The short beer that I had with Rodrigo was a good insight. He gave me good advice on what the entreprise culture in Peru, and Latin America overall, was like, and one of my regrets is not knowing what kind of company culture prevails in the country where I was born and raised. I realised that I know little to nothing in economics. These engineering studies are really brainwashing me.
I rushed meeting Stella and Fabien to the bus station: never should I do that again. The Parisian sense of time and space is distorted and compressed, memo for myself: add 10 minutes to any length of trip that they will tell you, especially if it involves walking. But the real reason why I regret arriving 1 minute before departure was a bus packed with French guys heading to Amsterdam for All The Saints holiday (to get high). I managed to squeeze into a seat at the back of the bus, and tried to get some sleep between 11 pm and 6 am. Mission failure, bus drivers have to take a break every two hours for safety reasons, and that’s the time slot where all the smokers will hop off to get some nicotine at 3 degrees Celsius.
Once arrived at the final stop outside Amsterdam, I still had to take a train to the Central Station. I was greeted with a bunch of drunk zombies and nurses coated with fake blood, heading back from partying Halloween. Kinda like a creepy Gare du Nord with people speaking in Dutch instead of French.
Now it’s 8 am, and the sun is up. I am waiting at the Starbucks of Central Station for Vincent to pick me up. There is a pretty view over the water. Ferries come and go, and the weather seems fine. It’s a strange feeling to finally be somewhere where I don’t understand a thing, being used to understand either English, French, Spanish or Chinese. My brain tricks me into believing Dutch is German, only to find out later that no, there is no way that’s German because the spelling is completely different. So here I am, in my second European capital city, 4 years after Paris.
Amsterdam Central Station, 30/10/2016, 7:31 am.