I haven been wanting to attend Essen — the board gaming convention Mecca. And I finally found someone willing to go with me. Since the flight is so long, I decided to visit another city and settled on Amsterdam. Marty, my traveling companion, was able to get work to pay for him to visit London afterward and I crashed at his hotel for an extra 10 pounds a night. You cannot beat that price for downtown London!

More, after the cut…

I parked at the IBM campus and took an Airport Shuttle in. I decided to not bring my phone with me, so I left it in the car. It is not like I could make calls over seas. I figured that this would be no problem because I have had Super Shuttle pick me up at work many times in the past with no problems. However, they managed to screw it up this time! I knew I was in trouble when I saw the blue van drive to some other spot at IBM. They did not read my directions at all. Luckily, I was able to borrow someone’s phone and call Super Shuttle and get them to come back and pick me up.

I flew to Chicago with no problems and walked to the Aer Lingus desk. There was a line of people waiting there, but there were no employees behind the counters! Finally, at 3:10 a stream of employees came out from behind a door and started working. It was amusing to notice that the Korean Air counter had a class of service called “Morning Calm.” The flight over to Dublin was good. There were many movies to watch and pretty Irish lasses as flight attendants.

We stopped in Dublin where I was selected for a long survey on the quality of the restrooms. The flight into Amsterdam was uneventful. We exited Amsterdam’s airport into a pretty large concourse. After some troubles with the automated ticket machine, we just went into the line and bought tickets into downtown Amsterdam. While we could have used the light rail to get to our hotel from central Amsterdam, I didn’t want to mess with all of that. We took a cab to the hotel. Which was colorfully decorated with laundry. I never did ask them why it was like that.

The room was quite small but functional. We had a “shelf toilet” with a small sink in one room. In another was a curtainless shower that used a shower head on a hose. There was also another sink and closet in that room. The shower was the best of the three hotel rooms that I stayed in. It was roomy and well thought out. And it had a super hot setting on it that I was too chicken to try out.

We arrived early in the morning. I didn’t sleep at all on the three flights. But I wanted to push through to my normal bed time around 10 at night. So we walked around town.

The city is beautiful — many canals that have five story buildings on both sides of the road.

One center of town is the dam. Maybe there was once a dam here that gave it its name. But now it is just a large square. Which currently housed a carnival. Of course the main attraction in the carnival were the hot waffles with chocolate. Mmm.

Of course, this is Amsterdam, where marijuana is legal here. Every coffee shop sells it. And people smoke it there. You can also buy mushrooms and even hemp lollypops.

As we were walking around, we noticed a lot of Argentian Restaurants there. Because there were so many, we decided to try one out for dinner. It had nice, hand-carved leather placemats. But the food was overcooked and bad. At least mine was.

The next day we stoped at the Hortus Botanicus Amsterdam (established at 1638). It was nice. They had several greenhouses. Each were at different temperatures and humidity. Enough to simulate most of the climates in the world. And each location had many plants.

I had a nasty surprise when we went from one greenhouse to another. My camera instantly fogged up! Gah! But it seemed to recover after a while.

We met up with Ward and he convinced us to rent bicycles and ride around the city. Wow, what a difference. This city is made for bicycling in! There are separate bike lanes on all the roads, bikes have right of way (well aside from trams). And you can lock up your bike on the sidewalk once you get to where you are going.

Marty’s bike had a Danny DeVito seat cover. How odd. (It was actually an add for Comedy Central).

For dinner, we went to a Indonesian restaurant that served a “rice service”. This is an array of spicy and tasty dishes that is served with a big bowl of rice (well, two different kinds).

The next day, we decided to try a fast food chain (called Febo) that had a unique method of service. There is an array of individual vending machines. Each machine served a different type of fried dish. You put the appropriate amount of coins in, opened the door, and took your food. All of this can be done without speaking to the employees! I love this type of service in a place where no speaks English. You can see what you are getting and it is do it yourself. I bought a cheese croquet, a vegetarian curry croquet, some french fries, and some chocolate milk. Did I talk about the french fries yet? Well, this place had a number of different sauces that you could get with your fries. I tried the curry sauce, which was good. The chocolate milk was excellent. Just milk and chocolate. None of the stabilizers, emulsifiers, HFCS, or other crap that American products use.

We took the requisite canal tour. Which was nice and something that I would recommend. You do get to see a different side of the city. I think that it would be awesome if I could buy a houseboat and live on one of the canals in the city.

Amsterdam is made for bikes. We saw a bicycle parking garage.

There are also some interesting canal bridges. Many unique architectures.

The buildings also had unique architectures. Each had different styles of roofs, and ornamental sculptures.

Amsterdam also had many tiny cars driving around. I don’t know how people fit in them. Very carefully, I imagine. This smart car was inches away from a dip in the canal.

What was surprising was that, for all the bikes that they had, there we not that many differences. There were no road bike or mountain bikes. There were only solidly built city bikes. There were only a handful of uniquely styled bikes that I saw. Like this one for carrying something (like small children perhaps) or another for carrying around cheese (mmm, cheese).

We stopped for lunch at this herring shop near the central train station. There was a cheese shop across the street and we bought a couple of cheeses and some bread to go with the herring. Yum! There was also a tiny hemp-mobile parked there.

