After a 1h 35min flight from Bergamo airport, we have successfully landed in the Netherlands, in Eindhoven to be more precise. It was a beautiful sunny day, a bit too hot I’d say, but much better than an eventual rain that dominated the Netherlands the days before.
We took our luggage and headed out to the bus-stop, which is just outside the airport, to get to Eindhoven central station. Bus number 401 is responsible to get people from the airport to the train station, so we went to search one… but first thing is first, we had to buy a ticket…
There are very nice ticket-machines at the bus stop, which accept both coins and banknotes. Well, that was the theory… in practice, the little robot was unable to process any kind of paper money (not ours, not anyone else’s). The irony of the situation is that we already had problems with the “ticket’omats” in Italy in the morning… we were really hoping that things will work in the Netherlands… 😛 . Luckily a ticket is €3.00 (three regions, one euro for each), so we managed to gather enough coins to pay the ticket for two people.
Now, the more interesting part: the bus… where is the bus? Well, “there it is!”, my colleague said… “don’t look for a bus…. It doesn’t look like one”, he continued. As the bus entered the station, I understood what he meant… what a shape… 😀 . We got on it, very curiously, to see how it looks like from the inside: well we were not disappointed… the fancy outside comes with a fancy and very comfy inside as well. The bus even had a ticket-issuing machine on it also…. very nice… 🙂 .
Eindhoven itself (what we managed to see of it), was out of this world: everything organized, clean, futuristic houses, and one could rarely see people anywhere. The whole city looks like a quick plan of someone built up in a rush, without giving it time to deteriorate… well, it is almost like that also: Eindhoven is “Philips city”, as the company has invested a lot in it, and most of the cities development is brand new.
I also met the Netherlands favorite transportation method: bicycles. Every road has additional lanes (often separated by the cars) for bicycles. The train station was full of them. I thought I have seen everything when taking the photos of large groups of Italian mopeds in parking lots… this was even better… there were hundreds of them, especially at the train station.
Well, that’s it for now… I am going to stop with this post… the next part of our trip deserves I think a special post of its own 🙂 .
