I decided to go to Amsterdam to dance, for no other reason than it wasn’t far, the guys are tall and they have a cycling culture. Then I discovered fly.be had, earlier this year, started a direct flight from Dundee to Amsterdam. You can already travel to Stansted from Dundee. Dundee airport is only 25 minutes drive from where I live. My mum, to whom people just want to tell useful information, learnt that future plans are for the airline to extend connections to Paris and to one of the Channel islands. I booked a flight for about six weeks ahead, mid August. In my mind, mid August is when children in Scotland go back to school (why?). In school-holiday focus I somehow managed to ignore the fact that for the rest of Europe it is prime holiday season.
The children and I had packed a lot in to the holidays with two trips to Manchester and a lot of day trips and picnics. As a result I left it until two weeks before departure to book accommodation. I have never found this task so difficult.
For convenience and safety I did not want to be far from the night time milongas to get back to my accommodation. A lot of my friends stay in hostels which makes travelling easy and very much cheaper. If I didn’t mind the sheer publicness of hostels, never mind the noise, I might too, but I do and I generally like and need sizeable chunks of time by myself. So I looked at Airbnb as I often find private homes closer to the milongas than hotels. Ordinarily I might often get a room for £40-60. Now it was more like £70-80+ and really at the top end of that - for rooms that were not en-suite. Trickier still was trying to get somewhere suitably located for public transport back from the late-ending milongas.
The Friday milonga looked fairly central but the Sunday milonga, La Bruja, was further out near an area I had biked through en route to one of the TangoMagia venues, two or three years previously. I’d been told not all the area was that great. Although cycling is a great option in Amsterdam, I haven’t found a place that will let you drop off the bike late on a Sunday night and I would be away before opening time on the Monday. If I was going to have to wait for public transport in that area I wanted it to be easy.
I looked at hotels too, but they were all £100+/night and not central either. Hopping then between Google maps, Airbnb and booking.com I began to get frustrated. My first choice of Airbnb host (a new host) didn’t respond, the second said the place wasn’t available. Finally I found a place but parts of the Airbnb site seemed to be down or glitchy. Eventually my son pointed at a place about as central as I was likely to get in west Amsterdam. It had its own bathroom and looked nice. Once the airbnb fees were added on it was still an eye-watering £100/night with no breakfast. Then my hairdresser told me about her package holiday to Turkey for two thirds of that and I thought what a fool I was.
By now I felt relieved to have found somewhere but fatalistic about the trip. I thought I’d booked too late, at the wrong time and the dance experience of Berlin and of Stuttgart loomed over me. With extraordinary lack of self-knowledge I decided to think of it as a tourism trip rather than a dance trip.
Forget perfume at the airport or picking up last minute things in Boots. Dundee airport is dinky. There are a handful of short-stay car park spaces. It felt wonderfully anachronistic that you can still park in these for free for the first half hour. There is a wee cafe with a cold drinks cabinet, some sandwiches and a bookshelf providing a free book exchange. I liked it. On the other hand, luggage was checked draconically for size. Not that it seemed the staff had any commission-fuelled zeal to charge extra but the flight was full (both ways it turned out) and any oversized luggage would have to go in the hold. Had I checked my hand-luggage for size? I mumbled something about never having had an issue and miraculously got through. I set off the security alarm repeatedly and while I was thoroughly frisked the chatty security lady kept up a cheerful patter in much the way that some professionals rattle off distracting chat when you’re about to undergo something unpleasant. It was a friendly place but with only one security scanner, you want to be either first or last in the queue. It felt very...local.
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