Here I was standing in this great hall at the airport with more time than I needed on my hands. What was I going to be doing for the next 12 hours. I had to come up with some ingenious ways on how to waste time. If I had the money, that wouldn't be a problem but I had about 20 Euros on me by chance. My credit card was smouldering.  I had used it a lot.

Sweating like an Arab lost in the desert, I walked off with my tail between my legs. Not only was I embarrassed that I looked like I was illiterate, I mean what is the difficulty in telling between 10pm and 10Am? In airline times it is simple. They use the 24 hour clock 1000 is in the morning and 2200 is in the evening. To make matters even worse, the flight was at 2155. OK, five minutes shy of 2200 but come on! So I tried to arrive in Holland (again) as slowly as possible. 

I decided to have the cheapest day out in a major western capital ever. A tourist. I decided to look for the tourist information desk in the airport without help. It is a nightmare!!! A lovely nightmare thought because in so doing I looked around the whole bloody airport. Looked into some shops and just to waste time I started converting the prices from Euros to Pounds. And to make it just that more interesting, into Ugandan shillings as well. I knew how much a balloon cost at Bloem!......in three currencies.Albert Hejn to go another shop in the airport has the cheapest Coca Cola bottles at £1.30. Oh, they also had a basket full of free chocolate. Lovely stuff.

Eventually (and to my annoyance) I saw the tourist information office. I had wasted 40 minutes!! In my so polite English way I asked the girls behind the desk what a man like me with so much time in Amsterdam could do. I shouldn't have told them my life story I realise with hind sight because before I got the the end, she pulled out a map and circled the Red Light District in Amsterdam!!! Shock HORROR!! Do I give off that kind of impression? Do bored English men in Amsterdam head for the RED LIGHT DISTRICT? (It was good to know anyway where it was) Cheers girls.

I cant speak Dutch to save my life but I decided to find the train station, work out which train went to the city centre and from which platform.. Another way to pass time. Not in a hurry. Like all people do in these places, I nonchalantly looked at the train departures board and to my utter annoyance, it was in English. So no Dutch lesson in finding out the word for "Amsterdam Cetraal", it is written like "Amsterdam Central.

I headed into Amsterdam wishing that like the Piccadilly line in London, it would take at least an hour with a few signal failures thrown in, unexplained delays at random stations and a change on to a rail replacement service. Two hours killed? Yeah right!!!"  Twenty minutes later we were pulling into Amsterdam Central. Great. More time to waste but on the bright side I was in Amsterdam.