forward at all). There was no bus service from Amsterdam to Dresden, but there was train service (an overnight train that would have been perfect). So I booked a train ticket online; the trip was to have taken about 10 hours and would have gotten me into Dresden around 8:30 am on Saturday morning. But when I got to the train station in Amsterdam, I was told that the train workers in Germany were going on strike as of that very evening. So I could not take the train as the trip was cancelled. I decided at that point to accept the KLM rebooking and to find an airport hotel for the night. All of the searches, bookings, cancellations and communications were of course done via my cell phone, which was gradually losing battery charge over the course of Friday afternoon. There were no charging stations that I could see at Schiphol airport in the general area (in 2023!). One of the salespeople told me I could charge my phone in the ladies room using the electrical socket there. So I did. That allowed me to book the Ibis Budget hotel located at the airport. Luckily, there was a shuttle bus to take me there, and once I was ensconced in my hotel room, I charged my phone and then set about trying to find something to eat. That proved to be possible, thank God. The hotel was very nice. At least I had a place to charge my devices as well as relax and get a decent night's sleep. At this point, I had used most of Friday just to travel to Amsterdam, and I knew that I would use most of Saturday to get to Dresden one way or another. 

The rebooked KLM flight was however not flying to Dresden, but to Berlin. So I had to find a way to get from Berlin to Dresden. Luckily, there is bus service (Flix) from Berlin to Dresden, so I booked a ticket after cancelling my train ticket and requesting a refund. I reserved an 8 pm bus trip for Saturday evening that would have gotten me into Dresden at around 10 pm on Saturday evening. I had to get myself from Berlin Brandenburg airport to the Flix bus station, which was about a thirty-minute taxi ride, and needed enough time to do that. I got a taxi to the Flix station at around 7:30 pm, but as it turned out, my 8 pm bus trip was cancelled and rescheduled to 9:30 pm the same evening. That was at least something. I waited two hours in a crappy bus station for the 9:30 pm trip. As (bad) luck would have it, my reserved seat on the 9:30 pm bus was broken, and none of the Flix employees including the driver were at all helpful in trying to find me another seat or in trying to fix the broken one. I waited until all the passengers had boarded at all the scheduled stops and then found a vacant seat. Luckily there was one. I arrived in Dresden at 12:20 am on Sunday morning and got a taxi to my hotel. Haika was still awake when I got there. Once I got there and once we were together, I managed to unwind and was hopeful that I could put the entire travel insanity behind me. I did decide however that I am never flying into Schiphol airport again. As in ever. I simply lost all faith in KLM and that they wouldn't cancel my return flight from Dresden to Oslo via Amsterdam. As it was, I saw that more flights had been cancelled at Schiphol on December 11th, which did not bode well for the 12th, the day I was to leave Dresden. This meant that I had to find another airline/flight to get home on the 12th. Luckily, I found a direct flight from Berlin to Oslo on Norwegian Air and I booked it. I also booked a Flix bus that left Dresden at 7:30 am on the 12th that traveled directly to Berlin airport; it did not get cancelled and it was on time. Thankfully, my return home was problem-free and easy. As it should have been for the trip to Dresden. It took me two days of traveling to get to Dresden, and less than half a day to return to Oslo. What's wrong with this picture?

It amazes me in this day and age that we are expected to accept living in a paperless society where all sorts of boarding passes, reminders, etc. are sent to our phones as texts or emails or apps that have to be downloaded. Yet a busy major airport like Schiphol makes no effort to have several hundred charging stations spread throughout the airport and not just at the gates. I find that very strange and totally unacceptable. I feel the same way about the Amsterdam Central train station--no charging stations anywhere, and that was confirmed by one of the train station employees. What is wrong with Amsterdam? I thought it was a progressive city. I have so many viewpoints to share and I'll do so in my next post. I also want to write about my visit with Haika and the Dresden Christmas market, since we had a wonderful time there. It made up for the travel nightmare and it gave me back my Christmas spirit, which I had just about lost. 

Vincent and Theo Van Gogh

I have been meaning to write a short post about the Vincent Van Gogh museum in Amsterdam (Van Gogh Museum - The Museum about Vincent van Gogh in Amsterdam - The Netherlands). My husband and I toured the museum in August; I found it to be one of the most interesting and emotionally-engaging art museums I have ever visited. I cannot remember that I have ever been moved to tears by an art exhibition, but this one had that effect on me. Van Gogh’s life lends itself to this type of reaction—he suffered from epilepsy, depression, and lack of self-confidence, and at the age of 37 shot himself in a wheat field in Auvers, France and died two days later. He was very close to his brother Theo who supported him at different times during his life; Theo died six months after Vincent and the two of them are buried side by side in Auvers. After Vincent’s death, Theo’s wife saw to it that Vincent’s paintings received the recognition they deserved; she came across in the exhibition as a generous and compassionate woman who had great understanding for her husband Theo and his close relationship with Vincent. 

