From our window

If you stick your neck out from our living room’s window and look to your right, you can see Amsterdam Centraal Station. That wouldn’t be such a bad thing if we were still living in the pre-Internet days. The distance to the station and the mopey weather would ensure that any whimsical travel plans fizzled out by the time we reached the ticket counter. But when the train tickets are, to use a horrible cliché, one click away, one easily succumbs to the temptation of booking oneself to some new destination a juicy 3-hour train ride away (that there are direct trains to Paris doesn’t make it any easier).

Yesterday, when the wife opened the living room window to air the house, the breeze carried with it, among other things, the sounds of the announcements from the station! One of the outer platforms has a public announcement system loud enough to be heard outside if you are cycling past the station, but the sound never gets this far (roughly 400m as the crow flies). Theres something thrilling about train announcements projected right into your living room (or we are too far gone).

Date

September 3, 2012

Up next

Making connections when none exist Christiaan Huygens, the famous 17th century astronomer, horologist and the inventor of the pendulum clock, was Dutch. Orange is the national colour

Previously

Unfinished books I just finished reading Author Author, a fictionalised biographical sketch of Henry James by David Lodge. While I immensely enjoyed it, this post is