Rotterdam is HOME

Sydney-Hong Kong-Amsterdam was a 6 plus 13 hours trip with a 15 minutes short break for transfer. Flying 19 hours was indeed unbearable especially when the transfer was only 15 minutes due to the delay of Sydney-Hong Kong trip. Even Cathay Pacific (CX) doesn’t feel much better than KLM when my trips were both really long. A special note here: the food was crap! Dragon Air has better food!

What amazed me was how flights can be speed up. Here is the conversation I had with one of the staff from CX when I was in Sydney International Airport:
Me: I heard there is going to be a delay of the flight due to the breakdown of the luggage belt.
CX: No, not yet.
Me: I hope not because I have a connecting flight to catch 1.5 hours after we land in Hong Kong.
CX: Even though we do have delay here, we can catch up in the air.

Wow! Shortening the journey in the air?! Come to think of this idea, is there a speed limit for planes? I don’t have any knowledge in this area. (For example, how does a plane find its lane in the air?) But we did end up our journey 2 hours shorter than scheduled which is a quarter of the whole length!!! Then again, my Hong Kong-Amsterdam trip was 1 hour shorter. Amazing!

The rude shop assistants in the duty free shops in Schipol (Amsterdam International Airport) confirmed that I am in The Netherlands now. I do miss ‘Hey, how are ya?’ greetings in all shops in Australia. (Thought I was usually frightened by this sudden greeting and didn’t know what to reply. ;p) But the Dutch rudeness makes this country special as well. (Not judging I like it or not!)

Then I caught the train to Rotterdam Central then tram to Hofdijk (the building I am staying at). On the way, I saw a black family and a Japanese couple. This reminded me of a feeling I had when I was in Australia last month. (Maybe not many countries are like Australia. There was race riot just happened. And most of the white Australians probably still associate their country as a white people’s country. But I didn’t feel like a foreigner when moving around. I saw people from different ethnical groups hanging out together.)

The Netherlands is so different when it comes to multi-cultural or multi-ethnical compared to Australia. It is like cocktail here - not blended enough. And the Dutch now are wondering if they’ve been too tolerant to immigrants. Well…if you don’t want to integrate them, why let them come and your society suffer?

Finally I got home - for a minute, I was thinking which floor I lived. I had this smile on my face when I managed to open the door. Nobody is back from holiday yet. I unpacked, took shower, change my bed clothes, wrapped some gifts for some teammates and watched BBC news (this might be what I missed the most). Not that this country is easier to be compared to the rest I have been to. But like many other teammates, I do consider Rotterdam as home. So it is good to be back. ;-)