Volume 2, Day 29
For the next couple of days, I was planning to visit a friend, C, in Leiden. Leiden is a small canal town to the southwest of Amsterdam and birthplace of one Rembrandt van Rijn. The town is charming and quaint and also completely dominated by the university there. Leiden first appeared on my radar when I started my PhD oh so many years ago and a friend forwarded me a job posting (for a PhD candidate) at the Max Plank Institute of Psycholinguistics, which is based in the University of Leiden. Reading the description of the ideal candidate as if I was looking at myself in a mirror, I began building a fantasy of doing a post-doc in Europe as a way of transitioning back to the West from my career in China. Needless to say, that is not a path I am taking. That is mostly because the institute turned towards research directions that I am less suited for and is not looking for postdocs. Nonetheless, a significant part of the reason of these European travels is to satisfy this itch that has been building in me the past six years and to have a glimpse at a life I may have had in an alternate dimension.
I met C, a native of Leiden, when she was teaching Dutch as a foreign language in Shanghai. Her immense love of her hometown also fueled my curiosity as to how great can the town really be. So, when I knew I was headed to Europe, I arranged to visit.
So, in the morning, I was in no particular hurry to move on to the next town nor did I have any compelling reason to hang around killing time. I enjoyed a leisurely breakfast, packed up, bid farewell to my roommate and headed over to the train station to go to Leiden, which is small enough to not be covered by Flixbus. That is somewhat unfortunate because the trains in the Netherlands, though efficient and green, are both a litle pricey and infuriating.
The train ticketing machines only accept coins and credit cards. I luckily had a pocketful of coins, but not quite enough to scrape together the 9.8 euro ticket price. Why they can’t accept a 10 or 20 euro note when the train tickets cost 10-20 euros is some sort of Dutch logic. I found a kiosk and bought a packet of M&Ms in order to get enough change to buy the ticket. Now, the ticket also has a 1 euro surcharge because … reasons? The Netherlands has a nationwide public transportation card system–dubbed OV–but is literally the worst system I have ever experienced. If you want a “permanent” card, you have to pay 15 euros for it. Those 15 euros are not a deposit, but a fee. And the card expires after 5 years. And if you don’t register your name (so that the government can track you), you don’t get any possible discount on transportation. Single use tickets cost 1 euro on top of the full fare. Again, that euro isn’t a deposit, you can’t turn in the card for recycling even though the fee is because they system is based on RF chips.
When I plopped down in the train for the half hour ride to Leiden, I started to relax until the conductor came by and wanted to fine me 50 euros for sitting in the first class section on a second class ticket. They look the same and having never ridden these trains before, I didn’t know to look for the tiny little “1” or “2” marking the separate sections.
C was waiting for me at the train station when I arrived. She lent me a spare OV card and topped it up to 20 Euros, which at first seemed like a nice thing until she explained that you must maintain a balance of 20 Euros, otherwise the card doesn’t work. Goodness grief, they just keep inventing new ways to screw people over, don’t they? Anyways, she rented a public bike (which should cost something like 4 euros a day and is a bargain compared to the 15 euros a day that hostels like to charge) and after a lot of fiddling with my luggage, we walked the bikes over to her flat on the other side of town.
She had some lesson plans to do and I always have work I need to be doing,(Honestly, how many days behind am I at this point?) so we biked over to the more commercial part of town and hung out in a cafe for a couple of hours. Unfortunately, neither of us got much work done because we kept talking.
I had originally suggested she invite some friends over for the evening to have a minor Fourth of July celebration, but her friends had all come over the day before for a little party. Nevertheless, I offered to cook something up and after a visit to a supermarket, I made fresh guacamole and fajitas. C is vegetarian so I put fake chicken in the fajitas. As I was cooking, I realized that the cashier at the grocery store has short changed me.
So, apparantly, the Netherlands does not accept 1 or 2 cent Euro coins. That explains why I noticed the cashiers rounding up every time I was buying something, but this time I had the exact 7 cents that was displayed on the cash register. Between the refusal to accept said money and scrounging up different coins, the cashier “forgot” to give me a 2 euro coin in change. C suggested that because everyone uses cards for everything in the Netherlands that cashiers no longer know how to count or handle money. Like history’s greatest trading people and inventors of the modern stock market could forget how to use money.
After dinner, C and I went on a very minor pub crawl, hitting two bars and walking around a bit of town in the process. The good thing about the Netherlands is that the bars are very heavily tilted towards the Belgian beers, so one doesn’t necessarily have to go to Belgium to enjoy them.
Despite all the inconveniences throughout the day, it was good to be visiting a friend and I am looking forward to the next couple of weeks.
| M&Ms | 1.25 |
| Train ticket | 9.9 |
| Groceries | 20.05 |
| Beer | 9.7 |
| Total: | 40.9 EUR (319 RMB) (USD 46.37) |
Running Total: 11074 RMB (USD 1609.55)
Daily Average: 381.9 RMB (USD 55.50)