Points of Interest: Amsterdam, Belgium and Paris

During our recent trip to Europe, I collected a slew of business cards from different places (restaurants, cafes, galleries, shops) we dropped into. Faced with filing these things away somewhere where I'd likely never see them again, I thought I'd enter them all here for other folks benefit, who may travel to The Netherlands, Belgium or France, too. So, it's by no means comprehensive, but here are some places worth checking out in the following countries and cities:

Antwerp, Belgium

• Hotel Postiljon - small, clean, comfortable rooms - and bathrooms with no doors on them! But exceptionally close to the Cathedral of Our Lady (Onze-Lieve-Vrouwekathedraal) - right behind it, in fact

Brugge, Belgium

• Gran Kaffee de Passage, Dweersstraat 26-28 - excellent eating: tasty ribs and beer at this convivial restaurant in the ground floor of a hostel, believe it or not.
• Hotel Cavalier, Kuiperstraat 25 - better looking on the outside or in the quaint cafe, than inside one of the rooms. Ours had a bed, which slanted downward to the head. Nonetheless, terrifically handy to everything in old Brugge.

Paris, France

• La Flèche d'Or, 102 bis rue de Bagnolet - we had to walk a few blocks from the metro to find this music venue in a renovated train station, but we caught a good show with a faux-Irish punk Celtic band. Or something like that.
• La Frégate, 1, rue du Bac angle 35 quai Voltaire - a typical French bistro in a sense, but with a stunning view of the Seine and the Louvre. Also: it's on on the site of the home of Marshal D’Artagnan, who inspired Dumas to write The Three Musketeeers.
• Hotel Champ du Mars, 7 rue du Champ de Mars - tiny rooms, but it was well kept and close to the Eiffel Tower and other great walks
• Lili's Brownie, 35 Rue Du Dragon - American-style brownies in, um, Paris
• Mandalas, Artisanat du Tibet - across from our hotel on Champ du Mars, lovely jewelry from Tibet, about a block away from the Rue Cler market street

Amsterdam, The Netherlands

• De Aardige Pers, 2e Hugo de grootstraat 13 B - it's a bit of a haul to get to this Iranian restaurant, but really worth it
• Quinta - Nieuwe Leliestraat 4, across from Anne Frank House - tasteful wine and liquor shop where the proprietor provided an informative and impassioned homily on absinthe
• Reypenaer - nice, bright cheese shop with very helpful informative owners and employees
• Temploe Doeloe, Utrechtsestraat 75 - delicious Indonesian food

U.S. Department of Paranoia

Via Reuters: A Muslim family was kicked off an AirTran flight yesterday after passengers heard them talking about safest seats.

What's unclear to me is: why weren't the complaining passengers the ones kicked off the plane? After all, they were the ones creating the ruckus, not the Muslim family. Apparently, to be Muslim is to be guilty by default.

Preparation

Twitter Works

Sitting in the departure lounge for my flight to JFK at Dulles airport outside DC I posted the following to Twitter at about 5:30pm:

JetBlue you scanning Twitter? 3:45 hr delay? This makes about 5 bad experiences. The small diff in price ain't worth it.

Sitting on the plane a while later - still stuck on the tarmac - I checked my email to see the following message with the timestamp of 7:35:

Hi, Robert A Stribley.

JetBlue Airways (JetBlue) is now following your updates on Twitter.

Check out JetBlue Airways's profile here:

http://twitter.com/JetBlue

You may follow JetBlue Airways as well by clicking on the "follow" button.

Best,
Twitter

Now, I will say that JetBlue put us on the plane about an hour and a half earlier than they'd earlier than they said they were going after they'd discussed the delays. I won't pretend to know that that had anything with my efforts - especially since the plane still ended up taking off at about 8:45, about 3 hours and 45 minutes after it was originally supposed to. But it does indicate at least that JetBlue knew what I was thinking at the time - even before my flight took off. So in that sense, Twitter worked for me.

Update: JetBlue responds to my post here in comments within 45 minutes. I'm impressed with your responsiveness to social media, JetBlue, if not always with your service!

Related: Summize search for Jetblue

The Romance of Travel

Ah, remember the days when flying was a dashing and romantic pursuit? Picture travelers striding purposefully through airports, dressed to the nines for the occasion, the bright, clean lines of the concourse reflected in their brilliant mirrored glasses. No more. Now, getting to your plane is invariably a series of humiliating trials you endure: removing you shoes to pad through a metal detector with padded feet. Trudging through with your pants slipping about your hips, after you've whipped off your belt before a line full of fellow passengers to send it through the scanner after your laptop (which might picked up by someone else who has one of those same Dells companies buy by the thousands).

I stood there today, here at Dulles Airport outside DC, waiting for my shoes, which I could see stuck in the chute just ahead of me as the security officer checked out someone else's luggage, and I watched a 90-year old African woman in a wheelchair getting patted down; long, lean fingers, reaching behind her to her backside to ferret out whatever contraband she might be smuggling through. The nun who accompanied her stood by watching silently. I'm sure the tall, thin young girl executing this search felt awkward doing it, though likely not as uncomfortable as the elderly woman experiencing it.

In these moments, I'm prompted to wonder, how many lives have been saved by millions of people removing their sneakers at a security checkpoint since September 2001? How many terrorists have been foiled because we've abandoned our belts and tripped over our pants cuffs for a 15-foot perp walk? I'm sure some would say, "We'll never know." I'd be willing to bet I could make a stab at an estimate though: zero.

We'll probably cease with some of these measures eventually, whether or not the terrorist threat continues. Why? Because we've abandoned useless measures before. Remember the three questions we used to get asked for years before boarding a plane? (Did you pack your bags yourself? Have you kept your luggage with you at all times? Did anyone give you anything to add to your luggage.) Those questions proved useless against a handful of box cutters, and were dropped after 9/11. Because we realized that since they'd been implemented they'd done demonstrably nothing to increase our travel safety. Besides, if you were a terrorist, were you likely to answer those questions honestly?

So, no doubt, eventually, we'll reverse some of these procedures and/or new technologies will streamline the process. In the meantime, however, we'll just have to learn to accept being treated like chattel. Contented cows, patiently stepping through the requisite chutes in order to reach our desired vehicle: a plane upon, which we're now expected to pay for every additional amenity beyond our seats. Moo!

Unparalleled Generosity

The Bush administration, we're told, is generously allowing Americans to send cellphones to their relatives in Cuba. What an extraordinary step forward for human rights. Now, how about to allowing those same Cuban-Americans to come and go freely to their own homeland? That's right. Cuban-born Americans have restrictions on their ability to travel to their place of birth - a clear human rights violation. And the rest of us Americans aren't really supposed to go there at all . (Technically, we're not supposed to spend American dollars there. Same difference.) Arguably, the government's restrictions on our travel to Cuba are not only impractical and ineffectual, they're un-Constitutional. In fact, if you ever traveled to Cuba and paid a fine for doing so, you should have insisted on holding onto your money: Our Treasury's Office of Foreign Assets Control has apparently never insisted on anyone paying the fine for fear that if they were taken to court over the matter, the travel restrictions would be deemed un-Constitutional. So, traveling to Cuba may be illegal, but it's also an excellent opportunity for legitimate civil disobedience.

Were the Bush government to make some changes to those restrictions, then I'd be impressed.