Old School Amsterdam

We stayed in Amsterdam but two days. Given the length of time we'd been sojourning in the cities of Scandinavia, this was quite brief.  Red was intrigued by the city, as almost everyone is on their first visit, but since I'd spent time there before, I was eager to move on to the other parts of the Netherlands, which I knew were even more rewarding if one gives them a chance.

So on the third day, after Red's obligatory visit to the Van Gogh Museum (which unfortunately was partially under renovation, disallowing visits to several floors and thus destroying the continuity of the timeline of the artist's life work) we wheeled our luggage from the hotel waiting room to the tram stop and rode the vehicle through herky-jerk Amsterdam streets past the canals back to the station, using our country-wide Dutch rail passes (OV-chipkaart, it is called) to check in and check out with the automated readers (the second step is important if you don't want to get dinged with a charge for a full-zone ticket, which is assumed by the system---that indeed happened to Red once, causing her to lose a bunch of her balance on her card). 

Once back at the Central Station (alas the days of shady characters hassling you at the big entrance doors is over), we read the electronic monitors and found our train.

Reading the monitors to find our track was a poignant moment. The electronic LED monitors were new since my last visit. But they were inevitable of course. Still I couldn't help feel a sense of loss from the old style of train station boards in Europe, that any old backpacker would have recognized, the old mechanical ones where the the slats in the boards made a certain unmistakable clicking sound as they flipped through the list of places, as the departing and arriving trains made their way up the board, as each one left in progression.

By watching the slats flip through the lists, one could spy out the places to which trains actually went, and the symbols on the slats that denoted different types of service, in different colors. It was like flipping through an old style encyclopedia, instead of looking something up online---if I can make a certain analogy with a different technology.