Pretend it's Yesterday

Okay, so here’s what I was supposed to post yesterday...or the day before.Pretend it’s the 27^th when you read it :)

Greetings all!

Matt and I landed yesterday morning, at 9:10 am local time. I have already been lax about logging on. We’ve been busy, as expected. But mostly, it has been the jet lag keeping us from communicating.

The flight was long (direct from SFO to AMS) and cramped, but uneventful, which is a plus. It took us a little while to figure out the baggage claim area, since there were 23 carousels. But once we did, our bags came out one right after the next and we hardly had to wait at all. Customs breezed us through even when we told them we were here for the long haul.

One nice surprise (to me) was that Matt’s first hire to the customer support group, Jean Philippe, came and picked us up with welcome gifts in hand. I came out first, and spotted a guy wearing an i365 t-shirt complete with a flashing company pin on it, carrying flowers and a welcome balloon. I smiled and waved, and he looked confused and a little uncomfortable, because he obviously wasn’t looking for me, but for Matt. This total stranger smiling threw him off a bit until Matt came out from behind me. I can’t say enough how nice it was, how calming it was, to have someone there that we could just follow blindly out to the hotel shuttle bus. Schiphol is a pretty nice airport, but being up for as long as we had been, and having had to cram so much into the last few days before we left, it was a real relief to be able to leave the chaos of airport navigation on auto pilot, and just follow someone who knew what they are about. The shuttle pulled up without much wait, J.P. bid us rest well, and we drove off through pretty farm country dotted with short shaggy ponies and white birds eating the farmer’s seeds… The hotel was a surprise to see, since the first thing you see is what you think at first is an overpass. Upon closer inspection, it becomes an overpass built entirely for a mini mall. A 2-minute walk across the parking lot of the hotel takes you to the A4 freeway, where a long skinny building populated with fast food joints, quick stop markets, and a suit shop holds court above 8 lanes of the fast and the furious.

We were exhausted beyond description, but tried to do as the locals do since that’s supposed to be the best way to beat the jet lag. Instead of crawling into bed at 11 am here when we wanted to (since in our heads it was 3 am or so), we stayed up and tried too settle in. We walked around our hotel, the Van Der Valk, in the Hoofddoorp, south of Amsterdam and 10 minutes from the Schiphol airport. And we wandered over to our hotel’s strangest of strip malls. After weighing our choices, we dined at an Argentinean restaurant, the Rancho BBQ and Grill. It was disconcerting to be ordering off a menu with descriptions in Spanish, and translations in Dutch (ie: Sopa Ranchera = Rijk gevulde Argentijnse goulshsoep). Somehow, that state of fatigue made accessing the foreign language part of our brains easier, and the language started making sense. Too bad it didn’t last until today :)

Today was Matt’s first day of work. After dinner, we stopped in at the lounge to watch some snooker and have a pint of Bavarian ale, followed by a brief net café stop. We got to dinner at a reasonable hour, but still didn’t sleep, as we should. Matt in particular, who of course, had to work the next day, couldn’t sleep after 3 am local time. So, once he did fall asleep, it lasted. I was up and moving around by 9 am here. I sat on our patio overlooking a lovely garden, with fields and ponies in the distance, warming my face in the unexpectedly warm sun, eating my leftover zucchini bread from the flight. By 11 am, as a team, we were on our way to work. I wanted to see where Matt was going to work, and I was planning on turning around again and coming back after I met the team. Turns out, we showed up just in time for the team lunch. Since they only have a short break, and in the business park there are no café’s to jet out to, the company finds it more cost effective to provide sandwich fixings and fruit for lunch, along with juice and coffee. So, we scored :).

Instead of heading out again by myself, I took advantage (or rather, they let me take advantage) of a free notebook that is set up awaiting Matt’s next hire, Fredericka, who doesn’t start until the beginning of November. I did get to email a few people but I didn’t blog because I had 13 pages of house inventory to finish. I still didn’t get it done enough to email out to our property manager. The i365 crew were turning off the lights on me and I was still typing. The VP of Western Europe was kind enough to give us a lift back to the freeway overpass mall, and we grabbed a quick dinner at the hotel restaurant. Excellent “Grandma’s Tomato Soup”, a nice red wine, and it’s off to bed. Or to blog :)

My computer says it’s 1:59 pm at home right now. It’s 9:59 pm here in Holland. My computer is running a low battery, and we left the adapter plug at the office….

So, until tomorrow.