We’d arranged a trip through London and Amsterdam, ending off in Slovakia, for my best mate’s wedding.
London was easy enough. I know the big smoke backwards. I’ve lived and DJed there. Living with my expat sister was a blast – I must chuckle when I hear about Benonians constantly complaining about the steadily decreasing water pressure in the suburbs – if you flush the toilet in my sister’s middle-class Earlsfield home you have to run around in the shower for five full minutes in order to get wet.
Our accommodation in Amsterdam was interesting, to say the least.
We’d paid considerably less than I’d anticipated – this should have heralded a warning. Then it got real when a barefoot Irish hippie emerged from the “hotel” to help my girlfriend and me take our bags up four flights of stairs that resembled the trek to Everest Base Camp.
This explained why the greasy Irishman had calf muscles that breathed on their own.
The room looked like nothing on the picture; there was no lock on the door and the house smelled of poo. I spent a fortune finding a new hotel – but it saved our trip.
Inside every human is the ability to explete and screech to avoid accidents. Which is why one must take note of where the bike lanes are in Amsterdam, because all that precedes imminent death by bicycle there is a diminutive “tring tring tring” – one too many and you won’t know which direction it comes from.
Cyclists have more rights than pedestrians and boy they get upset when inebriated tourists traipse across their bike lane like Olympic ice skaters. Lucky the bikes aren’t those light-weight, Kevlar-seated, shock absorbed speed beasts: their steady design hasn’t changed in years.
It’s a concept I would love to see working in Benoni.
Unfortunately, South Africans are not courteous enough to accommodate cyclists in their thousands — or even hundreds. It’s such an admirable sight watching pedestrians, trams, cyclists and cars move around with such consistency, sometimes coming within inches of each other.
Hair-raising you might think, but no one even wears a helmet.
In fact, implementing a bike lane in Jo’burg would probably herald a world first in robot to robot bicycle dices.
Everyone could install little sound systems on their bikes and glue some fur to the handlebars.
It’s common knowledge how expensive it is to travel to Europe – but it’s hard to believe how cheap and fantastic the European transport system is, until you get there.
Everything just works. Miss your train? There’ll be another in just a few minutes.
The worst experience was a Dutch conductor who laid an egg over the fact that we’d mistakenly seated ourselves in an empty first class cabin instead of the second class.
There was no sign or warning label and, after he’d had his words with me, I exclaimed a word in Afrikaans.
He must’ve been wondering why on Earth I was speaking about a box, on a train.
