The Real Journey Begins

It’s day 3 now, and yes, we’ve arrived in Holland safe and sound, if not a tad tired. Afterall it’s now 2.40am, Holland time. And after much procrastination and mucking around, I’ve finally started to type out entries despite the lazy bug biting! Jwen has uploaded most of the photos and have done quite some editing – time for me to catch up!

 

It has been a mad hatter rush – we’ve started planning on Monday proper, and got most of our packing done within what little time we have. And much to our relief – despite the luggages bursting at their seams, mine was finally a light 17.4kg, and Jwen’s 19.2 kg, with some room to spare! I had with me 2 hand-carries (a bag and a track bag) and Jwen was armed with a backpack and a laptop in tow.

 

8.45pm on Thursday came and went, and we met at T1, Belt 13 (KLM) and the process was much faster cos’ Jwen had done online check-in and chose our seats 18A and B (Jwen: not that we could choose. The other seats left were individual seats scattered everywhere. Not much chance for changes). The lady at the counter forgot to stamp on our check-in receipt and came running after us haha!

 

Miao Juan, Lin Qun and Bao Hui came down to send us off – thanks girls! =) and I guess MJ should be in Canada by now – give us a tag when you’ve arrived alright? =) (Jwen: Thanks also to everyone else who dropped us sms/call us to send us off even though you guys can’t be physically around )

 

 

 

We were supposed to board our plane at 9.55pm, and we lost track of time and only entered the gates at 10+pm – and much to our horror – the screen announced that the gate for our plane was closing, so hurriedly did our check-ins at the Departure gate, checked our gate number and RAN like 2 idiots past amazed travellers, hitting some on the way with my hand-carry, and cutting ‘lanes’ on the travellator to reach the gate.

 

In between taking in breaths, Jwen commented in amazement that she has never seen me run so fast (faster than her) ever in her life HAHA! The power of the human mind in times of desperation HAHAHA! And the good thing about wearing sports shoes on board the plane – to run (like idiots) in times of emergency as such. And hence, this made us realize why exactly many people have the habit of wearing sports shoes to board planes despite pumps being more convenient and would ensure entrance to everywhere else– to ensure we can run after trains/planes/whatever.

 

And we ended up feeling like idiots cos’ there was a lOoOong queue of people at the gate, and we needn’t have ran. But still, better to be safe than sorry. While running, I had the sorry picture of us standing at the gates, helplessly watching our plane (and the $2K we had to each fork out for the tickets) fly off without us.

 

So WE MADE IT to the plane! =)

Day 0 together 

 

KLM exceeded our expectations – it has individual screens, not to mention the multitude of movie, TV shows, music album selections to choose from! And their service was efficient and good; we requested for milk and the friendly air stewardess remembered our milk and delivered it to us after she was done with her rounds. The milk was rather thin though. There was also ample supply of fluids throughout the flight, and hydration’s one major contribution towards prevention of jetleg.

 

Food was aplenty on the plane. In that 13 hours, we were fed countless times. We had servings of roasted peanuts as a welcome snack. Shorly after, dinner was a relatively thick and spicy tomato soup, cold pasta like salad and a side dessert of muesli bar and watermelon slice. Packaging of our food was good, just as what Jingkai had showed us in the link in the previous entries…. 

 

 

 

Jwen with the nicely packaged dinner

Xf enjoying her hot soup

 

 

 

 

 

 

The soup and pasta had Jwen’s favourite sunflower seeds as well as croutons that were specially prepared for high altitude consumption. Dessert was this muesli bar thingy which was similar to what Wendy made for us at CGH. very nice Jwen got her usual dose of wine on the plane White wine this time round in a glass bottle.

Hours later, supper was ice-cream! =)

 

XF watched 10,000BC and The Other Boylen Girl but fell asleep while trying to attempt to watch Away From Her Flipped through the albums – they had Maroon 5!! Loveloves! And Justin Timberlake’s, Pink (Xf’s likes!) and others’.

