Amsterdam Wrap-up

Friday night I ended up walking around some more, and discovered a small letterpress print shop on Haarlemmerdijk. The owner, a frenchman named René, worked mostly on a platen press, although he did have a flatbed press in the back, which he said he used for larger work. He had a nice set of monoprints up on display, and we talked for a good forty-five minutes about printmaking in Europe, and I mentioned some of the cats that are blowing up the scene over here. After that, some more walking around, and I ran into some people I'd met earlier in the week. Hijacked into drinking heavily.

I made it out to Schiphol early-ish on Saturday morning. I was surprised with how chill security was at CDG. Not lax, mind you, they did their job. But the attitude was completely different than that of the TSA goons on this side of the Atlantic. In fact, they searched my luggage two times, and it was done so affably that I didn't mind at all. Then agian, maybe the fact that they had to dig through all my dirty clothes from the last week had something to do with that. Regardless, a relatively painless experience. I did get the classic "Did you bring back anything 'special'?" question from a TSA goon here at JFK, but that was to be expected, and -surprisingly- they didn't search me.

I got home, and proceeded to crash for two days. The jet lag and a screwed up stomach landed me in sickbay until today. Happy new year, and all that.