We wake up on the Day 8 knowing that we have no way of getting back to the US, so we plan to make a call to Delta airline to book a flight, as online booking site is scarcely updated and provide no practical information to move us further along in getting tickets. So after eating our breakfast, we ask our hotel manager if there is a way to call this Delta number in Amsterdam. He tells me in a broken English (he seemed drunk half the time) that the phone call would cost a Euro a minute because the hotel wasn't set up for long distance regularly, and that there are multiple "phone cafes" in our neighborhood. Assuming that international travelers are not supposed to be surprised by this archaic communication system in the Netherlands, I would have certainly hoped that he would tell me what these "phone cafes" looked like or were called. You guessed it, after additional 15 min, I wanted to ask him no more, we were headed down the street to look for these "phone cafes" to find out that they were closed because it was Saturday. Nothing operates on weekends in Europe, but I knew that before. So we go back to hotel, pack our stuff and headed over to Amanda's conference because we figured they could help us out with making phone calls there (they were helping others out there before).
When we get there, they were not equipped to call Amsterdam, so they directed us towards the "public phone booths" set up near the Rotterdam central station. I must emphasize that Amsterdam and Rotterdam are like 20 min away from each other, and the phone systems have no business of making themselves this complicated. Either way, we are just a traveler so as vulnerable as we are of being taken advantage of, we go to the phone booth located near the station. We find that like most thing in Netherlands, these phones don't take cash, they take credit cards but not American credit cards, so we had to go buy phone cards. You must again ask yourselves "okay, this place, to get a phone card, where is it?" before being told "of course it's this store around the corner that sells newspapers that sells phone cards, why are you travelers all so incompetent?". Well if your Dutch majesty PH-dot-D-dot could put up a sign for us lowly incompetents then we won't have to bother your precious weekend time anymore.
Seriously, I've traveled a lot. I've been to 40 countries or more and I'm usually lot more patient and understanding about how some places are just not travelers friendly. Netherlands aren't that bad...as long as you don't get into a situation like ours. But we are already tired because we've been walking 6+ miles everyday because your public transportation systems won't take cash or our American credit card and we have two kids that whine and I am just whining because I am also a whiny baby.
Anyway, we get ourselves a 10 euro phone card. We call the Delta number we got online. We are put on hold as expected. I expected that we would be on hold at least half an hour, maybe an hour or two. What I didn't know that I was on hold for just 10 min! BECAUSE OUR PHONE CARD RAN OUT OF MONEY IN 10 MIN!!! Apparently calling Amsterdam doesn't cost this much, but since it's an airline number, it's considered "informational line" and it costs a euro a minute. A EURO A MINUTE! If you were watching the news in Europe, 24h a day the news was about the volcanic ash and the effect on travels. On Fri/Sat, news reporters would relay us a message from the airlines/airports to please stay away from the airport because they would not be able to help them. Well I know why people keep going to the airport, because you can't use online system, you can't spend 200 bucks to be on hold to book an airplane ticket. The best thing is we heard from Amanda's boss who went to the airport on Sunday that there was absolutely noone at the airport then. Not even an airport personnel. Awesome!
So we wasted our 10 euro, and decided, whatever, we will get back to our hotel this evening, G-chat Amanda's family and have them call the 1-800 Delta number to rebook our flights. I thank Amanda's dad because apparently this was the best move to make. Even though Amanda's dad had to be on hold on the phone with Delta for a while, and our g-chat not functioning well because of the cross-atlantic cable overload, he got us tickets to fly out of Wednesday. That was the earliest we could get out. A guy at our hotel went through a travel agency in Amsterdam, only to get a flight back on Sunday-4 days later...which is today. Hopefully he got back safely.
So instead of trying to book our flight, we headed to the station and decided to do what we planned to do all day long, visit Den Haag. Den Haag, though is not a capital of Netherlands, it basically function as such because it has a parliament and a palace. I don't really know why Amsterdam is a capital, it has no business to be so. We take a train to Den Haag and arrives there around 11am. There are three things we wanted to see: 1) parliament, 2)Mauristhuis, 3)Marudodam. Mauristhuis is a museum with the infamour painting by Vermere called "A girl with a pearl earring", which was made into a movie on its own with Scarlet Johansen a number of years ago. Marudodam is basically a miniature Netherlands. From Den Haag HS(short for Holland Spoor or something) station was about a mile away from parliament/Mauristhus area and Marudodam was another mile or two out. On the way to the parliament, we stopped by yet another Le Marche/moevenpick located at a department store called V&D to have a lunch.
By the parliament
and the parliament itself
The staff there was very nice to us who had two kids and helped operate the elevators. It seemed that this museum had a lot of secret passges for the workers. Our elevators were also hidden in the walls and I saw couple of curators popping out of the wall several times. Andrew behaved very well, whereas Seth wanted to stay in one of the display rooms and did not want to leave. Afterwards we made a long walk to Marudodam, Andrew fell asleep on the way there so we had to wake him up. He had a blast. We had a blast too, I think. It was a lot of fun. They have few spots where you can put coins to make miniatures do different stuff. Andrew liked the ones where you put 10c and a miniature truck brought you a tiny Mars bar, as well as a spot where putting 10c turned on the town fair.
Seth seemed to enjoy the place, too. After staying there for several hours we took the tram back to Den Haag HS. It so happens that public transportation system ticket that we bought on the way to Keukenhoff worked so we used that to get back. Den Haag also has a Den Haag Central station where there is a metro that runs from Rotterdam but they use a different ticketing system. So as the bus. They are transitioning the systems in Netherlands to a shared system so people wouldn't have to use multiple paying systems but this newer system is very unfriendly for travelers (you have to buy a card that costs quite a bit of money and then put money into it to ride public transportation). Anyway, we get back to Den Haag HS, ride the train back to Rotterdam central, and walked all the way back to our hotel again (stopping by at the grocery store to grab a sandwich and grape again). Like I said before, we then got a hold of our manager to let us use the computer, got a hold of our friend Helaman from Boston to call Amanda's family and have her dad talk to us on Gmail to book our flights back. Thank you.
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