László Varga

The fastest and easiest method of transportation in the Netherlands is probably by train. Actually there are several companies running their trains on the railway tracks of Nederlandse Spoorwegen (Dutch Railways), but most of them actually belong to the main company. It is fairly easy to use the train network, because there are trains from everywhere to everywhere in almost every half an hour (in some cases every ten minutes). It is also interesting to note, that on the NS trains the ticket prices are the same, no matter of the class of the train (only the distance traveled is taken into consideration). One can imagine, that I was very curious to experience this seemingly high quality system.

After arriving to Eindhoven Central station, we ate a sandwich, and headed to find a ticket issuing machine to buy our tickets… surprise, surprise there were lots of machines, just like in Italy. They also accepted cash, credit cards or so called “Chipknips” (no idea what they are). Just like in Italy, all of the machines were unable to accept cash anymore… 😕 … No problem, we said.. we have all sorts of credit cards, exactly for these kinds of situations… and here comes the even bigger surprise: they only accept Maestro cards. Guess which one we did not have… I actually do not understand: Maestro is operated by MasterCard … we tried MasterCard, and no response… Strange 😕 …

Well, luckily nothing is impossible in the Netherlands: there is also a ticket office, with people in it 😀 (imagine the joy…). We bought our ticket (€18.40) and asked: “When does it leave?”… “In four minutes.”…. (now imagine the surprise and the speed we rushed out of the office…). We did not actually hope that the train would be late… and it wasn’t… we barely made it in time…

Our first train of the Netherlands was a nice yellow double decker Intercity. They are actually quite nice, and new… well not as nice as the brand new Italian versions, but nice… During the train ride, a nice gentleman said something gibberish on the speaker from time to time (Dutch is actually much easier to read than to understand… ), announcing stations and other stuff. After a 1 hour and 20 minutes trip we finally arrived to Amsterdam Centraal (imagine the joy again… 🙂 ). This time the speaker announced it in English also (oh, yes, that city really gets a lot from tourists… 😛 ).

About Amsterdam, in another post… but first I’d like to give some more info about NS: return-journey tickets. Return-journey tickets (Dagretour), are tickets which can be used only on the same day on the return-route from your destination. We have tried that when we visited Den Haag: the ticket was €11.20 and it said it was with 40% off. It is definitely worth a try 😉 .

Apart from these “normal trains”, Thalys and the German ICE operate their trains under the control of NS Hispeed, a subdivision of NS. Their prices and tickets have to be acquired separately and cost more (http://www.nshispeed.nl).

So much about train traveling 🙂 . All in all it is a nice experience, and the fact that it almost always works is a great thing. In Italy things seldom work well, but when they do, they might be a bit better than the dutch version (buying tickets is easier, new trains more comfortable, high-speed trains also present).

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 🙂 .