It didn't quite work out as I had hoped, though. At first the plan was to fly out on Tuesday, support the deployment on Wednesday, and come home Thursday. Then Shell changed their minds at the very last minute (Tuesday to be exact) and moved everything back by one day. So, when I called up the airline to change my flight, I ended up spending the same amount as the cost of my ticket in change fees! Good thing I'm not actually paying for it, eh?
Wednesday came around and I headed out to the airport. I was forced to take the Express train there as the stopping services were cancelled, so that was nice little perk. After standing in a line up to go through security that was long enough you would have though the Bin Laden family was having a reunion, I finally made it to my gate and boarded the plane. What a short flight! It was only 45 minutes to Amsterdam! I have never flown from Vancouver to Kelowna, but that's what it must be like, because even the flight to Calgary is an hour. You just feel the plane level off at altitude before you then feel it start to make its initial descent. It's crazy short. When the stewardess came by to offer me a drink, I asked for coffee. That was a wrong choice! She had no sooner passed me a cup of piping hot java than she was back up the aisle to clear away people's trash! I was still blowing on the coffee so that I could take a first sip!
As we came down for our landing and broke through the clouds over Amsterdam, it was kind of funny that the first thing I noticed in Holland was windmills. Typically Dutch to see a ton of windmills in the scenery, but these were very modern, power generating windmills, not the impossibly old-fashioned kind that turned a water wheel or anything like that. The other odd part of landing at Amsterdam is that you land miles away from the actual terminal building. We taxied for 15 minutes to get from the runway to the terminal, and drove over two highways to get there! It was very weird, sitting in the plane as we drove over an overpass, and watched rush-hour traffic pass beneath us; I can only imagine what it's like when you're the one in the car and a plane passes over your head!
I passed through customs and met with Damian, my colleague, in the airport and we took the train for a little over an hour south to Arnhem. This was where we would be working, and I was actually a bit excited because for a Canadian, Arnhem is a great place to visit. Canadians have a great history with the Dutch in terms of WWII liberation ... and Arnhem specifically is a city that the Canadians freed from German occupation. I was keen to do a bit of walking to see the bridges that we had fought to hold, and some of the monuments erected in our honour as well. But that would have to wait until Thursday. We caught a cab from the train station to the hotel, and on the way over I was treated to a radio station that thought it was the dutch version of Z95, and that the year was still 1992. It was kind of funny to hear a techno Annie Lennox remix on the radio, and even more funny that the cab driver turned it up! Why does it always seem the mainland Europe is so behind the times when it comes to music???
We arrived a bit later in the evening, but walked back into town from our hotel and found a place to eat for dinner. No restaurants had English menus (to be expected), but everyone in the Netherlands it seems, speaks English. So Damian and I had a laugh trying to pronounce certain words in the menu, and then had the waitress translate for us. At least a possible disaster there was averted!
Then came the big day. We were picked up by a local Shell employee, and arrived on site to install the software and make sure that everything went smoothly. Damian asked what time they were planning on being finished, and the answer was 3:00pm. Pretty good, I thought. That would give us plenty of time to explore the town of Arnhem, see the river and bridges, and find a nice spot downtown for dinner. Easy! But alas, it was not to be. Despite the fact that our software and portion of the deployment went extremely smoothly and without a single hiccup, we did encounter problems with the point-of-sale (cash register) system. Damian and I had to stay on-site at the small dingy gas station until 10:30 at night!! I didn't get to eat dinner until 11:00pm! It was nuts, and I was quite disappointed. I could probably fill a short story's worth of text with complaints over how the day and deployment process was handled, but that's not for this forum. A trip abroad, and all I'd really managed to see was a gas station! Oh well, I guess sometimes it's not meant to be. Hopefully there will be more opportunities in the future!