The Ham Nomads

12 Jul 2019. <DE> Berlin, Germany — <NL> Amsterdam, Netherlands —

Today we left Berlin for Amsterdam. We were at the Hauptbahnhof Berlin well in time for our train, which left at 8:34am — which meant an early wake-up for your intrepid travellers!

The Hauptbahnhof is amazingly set up — there's virtually a shopping centre inside, and the trains of the S-Bahn whizz through on an overhead track every few minutes! The platforms are easy to get to, and the train information is displayed on easy-to-read screens about the place.

Our train was a high speed — well, medium-speed compared with China — through train, so we had to be down on the correct platform at the right time to catch it. This was no problem, and we were soon in our comfortable seats and whizzing towards Amsterdam.

There was no difficulty knowing when we crossed into the Netherlands — all of a sudden the first announcement each time on the train was in Dutch, not German, and anyway the number of bicycles you could see out of the train windows increased dramatically!

We got into Amsterdam Centraal on time, at 2:57pm — the same time zone, so we didn't even have to change our watches! We caught a taxi from the station, and half an hour and €50 later we were in our very comfortable room in our hotel, the Novotel Amsterdam City, with a great view out the window. The hotel was considerably further out from the city than we had expected, but we had three choices of transport in — the Metro, the normal trains, or the trams, each of which was frequent and easy to use. (We ultimately ended up using both the Metro and the trams, whichever suited us at the time.) So all we did tonight was to go down to the hotel restaurant for dinner, and then settle in for the night.