[Dutch Lock Down Day Four Hundred Ninety Three]
Except not.
It’s actually Tuesday because I flew in yesterday to the Netherlands and took a shower and then slept until this morning at three.
Holy hell.
It’s really hard to focus. Of course. But let’s try to get this story out, shall we?
The plane landed yesterday and passport control no longer cares if you are an EU resident or not, everyone goes through the same line, thus it took close to an hour to get my bag, buy a train ticket, and make my way to the train platform.
Which was blocked by several police officers.
I was too tired to speak Dutch, “What’s going on?”
“Can’t you tell?”
ASIDE : if you ask a question in English and you get an unhelpful question in return, this is typically, “I don’t feel comfortable talking in English and would like to shut this conversation down as quickly as possible.”
I look past the police into the platform and see three fire fighters coming up the ramp.
“Of course.”
SECOND ASIDE : I’d like to have all the writers for this show fired, please.
The train station people were swamped with helping people go around these two platforms and I was deliriously confident in my train navigation abilities, so I took another train a couple of stops south to Amsterdam Zuid, sat my exhausted butt at the local Starbucks with a cup of tea, and read for an hour, hoping it would be resolved by then.
And it mostly was?
Since the article isn’t listed in any of the English news sources, I’ll translate that one:
“Train traffic to and from Schiphol was shut down for more than half an hour on Monday morning after the brakes of a train in the Schiphol tunnel got stuck, a ProRail spokesperson reported to NU.nl. This was accompanied by considerable smoke development, but there would be no fire.
The smoke development did cause the fire alarm to go off. “And because the incident takes place there, emergency services are automatically notified and they are on their way to the airport,” said the spokesperson.
Trains can now run to and from Schiphol again. The outage should be completely resolved around 11.15 am, NS reports on its own website.
According to the ProRail spokesperson, the train will be towed away and an extra check will take place to release the Schiphol tunnel. The smoke must also be sucked out of the tunnel.”
Nu.NL: Trains are driving to and from Schiphol again after major disruption