Jwen caught a dutch movie called Afblijven which was about this dutch teenager who loved to dance and abused drugs and in the end was happily attached with her childhood friend. haha. not too bad a movie to know a bit of the dutch culture and the dutch langugage.

Highly entertained throughout the flight and hardly got much sleep though the coffee (XF had 2 cups) weren’t very strong.

Let’s look at the list of movies, songs and games that were available.

 

 

 

List of movies was never ending.  

 

The inflight magazine was great! Not any bimbotic crap magazine. We learnt about the Dutch Light, how the Dutch sportsmen are training with artificial light to due with the problem of jetlag for the upcoming Olympics in Beijing. There was information about the possibility of using our mobile device to do a paperless check in and boarding pass on our way home. Something trivial. If you are traveling towards the West, you should sleep later than usual before the trip to adjust, and vice versa, so as to avoid jetlag.

Any idea what the cube in the picture is called?

It’s called a Rubik’s cube.

Jwen saw this and was super duper EXCITED. Imagine sending sms from the plane. So she went to explore

OOOOH hoo. jwen was still very excited and wondering who should she sms to…..

she pressed the button to inquire more.

 

Okay.. disappointed. no credit card. maybe next time when im rich. hahah

 Loads of drama to keep Xf occupied. Including:
CSI; Grey’s Anatomy and Heroes.

For those who know me well, I seldom watch Tv since im usually not at home, or I watch them halfway and have no idea what’s the show title.

This was our conversation:

Jw: What’s heroes? A Japanese show? (Coz I was thinkin of grace)

XF: Obviously someone is from Mt Bromo. Its from USA.

Jw: hahaha (Thinks of yy)

Breakfast was GOOD – XF had the sweetbread combination, which consists of sweetbread (something like bread pudding) – loveloves! – and a salad, muesli cake and the standard bread, butter and jam and mixed fruits. Jwen had the egg and sausage combination, which wasn’t too bad either! =)

 
 

Happy that we got the window seat. But sad that the sun rose from the other side of the plane and this was what we caught of the first ray of the sun.

Enjoying our cup of KLM coffee. 

Day 1 together!

The inflight entertainment system allowed us to learn the Dutch language too. so cool

 

We sat next to an Indian guy, and chatted for a while during the flight and after, and who turned out to be a Singaporean visiting his daughter (a research pharmacist) who is married to a Hollander and now lives in Holland.

 

The 13 hours of flight was no joke – our poor butts were aching after a few hours, and the only times we could get up was during toilet trips which were inconvenient for the Indian guy cos’ he had to get up and out of his seat and wait for us to return before sitting down. Leg room was pretty small, but since it was Cattle Class that we were taking – no complaints haha!

 

So it was nearly 6plus am when we reached Schiphol airport, with a temperature of 12 degrees celcius as it was drizzling earlier on. Schiphol is a short distance from Amsterdam.

Being pharmacits to be, obviously such things catch our eyes fast.
The first drug related shop we saw in the Netherlands.

After much queue-hopping – cos’ the stations opened one after another and we hopped to the seemingly shorter queues which did not move much, hence the ‘hopping’. And we finally cleared our bags and headed out to the Arrival Hall to meet Mrs Lee Tjioe, our host who took us up and out of Schipol airport to meet Eus, recognisable by his thick moustache who helped us with our luggages and drove us back to their home in Uretcht =) We were surprisingly not that jet-lagged! =) Must be due to the odd sleeping hours we had back in Sg. Like 5am nights due to planning and whatnots. HAHA!

 

Btw this comp is SOOoo lag, it’s driving me nuts. Ok at least our room has a desktop for us to use, really kind of the host to think of all these. But seriously, if I have to blog from here EVERYDAY, by the end of 4 weeks I’ll have the patience of Job. Or Buddha.Whatever. It’s now 1.51am! And there’s SO much more to update on. Just feasted on stroopwafles cos’ I daren’t go down to the kitchen cos’ I’m afraid of stepping on the dogs (2 of them) in the dark. Or if they bark and wake everyone up, I’m meat. HAHA. *sigh* I want something warm. Haha!