red lights and landings
by
mikka
The closest I got to a photo of Amsterdam's red light district (if you squint, you can totally see some lanterns.)
By the time you're reading this, we'll be in Scotland, though I'm writing this from the Amsterdam airport and so can't say much about what Aberdeen or Iain's family are like yet. This post, by the way, is post-dated only because Iain hasn't told either of his sisters that we're coming, and though I seriously doubt either of them will see this, I don't want to risk ruining the surprise. We left Beijing yesterday and landed in Amsterdam yesterday for a fifteen hour layover, which gave us enough time to go into the city and wander around a bit, and then come back and go to sleep in a little pod here. So I'm writing this from a tiny futuristic capsule room that sort of feels like what I always imagined the Enterprise must feel like, and wishing I had more time to spend in Amsterdam, which was beautiful, but mostly just looking forward to being in Scotland.
Leaving Beijing was a bit of a mess, though not nearly as horrible as it could have been. After carefully weighing our bags to accommodate what we thought were KLM's luggage restrictions, we found ourselves facing more than $1,500 in baggage fees (that would be thirty euroes a kilo), as it turns out there are two types of tickets you can buy, one that lets you carry about as much luggage as the flight we took to China, and another that does not, and if you book through a site like Orbitz, you have no way of knowing this until an officious KLM lady laughs in your face, crumples up your baggage form, and turns her back on you. To make a long story short (especially since it's one I'm still a bit annoyed about it), as we were sitting there dumbstruck and deciding whether we could just throw everything we owned out right there, this amazing random lady who is my new hero appeared out of nowhere and told us there was a post office just around the corner. We ended up having to mail two gigantic suitcases worth of stuff ahead to Aberdeen, which was expensive, but nowhere near the fifteen hundred we were looking at, and throwing out the suitcases, which fortunately were pretty junky to begin with. That random woman literally saved us hundreds of dollars, and I wish I had some way to tell her how insanely grateful we both are, but as it is, I can just pass on the information that Beijing's Terminal Two has a super-helpful, English-speaking post office, even if none of the nasty airline staff bother to tell you about it. Anyway, that's enough whining, and the next post will be from Aberdeen!