Also close by was a public, outdoor, men’s urinal. It was good timing right about now. And, when in Amsterdam…

We went to see an old church (called the new church). And I was surprised to see it right next to a sex shop. With women working in the windows. Talk about a liberal town.

The trip to Essen was easy. God, how different Europe is from America. We took the light rail from our hotel to the central train station, a train from Amsterdam to Essen, and then the subway to our final destination (Berliner Platz). We popped up next to a mall. We tried asking people in the mall where our Hotel was with no luck. But we finally spotted a Holiday Inn and walked towards it. Unfortunately, it was the wrong Holiday Inn. Fortunately, it was a short walk to the Holiday Inn Express. This one was next to an Ikea (which you could see from our original starting point).

The room was okay. The shower was okay, if a little bit more cramped to use. I had to turn it off when I lathered up. We ordered pizza after figuring out the English language equivalent for pizza toppings. What was translated to “stinky onions” turned out to be garlic. But it was good. And there were people already playing board games in the dining room! Although they didn’t seem too friendly at least to me. And I called it a night.

At this point I lost a bunch of pictures thanks to my brand new Hyperdrive hanging! Gah! Unfortunately, I only took one SD card and one backup drive with me. A decision I would continue to regret.

Essen was fracking crowded!!! There were people everywhere walking every which direction. And I quickly became overwhelmed by it. Everyone moved slowly. So, when I wanted to move quickly somewhere I had to constantly try and move around people or avoid running into people. It was quite frustrating. The Le Havre booth had two massive lines going to both the left and the right. And they weren’t moving. So I jumped out of that line and moved over to the Splotter booth. Where I bought a copy of Duck Dealer (a limited edition 200 print run). Thankfully, they had not sold of out that yet. But it did sell out by lunch time the opening day.

Essen was interesting. You could play almost any game. However, table space was at a premium. And you had to wait a while for the game to finish before you could take a turn at it.

I also had a lucky find. I had just bought a Knizia game called Tiku. I notice someone carrying a bag that said Knizia games on it. And I wondered if that was the man himself. I walk up to him and introduce myself and find out that it is Mr Knizia. I talked with him for a moment and he signed my game. Score!!!

Fairplay games had a list in it of the most popular games. This is where I learned about Comuni, Cavum, and Wind River. I would not have heard about these games any other way. So i tracked down where they lived and played a game. It turned out that I liked those games.

I went back to the hotel for dinner and I explored the mall next to the subway. It turned out that they had a Thai Street Kitchen called Cha Cha. It had really good food! Good enough to eat for three dinners because there are not many restaurants around where our hotel was.

My only regret was not being able to try out a beer garden and some good German food (sausages/sauerkraut).

The trip to Dusseldorf was a little stressful. We get to what we think is the appropriate train platform after lugging two heavy and unwieldy luggage up and down many stairs. But the train does not arrive. We start asking people for help and find someone who speaks both German and English. They read the schedule and agree that we are at the right spot. However, we finally figure out that this train does not operate every time on Sundays. The next one does finally show up though. I had taken many pictures of the train route poster. And I used that during the trip to track our progress. The only problem was deciding where to get off. You see, there were two airport stops. Marty convinced me to take the D-Flughafen stop instead of catching another train to the D-Flughafen Terminal stop which sounded more appropriate. However, this one proved to be the correct one after all. We got on an easy escalator and then took an airport monorail to the Lufthansa desk.

Unfortunately, I learned that my luggage was 7 kilos over weight. And that it cost 70 euros to check onto the flight. Wow! That’s highway robbery for an international flight (where my two luggage bags were not a problem on every other flight). Sigh. At least the ticket was cheap.

I did go back after the trip and figure out where the PDFs were of the different train maps. I documented those links here for future reference.

The hotel was big and pretty. And expensive I imagine. It was located in downtown London right next to the theater district. But Marty’s work was paying for it. This hotel had style. Style in spades. Rather painful spades actually. So the motto was “You have to pay for your style”. The bathroom had no door to it. The shower had painful to stand on draining grooves on the floor. The “couch” was poorly situated to the cross-shaped television.

The breakfasts were good. There was a selection of fruit, pastries, yogurt, and main meal (eggs benedict, omlette, English breakfast, etc). Forutnately, it was included in the room price (normally priced 25 pounds — expensive).

The restaurants around here were the best of the trip. We had Indian tapas for dinner at Imli (167-169 Wardour Street).

I stopped by the Tower of London for the next day. There is a lot to see and do here. But it is crowded. So very crowded.

Next up was the Tower Bridge. It was less crowded but not that much to see.

Some other sites that I saw was Big Ben.

The Millennium Eye.

Buckingham Palace.

The British Museum (which is fracking ginormous)!

Some other good dining experiences were Itsu (sushi on “boats”) (103 Wardour Street), Just Falafs (a falafal place), Crepe Affair (crepes — both sweet and savory), Beard Papa’s (cream puffs) (143 Oxford Street), St. Ives Cornwall Cornish Bakehouse (meat pies),

I had worried about the trip home. I didn’t want to lug my luggage around. Surprisingly enough, there is no handicapped access to the tubes in London! Fortunately, we took a taxi to Paddington Station. Which turned out to be on ground level. And took the express train right to the airport. And home. Eventually.