Amsterdam

Lovely uneventful flight where we watched too many movies (Monsters v Aliens, Benjamin Button, and Frost/Nixon), drank red wine, and ate really nice "Asian vegetarian" meals with a chickpea curry and rice for dinner, a bean-salad pita for "lunch", and... well.. a plastic bowl of multigrain Cheerios and soymilk for breakfast. Which wouldn't have been quite so bad if the standard breakfast hadn't been egg and cheese biscuits. Oh well.

Schiphol Airport is amazing -- beautiful design, lots of self-service transfer kiosks (where Wil could finally print his boarding pass for Barcelona, which the less-than-genius agent in Seattle claimed she couldn't do even though I had printed mine...), lots of fun shops, and an interesting system whereby we suddenly had to pass through immigration and security but there didn't seem to be any differences between the two sides. (Love the brightly colored bins they have at their x-ray machines!) Also, I noticed that, in addition to their metal detectors, they had one of those x-ray picture machines... that had a large monitor attached. I said "Ooh, it's the naked picture machine!" and Wil said "Yeah, and I guess the monitor is for the entertainment of the queue."

Didn't have too long to kill, but did manage to find a cheese shop and buy some lovely cheese in honor of my international cheese-smuggling mother. Say cheese!