New Years’ Celebrations

On New Year’s Eve, another NZ workmate arrived – Milli! While Amanda and I managed to work out the tram system (well, enough to get into the centre of Amsterdam, anyway) Kinga went to meet her at the airport.

We all gathered at my apartment for a few beverages. Kinga managed to work out the timer on his digital camera (after a few false starts) and the result was this:

What we didn’t realize (when we were this happy) is that public transport doesn’t run in Amsterdam on New Year’s Eve. This is one of the weirdest things I have ever encountered. No shops are open on New Year’s Day, so it’s the perfect night to go out and celebrate. There’s music and fireworks in the squares in the central city, and yet there’s no way for all the people to get there! We started calling taxi numbers from the phone book in my apartment, and had made over 30 phone calls to no avail when Kinga decides that he’s going to miss New Years if this continues and that he is going to try to hitch hike to Amsterdam from Amstelveen! So he takes off outside and leaves us girls inside trying to get hold of someone (anyone!) to drive us into the city, preferably before midnight! We finally strike it lucky and off we go!

We made it into a pizza parlour around 11pm (after a 20min wait at the door) and found that we could order vodka with our pizza! Although the menu detailed it as Wodka…. and when it arrived the orange juice was in one glass and the Wodka was in the other. You had to pour it in together yourself.

We finished eating at 11.55 and made our way outside to the square so that we could see the fireworks. Now, Dutch people go MENTAL for fireworks. They’re only available around New Years (I think, I hope!) and the streets are absolutely littered with all the fireworks wrappers, and all day long you hear people letting them off (even when it isn’t dark – ummmm, hello?!?!).

After the countdown, and the fireworks, and the music (instead of Auld Lang Syne, here they play the ABBA song ‘Happy New Year’, for about the first 5 days of 2008 we heard it absolutely everywhere) we tried to find our way to a bar or something. We were in a total crush crowd-wise and so just followed the flow, and found ourselves on a canal somewhere, with people letting off fireworks left, right and centre, aiming at people, aiming across the canal, and right in the middle of the crowd. It all got a little too much so we ducked into a ‘Bulldog’ bar and got ourselves a few beverages.

The first thing we noticed is the smoke in the bars! The smoke-free bar rule doesn’t come in until later this year, so it was a big haze of tobacco (and other) smoke. Us poor kiwis weren’t really used to it and got sore eyes and went home feeling decidedly smelly.

When we decided to leave, we realized that we had no idea how we were going to find a taxi. We didn’t know where we were, and all the central city streets were closed off to be pedestrian malls for the celebrations. After following the crowd for a few blocks, we found ourselves in the red light district. A few minutes later, Milli and Amanda are being offered ‘a first class ticket to the moon’ which Amanda politely declined while Milli giggled into her boots.

We finally stumbled across a group of taxis, where a guy offered us a ride for 20 euro each for what should be a 30 euro taxi ride, and there were five of us! So he made a mint off of us. None of us cared (well after Milli got Kinga under control none of us cared) because all taxis quote more expensive prices than the meter for special occasions, and we really wanted to get home as soon as possible. Some of the other NZers (who we didn’t manage to catch up with in the city) took a cab back to Amstelveen but had to wait for a few hours before they could get one, so we count ourselves lucky. On the way home we did see this building on fire, though.