Dance! - The Road to Heavies: lesson 12. February 3, 2012
Or: what should have been lesson number 12
There is some powder-snow falling down when I leave home for work around 9.30 in the morning. After a visit to the market, I enter the bus around 10 o'clock and nice wavy looking clouds of snow whirl over the road.
Yeah right, this probably won't be anything good. At work, around noon, the gates open up and before I know it, things take a turn for the worse. Around 2 o'clock in the afternoon, levels of snow have reached substantial levels and from my place of work in the center of Amsterdam, I take a listen to the radio and hear how one railway after the other suffers severe delay or even complete shutdown, public transport in Amsterdam suffers severe delays due to frozen switches, the National Railways-website is down due to many people trying to reach it and most motorways suffer from chaos.
Ah well, still another 3 hours to go to dance-class. Things can change in that time-window. I do make a phonecall home to ask my brother if he can send a message to the teacher I probably won't make it. It's a little stupid, but I did not provide myself with some contact-details in case something goes wrong on the way to dance-class (like it is now) and can't reach the teacher from the place where I work.
Spend the night somewhere else in case of public transport-shutdown
Shortly after, my grandpa from Osdorp calls. He doesn't know if there is still a bus-service to Purmerend but in case they don't, I can take a detour and go to his place for a meal and a good night of sleep. I hope that if it comes to such a shutdown there will still be trams left that go to Osdorp, but hey, let's see what will happen. What works, works, and what doesn't, doesn't: I won't make any progress by complaining.
On second thought: Let's skip dance-class...
Around 5 in the afternoon, I take a quick look on a different website that also tells the delays on the Dutch railway-lines: the National Railways-website is still out of service due to the many visitors. Well, hell no! I tend to search for adventure sometimes by deliberately travelling to places where a signal- or switch-failure is taken place, just to behold the chaos at scene and take joy in the fact I don't have to get to a place in time, but this time, I'm not in the mood at all. Delays are estimated between 1 to 2 hours, on about 60 to 70% less trains than normal. Not in my right mind would I think about going by train tonight. The thing is I have to get there in the first place, but I also have to get back and I don't rest assured that problems won't get any worse by night-time, as - for my understandings - serious frosty conditions are forecasted. Most forecasters talk about -15 degrees Celsius, one of them carefully even dares to mention -20 degrees.
It takes a while before I realise this could endanger my first Feis-visit as well. If the National Railways don't get their mess sorted out around Sunday, I'm afraid I have to cancel my plans to visit the Feis.
Crowded Central Station
When I leave work around 6 and take my regular walk through Amsterdam Central Station to get to the bus, the corridors of CS provides a rather familiar image. There are big groups of travellers everywhere, sitting on the ground, waiting for 'their' train to depart. The stairs that lead up to the platforms are full of people who are eating something and are sharing the same fate of waiting.
The temperature however ís a difference: A nasty, chilly wind blows through the tunnel leading to the platforms and makes waiting uncomfortable.
The buses drive like they normally do. There are some delays, but it's really nothing compared to what train-travellers have to deal with at the moment. It is going to be my most spectacular bus-ride though. Never ever have I experienced that roads are so slippery that we overshoot bus-stops frequently (allthough the driver takes it easy and brakes very slowly) or the busdriver has the greatest trouble driving away from a stop, as the articulated part (that holds the engine and powered axle) swerves from left to right before the wheels find the grip to get the bus going again.
That's it for the front-door...
At the busstop of Ilpendam, the journey comes to and end. The bus leans to the right (our buses don't tilt, but lean over to the right) to let a passenger board the bus, but a loud 'bang' can be heard from underneath the bus. The front-door opens only halfway after that and won't open completely. Part of the door sticks out to the road where huge piles of compressed snow are present, which have become rock-solid in just a few hours.
The worse part is that the door won't close anymore.
The next bus is radioed to call at the stop and take all the remaining passengers. Without any bad word, everyone makes it into the other bus, which is completely overcrowded (I'm not someone who easily calls a vehicle overcrowded, but we really couldn't take any more passengers)
Packed, the bus continues to Purmerend.