Visited Amsterdam

It has been once again a while that I’ve been updated anything here. I’ve been focusing on a huge development project at Exove, and been burning the midnight oil quite a lot recently.

Anyhow, I managed to chip a few days from my hectic schedules to a trip to Amsterdam. This time, no family around, just Sanna. Such a peaceful experience.

We flew there on Saturday morning (got really cheap tickets compared to flying on Friday), and came back on Monday evening. The Saturday flight took off 9:05 (or something), so for once it was nice to travel after sleeping a full night. Flying with KLM seems to be hassle-free, and we were in the town pretty fast. I coded during the flight — has not happened for a while — and got pretty far, surprising even myself. To be honest, no other soul was interested in my advances with PHP code.

We had a smallish room in a nice design oriented hotel a few kilometers south from the central station, easily accessible by trams. And by walking, we probably walked at least once a day to the city centre and back. The hotel was located in a shabby area, but was in top-notch condition inside. The price included free wifi and an excellent breakfast with really delicious croissants and a lot of other good food, too.

Saturday and Sunday was going around the town for various reasons. We had a bike rent hotel package, so on Sunday we rode local bikes for the best part of the day. They are really handy getting you from location A to location B in the city. Amsterdam is very nice place for biking as it is practically flat, and the Dutch go everywhere with their bikes. There were more bikes than cars, which is always nice.

I managed to find a pair of Boss sneakers that I’ve been looking for for some time now. First, I bought light coloured pair from the local department store, de Bijenkorf, despite Sanna being against them. Immediately after that we found a Boss store that had them in black. Fortunately, de Bijenkorf was kindly enough to refund the shoes with no questions asked, and I could lay my hands to the better looking pair. Would there be no refunds, I’d probably ended up with two pairs. For some reason, Boss sneakers are not that expensive — compared to the general image of the brand.

Amsterdam is really strong in shoes and boots. There are plethora of shoe shops, and the prices are decent. We ended up buying a pair for every member of the family; three pairs of sneakers, and one pair of boots (for Sanna) during the weekend.

Monday was more quiet day due to business reasons. Sanna bought a pair of fancy Prada boots, otherwise nothing worth reporting. We left the city around three o’clock, and had an eventless trip back home.