HotelChatter editor/Jaunted editor-at-large Juliana Shallcross is currently wrapping up her whirlwind tour of Amsterdam, courtesy of the Netherlands Board of Tourism. We'll be giving you a day to get all the pot jokes out of your system, so that you might appropriately comment on her reports. We'll have those for you starting tomorrow, but until then, here's a preview.
Above is a picture snapped at Schiphol Airport. Though they don't appear in the picture, airport security guards at Schiphol apparently ride around on Segway Personal Transporters. Juliana spotted some renegade staffers on their scooters, but they rode so fast and furiously in pursuit of official scooter business that they couldn't be caught on camera. Not as elusive, however, was the glorious assortment of beauty products upon a KLM flight--you can catch that picture after the jump.
Juliana also reports on this nugget of irony from the gates of AMS: "Right when you get off the plane, the airport says its a no-smoking airport but then there' s a bar in the terminal where people are puffing away." Stay tuned for more. In the meantime, you can visit Trippist for more on the Amsterdam scene.
Airlines will eat your soul in any number of ways, claiming your firstborn among them. It's too bad for K.L.M. (that's short for Karl Lorenz Martin) Banal that Dutch carrier KLM is no longer giving free lifetime air passes to babies born on its planes, because he happens to be one of those babies. Karl's mom, Betchel, was on a flight from Amsterdam to Manila when she went into premature labor. The plane was diverted to Kazakhstan, of all places, but without time to safely transfer his mom to the hospital, Karl popped out right there, into the aircarft cabin.
KLM, the airline, paid for K.L.M.'s care in Almaty, Kazakhstan, for a week, and a KLM staffer visited K.L.M. and his mama in the hospital every day.
Babies and drool and whatever else aside, we can only wonder what the experience was like for the rest of the plane's passengers. Imagine being a peaceful, Borat-loving stoner en route from Amsterdam to the next phase of your backpacking trip. After sleeping off last week's parties, you suddenly awake when your plane hits the ground in Kazakhstan. There had to be at least one person enjoying the hilarity of it all, no?
Speaking of scary airports, the approach that airplanes make into St. Maarten's Princess Juliana Airport is famous. Planes as large as a 747 jet fly extremely low on approach, nearly clipping Maho Beach in the process. You may recognize the scene above from a "fake" image sent to you by a friend, but the photo and the video are 100% real. We posted a different clip a while back, but this one's even better, mostly because of the cameraman, who really adds to the effect by asking his fellow planespotters for their "last requests."
Though the airport is in the second phase of a significant renovation, news out of the island doesn't indicate that the close call arrival for jets has changed much.
Have you been to St. Maarten recently? Let us know what the approach is like nowadays (by email or in the comments).
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by djk
