May 6th--Arrived safely

Dear Mother,
We have arrived safely in St Maurice.  Our plane from Vancouver to Amsterdam was full, possibly having nearly 270 passengers.  The 9-hour flight was uneventful, though sleep was a distant companion.  Janice and I both take aisle seats these days because we like the added sense of freedom, even though space and freedom to move are illusory these days.  I enjoyed a French movie with English subtitles, something about Coco Chanel and Igor Stravinsky's brief liason.  They played quite a bit of Stravinsky's music, which I enjoyed, and the extended depictions of the ballet accompanying The Rite of Spring were well shot.  The love bits were apparently for general audience, not sufficiently interesting to keep one awake.  Otherwise, I started reading Loving Frank by Nancy Horan and listened to the music Cantata Singers had just sung Saturday, and dozed.

I sat beside a retired gent living in Vancouver.  He is a keen photographer, or at least has top Nikon equipment and lenses, and spoke knowledgably about exposure techniques.  His elderly father still lives in Scotland and is doing poorly.  Apparently every time there is another health crisis, this man has to fly over to Scotland to help, so he is going every three weeks.  That can eat up a pension cheque quite rapidly.

Schippol Airport (Amsterdam) has always been our favourite airport.  By now, other airports have imitated its concepts, but it was one of the first to have good shops, interesting places to eat, and pleasant places to wait.  Being jetlagged, I did not think to take pictures when I could have, but these show a bit of the last terminal we used.

This being The Netherlands, there is an interesting shop selling flowering tulips.  They also sell bulbs which are packaged for various countries, meaning that they have been cleared for customs by the proper inspectors.  There were also seeds for vegetables, some of which we could not identify and their English translation was utterly unhelpful:  "Greens".

I neglected to photograph our favourite chocolate shop, Neuhaus, where we purchased a box for the Bloughs.  Last year's box was much admired.  This picture (wide angle lens) shows a Café Chocolat, which we have studied while strolling slowly by.  You can get all sorts of chocolate drinks there and consume them peacefully in a special room, much as one might do in a European coffee café.  The larger blue-green shop to the left of the photo shows the unlikely combination of seafood (mostly cooked and served cold) and all sorts of wine that can accompany seafood.  I've never seen any customers there, but it seems to survive somehow.

I wanted one shot of a KLM plane, typically blue, against the lovely sky of the afternoon.  Of course it was 5:00 a.m. in Vancouver, so we were a bit groggy.

I took this shot of people standing on a moving walkway, shillouted against the windows looking out over the airport's docks (or whatever they are called).

Janice, sitting quietly while we awaited our second and last flight, the one to Charles de Gaul just outside Paris.

The flight to Paris was just long enough for a hurried snack service (to Europeans, "snack service" includes beer and wine, as well as water, coffee, juices, etc.)  As we walked into Charles de Gaul airport, we unexpectedly had to show our passports yet again.  I don't know what was going on, but there were five burley police officers with expressions that did not invite small talk.

We had a great taxi driver who put up with my French, so we talked about fut (soccer), and France's deplorable chances at World Cup next month, about some of the players' personal difficulties, and a bit about Canadian soccer.  He knew the Winter Olympics had been in Vancouver, but did not see them on TV.