New view of old friend

And on your right, Mount Shasta from 40,000 feet.

A walk near Schiphol

This afternoon our meetings ended at 4pm so I had some time to relax a bit before dinner. I decided to go for a walk. You may recall that I am staying 100 yards from the airport, so this isn't exactly walking tour country, but one of the guys from my meetings said he'd been running along the bike path and within minutes you're away from the airport and in farmland. He said he saw chickens. I had to go.

So I set off on a little walk down the bike path, hoping for fresh country air and relaxation. I quickly discovered that one of the different things here is that motorized scooters also go on the bike paths and as far as I can tell they are all in a quite a hurry.

It was great to be outside but walking is a lot slower than running and I didn't get to the good stuff until it was pretty much time to turn around. So I got a full helping of jet fuel fumes and airport operations scenery, and just a taste of the pretty countryside. I didn't get to see a single chicken.

On the walk back not one but two scooter-ers stopped to offer me a lift and both seemed sincerely puzzled when I did not accept. It was very tempting, but then again I had gone out expressly for a walk so taking a ride would have defeated the whole purpose.

Here's the best of what I saw:

And now for something different

I'm in Amsterdam this week for work and because I didn't get to book my own travel, I am not staying at a Starwood property (booo); instead I am staying in a hotel called Citizen M which is remarkable in a number of ways.

1. It is walking distance from the airport. I literally got off my flight, wheeled my bag out of the terminal and down a small paved walkway about a hundred yards to the hotel. It it well sound-proofed so you don't hear airport noises, which is nice. At check-in I was offered a 'runway view' or a 'World Trade Center' view, which is nice way of saying the view that looks at some other buildings with a bunch of flags on them. I chose runway view but somehow got WTC view instead. Eh, whatever.

2. If one day you found yourself making hotel arrangements for George Jetson this would be a safe bet if you were worried about him feeling comfortable in familiar surroundings. As you can see in the photo below, the room includes two sliding-glass-enclosed pods for the toilet and shower. They seem to have forgotten the pod that puts your clothes on you and does your hair.


3. The room makes a lot happen in not a lot of square footage and doesn't include silly wastes of space like, oh, a closet. You only get three clothes hangers for the rack by the door and when you ask for more like one of my colleagues did, you get a look like "Ugh, Americans." And then you get told no.

4. The room has a mood pad that allows you to change the way the lights go and varies between a range of mood music options and probably other things that I haven't even discovered yet.

5. The blinds are motorized and you can open and close them from a push button you can reach from the bed (then again, practically anything in this room is reachable from the bed so that's a dubious distinction).

I've heard that the bed actually converts to a couch at the touch of a button, too, but haven't seen it for myself. Am vaguely concerned I will accidentally discover that button on the middle of the night and get squished.

Stuff and more stuff

It's Saturday morning. Eric is teaching his first class at the UC Berkeley Extension this morning (Go Eric Go!!!) and left at least 90 minutes too early but I think you kind of have to do that the first time.

I am packing and doing last minute prep for a business trip to Amsterdam for which I leave today* which means I am actually vacuuming and dusting and cleaning the bathroom because for some reason those are all more appealing right now than the things I am supposed to be doing.

Drunk Mexicans are singing and laughing on the street below. They're singing "Cielito Lindo" which I remember from my 9th grade Spanish class. It is one of those rare songs that actually doesn't sound all that different sung by bored, embarrassed 9th graders or by drunk Mexicans.

I've now decided I need to throw out all of my shoes. They are in a paper bag by the door. All except for a few essential pairs that were spared. The rest must go. And by go, I mean that they go down to the "storage area" in the garage where they sit in Goodwill purgatory while I wait to realize that I have made a horrible mistake choosing to throw them away. After a few months, if I haven't thought about them, then off they go for real.

I'm back to reading fiction books again, something I gave up for about 18 months there for no reason other than that I just sort of stopped reading them. But now I am back and making up for the lost time. The only good thing about the 11 hour flight ahead of me is that my laptop battery will die and I will have no excuse not to tuck into some quality fiction. One other good thing about the flight is that it is direct to Amsterdam. The bad thing about the flight is that I am flying coach, even though it is for work. But now it's time to go so I'll have to save my self-righteous griping about that for another time since I still need to finish packing.


*Brutal, no?

Made a friend in the airport bathroom

So that's what's on my mind

I had a full-day meeting today with two colleagues and two clients. We were preparing for the summit we're holding next week in Amsterdam and so we were running through the agenda, reviewing the various slide decks and videos, and making sure all the logistics have been thought through.

At one point in the early afternoon, one of the clients turned his laptop to the other and said "I thought this might be great at this point in the agenda."

He was so mysterious about it that one of my colleagues said "Ooh, I wonder what it is."

"It's a video of a mermaid riding a donkey," I said without hesitation.

"Sometimes Ellie accidentally lets her true self show through," explained my colleague to address the stares and confused titters of the clients.

We all like to feel useful

I am doing one of my quick Seattle trips and flew up this morning on, mercifully, not the crack of dawn flight but the one immediately after it.

I had a middle seat. The woman to my right, who had the window, was nondescript and mostly just sat there. There was an older gentleman to my right, on the aisle, who was traveling with his wife (I assume) who was seated on the other side of the aisle from him.

After the beverage service, the man put his napkins into the empty plastic cups and stacked them up, put his tray table into its upright locked position, and then just held the trash in his hands.

He sat there and held the trash. For kind of a long time.

Then, every so often, the wife would add another item to the pile of trash this fellow was holding: her empty coffee cup, then a crumpled napkin, then a gum wrapper added to the top of the pile like a cherry on a sundae. I couldn't really see her - all I could see was a ghostly hand floating into view, depositing used bits and pieces, and then floating off. The intervals between deposits were just long enough that you would start to think that it was done, and then more trash would float in from offstage left and be set just so onto the growing pile.

He continued to sit there and hold the trash.

Time passed. I took a short nap.

After a while, when I had woken up, he turned to me and said,

"Do you have any trash?"

Really?

"Um, yeah, I guess" I sputtered. I took my empty coffee cup and crumpled napkin from the seat pocket and added it to the pile.

He seemed pleased.

A solid ten minutes later the flight attendant came by with the garbage bag and he was relieved of his armload of airplane refuse.

I probably imagined it, but he almost looked disappointed.