I think the museum did a great job in depicting the emotional depth of the relationship between Vincent and Theo—you really felt and understood the empathy and love that Theo had for Vincent, and the utter humanity and frailty in their individual lives. I found myself thinking—‘there but for the grace of God go I’ as the expression goes. Because we all suffer from lack of self-confidence or from depression at times; and if you have experienced these then you have empathy for others who are weighed down or destroyed by them. By the time I got to the section that showed a photo of the gravesite where both brothers are buried, I was quite sad. I have never seen the Robert Altman film from 1990 about the Van Gogh brothers—Vincent & Theo—but I want to get a hold of it so that I can. It received very good reviews when it came out; I don’t know how I missed it--perhaps because I had just moved to Oslo and was not paying attention, or perhaps because the movie never opened in Oslo at all.

It is not easy to watch people you know and love sink into depression or mental illness. I have seen that happen in my own family and in friends’ families as well. It is terrifying to watch the descent into severe mental illness like schizophrenia; daunting to witness what chronic depression can do to a person’s overall health. It makes you realize that the brain is the last great frontier in a research sense—how the brain works, why do certain aspects of normal brain function go awry, what are emotions really and where are they based? There are so many questions that remain unanswered to date, and one can only hope that some of them get answered in our lifetime. 

Amsterdam coffee shops, head shops, sex shop and oh, an American hot dog stand too

Some photos from the Hortus Botanicus in Amsterdam

A few more photos from the Hortus Botanicus (Botanical Garden) in Amsterdam, where we spent a very pleasant afternoon. It is well-worth seeing, especially the Butterfly House. Check out the photo with the butterfly with eyespots, called an Owl butterfly according to what I saw on internet--way cool. Enjoy!

Butterfly with eyespots, an Owl butterfly

Amsterdam views

We were in Amsterdam last week, enjoying a short vacation. The first time we visited the Netherlands was in April 1998 when my husband took a microscopy course at the University of Delft. We managed to spend one day in Amsterdam before traveling on to Delft, which is southwest of Amsterdam. While he attended his course, I traveled a bit around the country by train and bus, visiting Amsterdam for a day, visiting Anne Frank’s house (a moving experience but also a claustrophobic one—how she and her family managed to live in such tight quarters plagued me no end) and walking around the city and taking in the lovely views of the canals (the Dutch word for a city canal is ‘gracht’).  I also spent a day at the famous tulip park called Keukenhof in the city of Lisse, which is west of Amsterdam; the park is closed during the summer so we did not get to see it this time around. I remember it being very easy to travel around Holland—the train system is excellent and most people speak good English so it wasn’t a problem to communicate with them or to ask for help or guidance.

While we were in Amsterdam this time, we walked quite a bit around the city as we are wont to do when we are in a new city; walking is the best way to get to know a place. We visited the Rijksmuseum with many of Rembrandt’s paintings as well as several paintings by Vermeer and van Dyck, the Van Gogh museum with a wonderful and moving exhibit of the artist’s life and works, and the Stedelijk Museum with its very unusual modern art. The ‘Girl with a Pearl Earring’ by Vermeer was unfortunately not in the Rijksmuseum; it is located in the Mauritshuis gallery in The Hague. We visited the Madame Tussaud wax museum with its interesting presentation of Dutch history as well as of Hollywood actors and actresses like Elizabeth Taylor and Marilyn Monroe and American singers like Elvis Presley and Michael Jackson. Who doesn’t want their picture taken with one of these people? It’s just a lot of fun, and where would the world be without American celebrities? We also walked around the Red Light District that is famous for its sex shops, museums and window prostitutes, and which is frequented by tourists from all over the world who walk through the district ogling the shops and the young women in the windows. This district dates back to the fourteenth century when sailors from all over the world arrived in the city of Amsterdam and went looking for female companionship. We also took the requisite canal boat tour that is always a lot of fun. We are boat people; no matter where we go, if it is possible to take a boat trip of one kind or another, we always do, since it is a relaxing way to see a city and to take some interesting photos. We ate lunch one day at the Café Americain which is located inside the famous Amsterdam American Hotel; this is a beautiful café with a splendid interior that just has to be seen. On the last day we were there, we visited the Botanical Garden (Hortus Botanicus) on the east side (the quieter side) of the city, with its incredible Butterfly House. When you walk inside the house, there are hundreds of butterflies of all kinds flying about, landing on the orange slices and sugar water that have been set out for them. The house contains many different kinds of plants, from coffee plants to sugar cane, and the butterflies alight on them and then move on, flitting from plant to plant. We rounded out a very enjoyable stay at a Dutch restaurant where we enjoyed typical Dutch-style food: pea soup (called ‘snert’) with smoked sausages and bacon for me and mussels for my husband; Holland is apparently world-renowned for its mussels. But I have fallen in love with ‘stroopwafler’, also called syrup waffles in English; these are to die for—a waffle sandwich made from two thin layers of baked batter with caramel-like syrup as the filling. Impossible to eat just one!

Amsterdam is rich in history, architecture, beauty, culture and tolerance. It is a city that has a modern feel to it without having sacrificed its ancient architecture and beauty. The canals are an amazing feat of engineering and were constructed in the seventeenth century; it is no wonder that the city is often called the ‘Venice of the North’. People live in the many houseboats that line the canals; they are considered legal residences since housing in Amsterdam is tight. The houseboat inhabitants seem to take tourists in stride; they are nonchalant about being stared at and don't seem to mind the tourist canal boats. We will return to the city at some future time, probably during the springtime in order to be able to visit Keukenhof park, and look forward to doing so.

The Queen of Holland in the Wax Museum

The singer Prince in the Wax Museum