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Monday June 12, 2017

Our Denmark/Netherlands Trip: By the Numbers

Amsterdam sign by the Rijks Museum

  • Days gone: 18
  • Countries visited: 2. Three if you count the Charles de Gaulle Airport.
  • Lonely Planet guidebooks brought: 2. But we really could've used one for the Charles de Gaulle Airport. 
  • Minutes to make our connecting flight at CDG: 70
  • Minutes by which we missed our connecting flight: 5
  • Minutes subsequently spent at CDG: 480
  • Museums visited in 18 days: 17
  • Museums visited alongside field trips of howling school kids: 16
  • Churches/kirkes/kerks entered: 20
  • Towers climbed: 6
  • Paintings by Dutch masters gazed at: 142
  • Van Goghs seen: 69
  • Canal tours taken: 1. Copenhagen.
  • Visits to the Little Mermaid: 2. Once from the canal side. 
  • Visits to Tivoli: 2. Once in the evening. 
  • Visits to castles: 8
  • Visits to Shakespearean castles: 1. Hamlet's, yo.
  • Number of Yankee caps seen on the heads of Europeans who think “NY” is “like the rebel image”: 99
  • Number who know the Yankees are the richest team in baseball: 0
  • Polish Carlsberg workers with whom we debated whose country's president was the more embarrassing while sharing an outdoor table at a charming pizza place in the former meatpacking district of Copenhagen: 3
  • Number of nodded concessions that, while the Polish president was an embarrassment, his idiocy didn't affect the world: 5
  • Number of times I crossed the street in advance of looming bikes, cars or trams, or just before the light turned red, and Patricia missed the cue, and we wound up staring at each other from opposite sides of the street: 212
  • Number of times we consulted Google Maps and then went in the wrong direction anyway: 53
  • Times we visited Hope in Copenhagen for breakfast in our five mornings there: 2
  • Mornings when we thought, “You know, we really should've just gone to Hope again”: 3
  • Number of times in the morning I thought, “Wow, Danish people are really good-looking”: 4 
  • Number of times in the late afternoon I thought, “OK, maybe not”: 4
  • Number of times I was absolutely turned on by women in Amsterdam: 24
  • Number of times this happened in the red light district: 0
  • Number of scheduled cyling days on our bike-barge trip along the IJsselmeer in the Netherlands: 6
  • Actual days spent biking due to weather: 3
  • Number of times we had more trouble finding the boat in the new port than we did making the actual journey: 3
  • Number of cyclists on the trip: 19
  • Number of Pacific Northwesterners: 8
  • Old-style windmills seen: 8
  • Wind-energy turbines seen: 211
  • Times I thought of Trump because of this: 211
  • Pannekoeken eaten: 5
  • Cappuccinos drunk: 27
  • Frites: 8
  • Netherlanders impressed that I pronounced “bedankt” with the “t” at the end: 15
  • Number of tickets we tried to buy with credit cards/debit cards in train-station kiosks: 12
  • Number of times the credit card/debit card was rejected: 12
  • Number of times the cards were rejected elsewhere: 0
  • Postcards sent: 36
  • Postcards bought but never sent: 111
  • Refrigerator magnets bought: 12
  • Text messages warning us that we were about to exceed, or had already exceeded, or were hopelessly in excess of, our international data package: 4 
  • Plane hours home: 9
  • Money spent: TBA
Posted at 03:43 AM on Monday June 12, 2017 in category Personal Pieces